My Way of Learning: Plan and Set Goals But......

"Failing to plan is planning to fail"

We were repeatedly told this phrase since young. We have seen this phrase many times. So what is planning? How to plan so that we can effectively work our way through? Personally, I keep two sets of plans. I call them the big plan and the small plan. I write them in an organiser which is always in my bag.


The Big Plan

The big plan is something more general. I will plan how much time to spend on one activity per week. The image above shows the big plan I made for myself during my final semester in NUS. The stated time was the amount of time I planned to spend on the corresponding activity per week. This plan may not seem like a plan, but it serves as an important guideline for me. In case I feel lost during the week, I refer back to this plan and see what I can/should do.

The Small Plan

Looking at the second image, it shows how I spend each day. Every night, I will write down what I plan to do the next day. I will try my very best to make sure I follow my small plan. As you can see, the way I plan is very simple. I want to finish EE4001 report by the next day. I want to do EE4502 tutorial 2 the next day. As simple as that, no need to be very specific.

Do Not Follow Your Plan Blindly
Plan never really works well, at least not for me. I am not contradicting myself. There are many times which we are "forced" by circumstances to change plan. My rule of thumb:

Failing to change plan is planning to die

Looking at my big plan above, do I really have the textbooks for the modules? Do I have so many questions for practicing? Actually no. In fact I did not purchase any book. In fact, I spent all 5 weekdays (from 830am to 9pm, minus off meal and lecture time) in the lab working on my Final Year Project, so much so that I did not even bother to write it down in my small plan. And I like to shift the things that I want to do from one day to another. As long as I get all my TODO's done by the deadline, I am free to do anything I want to my plan.

Summary
So the main idea here is to plan well, write down what is needed to be worked on, don't do last minute work, spread out the workload so that you won't feel burdened. And of course, celebrate whenever you cross out a task from the task list. Give yourself a break, buy yourself a curry puff (yes, the curry puff from the snack store in NUS Engineering was my reward for myself).