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Whether you are looking to advance your marks, change directions, planning ahead will help you stay focused. Planning is significant as it directs us on how to tackle the year ahead. We just need to be flexible, acknowledge that our plans will have to accommodate for some uncertainty.

Review the past year

Before you can plan for the year ahead, you need to review the year you have just had. And don’t only assume everything was awful.

• Acknowledge the victories, mistakes, experiences that grew your skills, and those that didn’t.
• Look at what moved you forward and what held you back. Write these details down so that you can use them to make a strategically sound plan for the year ahead.
• Identify three large wins and three areas that needed work.
• Look at how you spend your time through the year – did it align with your goals and what didn’t.

Establish a routine

Aristotle once said, “we are what we repeatedly do”. Routines are conscious ways of doing things repetitively and in a specific order. For example, waking up at a certain time every day and sleeping at a certain time, having coffee, going to class, going to the gym and studying for an x amount of time. Creating routines is important because they help promote self-care and create healthy habits. Having a routine can lead to happiness and fulfillment because we can accomplish the most important things to do vs the urgent things.

Having a routine and sticking to it is incredible, however, you should give yourself time. Productive habits take time to develop. If you are too hard on yourself, you might never have the chance of enjoying the benefits of a routine. Your success depends on how seriously you take your routine.

Create a schedule – daily, weekly and monthly

• Write down all the important dates and deadlines you know for the year. Some you might not know immediately but as you find out, keep filling in the dates.
• Write clear and measurable goals.
• Create a specific action plan for each goal.
• Think about big quarterly events and schedule those too. It helps you to plan your week in advance instead of scrambling for time to get everything done. It also helps with delegation too.

Avoid procrastination

You are more likely to procrastinate if you don’t have a set plan or idea. If you know what you need to do and by when, then it makes it easier to eliminate most distractions. By limiting the number of distractions around you, you’re more likely to get done what you need to do. Shut your phone off or set it on flight mode, retreat to a quiet place and listen to classical music, study in the library as opposed to your room where you might be tempted to sleep in your room.

Work on a side hustle

Even if you’re a student, it’s okay for your plans to include sheer enjoyment and recreation. Without distracting your studying, exploring your passions and interests can help you learn new skills and techniques that might not be taught in a traditional workplace. And who knows, it might also help advance your career.

The beautiful thing about side hustles is that they encourage creativity, self-development and confidence.

Reward yourself and celebrate your accomplishments

It’s very important to attach an incentive to complete a task and perhaps incorporating this in your planning might help. After studying for a test or completing an assignment, consider giving yourself a reward. It could be as simple as, “Once I finish this assignment, I can watch an episode of my favorite show.”

Planning and setting your goals can be vital for anyone with a vision for their future. Before we explain the importance, we must understand what planning is. In short, planning is a process of deciding in advance where you want to get (goals) and how you will get there.

Why is planning important?

1. It helps identify your goals and helps you decide clearly and concretely what we need to do.
2. It helps you to ensure that you understand your goal and what you need to do to reach it by involving everyone in the planning process.
3. It makes you work in a goal-oriented way rather than in a loose or ad-hoc way where we just respond to issues and crises with no clear plan or goal.
4. Planning helps you see in advance those things that can help you achieve your goal and those things that can prevent you from achieving your goal and work out what to do about them.
5. Planning helps you decide how best to use resources (people, time, money, information, equipment) so that these elements make the most significant contribution to achieving your goal.
6. Most importantly, planning helps you to be accountable for what you do.

Why is planning your academic year important?

• Reduce anxiety
Anxiety is real and it exists. While we can acknowledge its existence, equally so, it’s important to recognize ways to minimize it and you know what they say, prevention is better than cure. Many students face a huge amount of pressure and uncertainty when it comes to their future, finances, qualifications, and even social life. However, having a plan can help you piece the puzzle together. Helping you see a clear picture of what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. Often anxiety has to do with lack of control and this is why planning helps because it can give one a sense of “control”.

• Identify strengths, weaknesses and areas where you can improve
Planning can help you gain insight into where your strengths and weaknesses lie. For instance, when you plan, you’re able to distinguish whether studying at night or in the morning works for you. You’re also able to see if perhaps you should take an extra class and whether you can afford to take an extra class etc.

• You’re able to keep your options open and have the flexibility
Perhaps one of the most important reasons as a student to plan your year is to be able to keep your options open. Changing direction, pivoting, re-adjusting, whether it’s changing time slots or something as drastic as switching degree programs is part of the academic experience. Having a plan in place and keeping track of progress or regress helps ensure that you have the ability to take on new opportunities as they arise. But most importantly, opportunities that are fit for you.

Common problems arising from ineffective planning

For most of us, we often plan and fall short of these plans. This can happen due to encountering certain challenges – these challenges often mean that the plans developed are not very useful and effective. The following are some of the common problems experienced:

• Your year can change as a student and the plans no longer seem relevant – so we abandon the plans and react in ad hoc and unstrategic ways as opposed to re-adjusting our plans.
• The difficulties we experience and these can arise from the fact that we set unrealistic goals. For example, it is unrealistic to claim that you will study every day for 5 hours. When will you rest? Go to the gym? Cook? Etc. While it’s important to push ourselves, you also want to be careful not to put yourself up for failure before you’ve even started. This can lead to demotivation causing you to up on your plans completely.
• We are not able to say what we have achieved, only what we have done.