The famous quote from Game of Thrones, the words of House Stark, "Winter is coming". It really suits the weather we have had the last coupple of days. Last weekend we hade wonderful sunny Autumn weather and now its snowing and cold and the snow actually sticks to the ground.

At the same time as the weather is slowly changeing the mood of people changes. You feel tired, a bit cold and really don't want to leave your bed for the day, or is it just me? I hate winter, its cold, wet, snowy and cold. The only positive thing about winter is Christmas since then I get to spend time with my family.

Well, even though the motivation maybe isn't at the top there are still work to do, papers to write and texts to read. At the moment I'm not quite sure about what I'm studying it has something to do with teaching reading, speaking, writing and vocabulary but also something about research didactics. Yeah, it's really confusing with university at times. You don't always get the clearest instructions so you just go with the flow and hope that you end up at the right place at the end.

I talked a bit about planning earlier today and I though why don't I show you guys an example of how I plan my weeks with studies, work, and other stuff that I have going on. I try to plan during the weekend before since I usually have things to to until Monday since the first seminar of the week is usually on Monday morgning.

This is just an example of how one of my weeks can look like. I only have two mandatory seminars/ week but there are a lot of work going into these seminars and it is not as chill as many think studies are. Other than studies I have some meetings about me going abroad for one semester and I have two larger work assignments and there is a planned party this weekend which I have gotten a ticket for.

As I already mentioned, this is a rough outline for one week, usually I squeeze in some gaming towards the weekend or in the middle of the week depending on when I have time.

In schools teachers often talk about planning your time. But how do you do this? How do you plan your time effectively? Planning is difficult and you need to practice it but what is even more difficult is to do what you have planned. Planning is only the first part the second part so to execute the plan.

You can use different tools for planning, a calendar in your phone, computer, on paper it doesn't matter where you do your plan as long as you do it. At the moment I use google calendar but I will change into a paper calender as soon as the one I have is valid, which will be in the end of November.

In you weekly plan you first have to think about what days during the week am I booked? It can be practice, lectures, meetings, work anything that is set, that you cannot move. All the time that is left you need to figure out when to do what. You need to include studies in your plan, be sure to pinpoint what you are going to study not just that you are going to study but what. Then you also have to include time for meeting friends or doing other things such as, shopping, going to the cinema and so forth. To make it easier to get started with making your weekly plan choose a specific day of the week when you are going to do the planning. For example, Sundays, it's the last day of the week and you have the whole next week before you and your week start on the Monday and maybe you have to start studying for that test.

Want some more ideas about planning check out this short youtube clip: