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.

Today I had not managed to complete all my tasks when the end of the day came closer. I knew that I could have got more things done, therefore I decided not to let myself go to bed without finishing my tasks. As I was working hard to reach my goals for the day a friend of mine called and asked if I wanted to meet him. Without any consideration I said yes. However, after the call I realized that my intention with this project is to be efficient and since I had not reached my intention with the day I knew I had to re-consider my answer. I told my friend that I had a lot of school work to do and that we had to meet another day, he completely understood my situation so there were no hard feelings. The effect of my decision was that I managed to complete all of my goals for the day, thus giving me a good conscience.

In order to be efficient and productive it is vital that you comprehend what you must do, hence being capable of prioritizing.  By having a plan for each day you know what you must do and therefore it becomes much easier to keep to the important duties.

Since we began the Lean On Myself-project I have started working extra parallel to my studies. The work requires that I help them during the afternoon and some full days. In total, the plan is to work about 12 hours a week. Combined with this, I have a plan for what needs to be done in school during our 10 weeks. Doing my preaction yesterday (for today) I realized that I had planned a lot of studying for the week that I now weren’t sure I would be able to finish. The schedule for today was two hours of studying in the morning and then work the rest of the day.

The two hours came to be very efficient. I had no problems with concentrating, turning off the computer or putting the phone on silent, which I often use to have. I ended up with doing tasks that usually takes much longer. Before this project, I had found it difficult to take advantage of the two hours as efficient as I were able to do today.

Doing a lot of planning in advance helps me to get an overview of my objectives and commitments. Having this in mind, I today appreciated the sense of control it gives me and that I nowadays perform better when I have a day with many commitments than I did before.

For the last few days I have been highly productive and efficient in my opinion. Nearly all of my spare time has been spent on schoolwork. Accordingly a lot of tasks have been done. Yet, I have not reached the quantitative goals that I set up.

Perhaps I could manage to do more during a day by being more efficient. However, the main reason behind me not reaching my goals I believe to be poor estimation of the time needed. Further into this project I might be able to accomplish a lot more but as of today I am not efficient enough to reach the goals that I set up for a day. It is also important that I do not stress in order to reach my quantitative goals since this might affect the quality of my achievements in a negative manner.

My learning point from this is that you need experience in order to plan and set reasonable goals for a day. Hopefully I will gain this experience throughout this project and consequently it will not be as hard to reach the goals that I set up.

Even before this project started I have seen myself as a pretty structured and well planned person. But a big problem I’ve always have had is that when my planning turns out to be a bit optimistic and something important comes up that I have to deal with, as it usually does, I don’t follow the rest weeks planning. I tend to see the plan as unrealistic, thinking that I have to reschedule and start off better next week or the week after that. As a result I often end up with a lot of last-minutes work.

Today I ended up in this situation. I had to take care of some really important work-related tasks during my planned studying session. But instead of following my old example I could quickly move today’s planned two-hour studying session to Saturday and continue in the same pace during the rest of the week.

My main takeaway from today is that it’s really good to always continuing working according to your project plan and daily goals even thought you miss one day. If you miss a day it’s however easy to reschedule a few hours work instead of redoing your project plan.