This article will talk about the benefits of having a schedule. I’m going to give you five reasons why having a schedule is a very good idea. When you are at school, you are working by a schedule that somebody has set out for you. It’s not something you have to think about because it just kind of exists already but think about it, if you had to plan that day out for yourself, it would probably end up being a little bit chaotic because there would be far too many distractions you’d be pulled off in all sorts of different directions so the fact that somebody else has to sit there and do that for you is rather handy. When it comes to the rest of our lives sometimes we can just end up bumbling along and not having a plan in place about how our time and energy are getting used up. Here are five reasons why scheduling will work well for you. 

First of all, it’s going to stop you from getting sucked into the world of overwhelm in the beginning. It can feel quite exciting like you’re being all dynamic being pulled here, there and everywhere and go ‘Oh, I’ve got so many things to think about’ but that’s not sustainable and eventually you will feel like you are drowning. It needs to not be in your brain, it needs to be on paper in front of you. If you are someone who prefers to schedule yourself digitally, there is an app called ‘good notes’ which is good not just for note taking but it’s got different templates in there for running weekly schedules, monthly schedules and yearly planners – you can also attach pictures to your notes. This will help you keep on top of things.

Scheduling is going to help you prioritise what you do so that you only do the stuff that is the most important to you. When you get to a stage where you’ve got essays to write assignments to hand in, exams to study for – you are going to need to prioritise your time well. Sometimes that might also mean skipping on some of the more enjoyable stuff or postponing that but what you want to be able to do is to get the balance right because equally you can get too sucked into the academic side of things and not taking any down time and then that’s going to have some ramifications too.

If you have this down on a piece of paper in front of you then you can make sure that your time is getting fairly distributed to everything that needs attending to, it’s also going to help you avoid forgetting the really important stuff, the deadlines that you have, the birthdays that are coming up and the things that you had already committed yourself to.

Scheduling also enables you to become more realistic with your time frames and prevents time from just slipping away from you, even if it’s because you’ve got your head into a good book or you know you’ve got into the flow of doing something. Sometimes you do need to pause because there’s something else that needs attending to, at that particular point in time, so if you’ve got your day planned out then it’s much easier for you to know when your cut of points are from doing what you’re doing and switching into doing something else.

The other really good reason for doing a schedule is that it prevents you from procrastinating – Putting things off and then panicking because they’re not done. When we procrastinate sometimes it’s a way for us to avoid doing the things that we don’t want to do. Sometimes it’s because we just haven’t given something enough importance. Some people use procrastination as a way to motivate themselves because they’re last-minute. com-type people. They’re the people, that don’t get motivated to do something until they’re virtually out of time to do it. That’s all well and good as a motivation strategy but for managing your stress levels, it’s not the healthiest. If you schedule, then you can make sure that you don’t procrastinate and leave things until the absolute last minute but that you give yourself enough time to be able to do things in a way that’s going to be maybe even enjoyable.

This is the app recommended in the article: https://www.goodnotes.com

By Gemma Bailey
www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org