During my time studying I have experienced problems with planning my studies in a specific course, and have thus not been able to reach the goals that I sat up for myself.

The cause is that I have never been able to get an overview of the work load that I have had and therefore never been able to estimate how much time I needed to study and how I should allocate my time for the various courses.

With lean thinking (jit and jidoka), I have been able to create a visual overview of my studies and with thus been able to estimate how much time I need to spend on each of the courses to be able to reach the goal that I have set up for each course.

If you want inspiration to try to create something similar for the planning of you studies, you can take a look at my planning table. It is in Swedish [apologies for my English speaking readers] but I think you will understand the concept.

The last days I’ve partly reached a high level of efficiency partly been quite inefficient. I’ve been thinking back and forth on different reasons to why.Of course I find several different reasons but I do find a pattern.

I reach higher efficiency as well as higher output when working by myself in the “quiet part” of the library or when all my colleagues have left the office. It’s often a challenge for me to just focus on the tasks that I have to finish and I easily start to talk to my colleagues about things that I should discuss during lunch-break, in my spare-time or during our strategy meeting.

However, I think it’s important to be able to reach a high level of efficiency even when my colleagues are around.  Therefore, my solution in the future will be to plug in my ipod and don’t let anything they say disturb me. Furthermore I will to the extent it’s possible work in an empty room at the office or at the library when it comes to my studies.

Since I started my studies at SSE I have been working full-time with my start-up and at all times given higher priority to my business then to my schoolwork. As a result I have ended up with the same behaviour pattern before each exam, being forced to take two or three weeks off from work just focusing on my studies before exam day.

Therefore my goal for the coming period was to make a project plan were I would minimize the work effort, focus on the important parts of literature and tasks from the start and most important having a reasonable every-day work-load, not being forced to take time off from my new business. But how?

To figure it out I started looking at the literature, old exams and so on. Soon questions started turn up; Where to start? And what is really important? How much time should I put into each part?  I asked all the fellow students I knew, who had already taken the course how I should do to minimize work effort and only focus on the important parts. In doing so, I had, in just one hour, got all the important information to make a project plan with weekly and daily goals were I needed to work two hours/day until the final exam day.  Today, after testing my school project plan for two days My conclusions are:

1.     It works great

2.     Without their help I wouldn’t have a chance to estimate work effort needed

3.     In the future I’ll always talk to people who already has passed the current exam when setting up my project plan