Ouyang Xiu, a great Confucian scholar of the Song dynasty, once said that the three best places for thinking are "on horseback, in the restroom, and in bed." This quote shows how much Ouyang Xiu valued time. In this post I want to share a way to plan your time. The thing is, I'm someone who is terrible at time planning. Before the high school entrance exam, I tried making a time plan to review my schoolwork, but it was a complete failure. The plan was too complicated and too rigid. It wrote down everything I had to do each day, down to what I should be doing at each hour. The problem with that is that it's very hard to stick to. People just can't adapt well to a life that runs strictly by a timetable, and I couldn't keep to that plan for more than about two days. = =
Even so, my first attempt at time planning taught me the key point: don't make it too detailed (for the time unit, use weeks, and don't go down to hours....). Later, in the second semester of my third year of junior high, we studied statistics in math class, and that included box plots, a relatively new kind of statistical chart. That box plot lesson inspired me and led me to a way of planning time. I don't know whether someone has already come up with this method~ but I really did think of it myself xD
The special thing about the time-planning method I came up with is that it's expressed as a chart, so it's easy to understand at a glance. It looks a lot like a box plot, and it's very simple to draw. Let's take a look at the picture below first~
What this picture means is that in August you review Chinese and math, in September you review English and natural science, and in October you're free~ It's very easy to draw and easy to understand. However, there's no dedicated program for drawing this kind of chart yet, because I invented this chart myself (grinning, so of course there's no program for drawing it (because I never wrote one~)
As for the time unit, you can go as fine as weeks, but I'd recommend not going down to days. Otherwise you might as well just use a calendar, and planning down to the day just feels strange. Like I said at the beginning, people find it very hard to plan out everything. Part of that is because of our temperament, and part of it is because there are too many variables in life. You might plan to do something on 8/10, but that day your girlfriend (or boyfriend) suddenly picks a fight with you. I imagine you wouldn't be in the mood to get anything done after that. Or maybe you're not feeling well that day and don't want to do anything. These kinds of things happen all the time. So the reason I plan this chart by month or by week is to leave a buffer, so that when something unexpected happens, it won't throw off your plans afterward.
I'm curious what everyone thinks of this way of planning time? If you have any thoughts, feel free to leave a comment^^
Supplement: Gantt Charts
Someone on Plurk just mentioned a type of Gantt chart that's even more convenient to make. It's a bit similar to mine but also a bit different (mine is really just a basic Gantt chart, XD). A so-called Gantt chart also uses a timeline, with the tasks written along it. For more information about Gantt charts, you can check Wikipedia, or the Gantt chart tutorial by Lánsè Gòngxiǎngtǐ.
Video Tutorial on Making a Gantt Chart in Excel:
P.S. I didn't make this video~