Planning is a quite significant part of our life. Ability to plan your activities makes it possible to achieve impressive results quickly and without distraction from the main goal. Business-planning leads to the achievement of strategic goals, work planning helps in career advancement and income increase, personal life planning is needed for self-realization and improving living standards. What about education planning? As it turns out, it becomes important to know how to make a study schedule, especially if you learn on your own.
Build A Schedule For Effective Learning In 2018
A word on education planning
A study plan is not just a to-do list. Establishing and following a study routine means taking responsibility for your education, that, in turn, needs proper time allocation. If there is no plan, you can involuntarily let things slide, as it's so easy to get confused and even lose sight of the goal. On the contrary, if there is a plan, you can clearly assign time to important and secondary things, leisure, rest, communicating, hobbies, self-development.
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Based on these reflections we can emphasize the advantages of study schedule:- you can freely plan all your activities, getting rid of mess associated with the learning process;
- you spare your time, energy and motivation; stay focused and don't spread between several cases;
- you know exactly what's needed to do in front;
- you can self-evaluate education process, speed up or slow it down if necessary.
Preparation of the plan
Creation of a study plan for self-sustained learning involves 3 steps:
Setting a target
The purpose of this stage is making a list of the knowledge and skills you want to possess. In order to do that you have to clearly see the final goal and break it down into smaller pieces, they can be working sessions, classes, small purposes of day/week/month. It's called a strategic planning - you need to consider each lesson and the result you're aiming to achieve. In the same way, you can create a college study plan or any other plan for informal education.
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College study plan may also include a final project or any other form of assessment of student performance. Such document supports the candidature of an academic degree, it can be thesis or dissertation. As you can imagine, that work involves a pretty large amount of research of different complexity; writing it may be a labor-intensive assignment and therefore on the Internet you can find some companies providing dissertation writing services.
The purpose of the second stage is to allocate time for independent studies. First of all, you need to define the total time for education, for example, 6 months. Then you just divide that time span into smaller ones for each sub-goal in accordance with plan items outlined in the previous step.
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For instance, you know that you are capable of going through all training material in 360 hours. It appears that you're going to have to study 3 hours per day, 5 days a week: 5 times 3 hours is 15 hours, 4 times 15 hours is 60 hours a month, which is 6 months in total.
Selecting methods
This step is as important as two previous are. Its goal is to define methods and techniques you're going to use in further education. Also, you've got to choose sources of information (Internet, books, tutorials, courses, training videos, audio materials, podcasts, etc.) and devices, auxiliaries (PC, laptop, markers, smartphones, voice assistant, communication tools).
After making sure you've passed three previous steps, you can start to outline the plan itself. You're free to use special methods of plan creation or just write down a simple outline which doesn't require any skill. A great example of the simple plan is a table with columns such as: "name of activity", "brief description", "deadline", "mini to-do list", "criteria", "results".
When your study plan is ready, you can start to execute the plan. You just need to go through the plan step-by-step. As you progress, the plan may change in some places - it's absolutely normal. The main difficulty at the stage of implementation is staying focused.
How to stick to the plan
Frequently, in the process of learning your attention can wander away to something that seems more interesting. That can be some fascinating facts and information in related fields, which concern your subject indirectly. Eventually, you may just end up learning another subject without completing the original one. In order to avoid that you can use sticky notes as reminders - stick them all over the house, in the workplace so they can serve well.
To avoid the state of imaginary exhaustion, fake lack of time, procrastination (the most dangerous one), it's crucial to motivate yourself and stick to the plan, that's it. The most powerful motivators are your personal goals, skills to develop; systematically remember them, realizing their importance.
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Competencies needed for self-sustained learning
- Carrying out important tasks immediately - extremely useful and rare skill that will help you to face any challenges, no matter how difficult they are. We recommend you to learn more about procrastination and ways to combat it.
- Self-discipline - is the ability to manage yourself, work without any excuse and stick to what you determined to be a lifestyle.
- Self-motivation - is the ability to influence yourself the way so you do even the most unpleasant things without internal resistance, and maintain that attitude. Read 1-2 books on methods of self-motivation and practice them at once.
- Time management - is an effective way of managing and using time as the most expensive resource. Time management became extremely popular worldwide and nowadays on the Internet are terabytes of information on that concept.
- Memory - good memory is a great asset to planning and learning. In order to keep it excellent you should live a healthy lifestyle and train cognitive functions - consider Schulte tables and mnemonic device.
It's our fervent hope that information you've found here will be very helpful in your studies. Never stop learning and always share knowledge!
