The Plan
Posted by anas on Feb 20, 2009 in Life | 12 comments
After a regular self-assessment ritual that I perform very often I discovered that I’m giving very less time to my academics. A quick analysis of the past week revealed an average of 15 study hours only! Digging deep in the problem I found the lack of a concrete plan to be the root cause of this problem. In fact, since the start of this new term I have no plan at all!
I sat down yesterday just to rectify this problem and work on a study schedule to maximize the time given to books. As usual, the plan includes all sorts of stuff including the time to sleep and wake up, coffee breaks, prayer breaks and anything else that is regular.
The plans are never executed to perfection but they give an idea of where time is being wasted and how a couple of extra hours can be squeezed out easily without much ado.
After scheduling study slots, the next step was to assign tasks to each slot. For example, I should be able to know beforehand how much time is needed by a particular subject/topic and hence give it an appropriate slot. I usually follow a very rough linear model of my own to estimate the number of hours needed for studying something.
K = Ax + By + Cz
Where, K is the number of hours needed to study, x is the number of hours dedicated to the topic in classroom, y is the number of pages to read and z is a binary variable (1 or 0) which is to say if I have an interest in the subject or not. If I don’t have an interest, it is assigned 1. The other variables are proportionality constants, which are roughly similar for all subjects except two.
Anyway, so I did succeed in making a nice plan for the week and started the day by waking up on time. So far the whole day has been spent productively but now there is a slight problem. I’ve finished what I was supposed to do, two hours before time. And since nothing else can be seen in the plan, I feel blank! I cannot start anything new because that would disrupt the plan and I don’t feel like wasting time (to avoid feeling guilty).
Since I couldn’t seem to get out of this conundrum I thought of just writing it down. Oh, and by the way, blogging is not considered a wasteful activity in the plan 
hahaha…u are becoming a raw form of munzir….u could had watched a movie, listen to a music….if these are also in schedule then u need a doc:)
Man, you are such a studious lad!
And since I can’t stand studious lads, I refer you to my paper: An Evaluation of Popular Time Wasting Algorithms. (Shameless self-promotion, I know!
)
Hey.. where are the two comments I posted!!
Don’t tell me you “moderated” them…. You’re about to lose a reader… **scowl**
I am very glad you appropriately tagged this with bakwas
I never scheduled any study hours. Never. I’m not talking about the NUST days, I’m talking about the O Levels and A Levels days when I was actually a good student. I did perform regular self-assessments, but those were more about finding out which subject/topics I needed to study rather than how much time I needed to spend studying them. The time-slot allocation was left till a week before the exams when you need to review all subjects in a short period of time.
@MAK
my plans are realistic
@Saadat
[and im serious!!]
man that is one helluva post…can u write it in an ieee format and make a pdf out of it? i will upload it on imperial’s web for the brits
@Uni
i dont moderate comments, WP does…but none of ur comments were in the moderation queue 
dhamki
@Absar
tujh se poocha hai kisi ne?
u see i go one step further. after finding out which topics i need to study i try to figure out if i have enough time to complete all that, if not then some activities need to be contained
Hum kisi ke kahay baghair waise hi har cheez mein taang arra detay hein! Aur tameez se baat kar bay! Tujh se bara huun mein!
Okay, coming back to reality, this technique does not work with my younger cousins, so I doubt this will work with you!
dude, u actually plan to study? I do too, but the plan always fails and then I wish I hadnt planned anything at all
@Absar
LOL!
@Leena
u are not a good planner, accept it!
oh i have already accepted that…thats why i like to call myself a dreamer rather than a planner
You mean, fame and glory for my oh-so-academic ideas?
I’m in! (That is to say: expect an email in a month or so.
)
@karachiwali
hmm dreamer? shadi se pehle yeh hota hai
@Saadat
a month!! oye jaldi karo
How do u do it man? How do u? Its close to impossible to do something of the sort for me….I could really use some tips….