Study (insert other important task)

The next daily task on my son's planner is 'study'.  At the point of discussing and making up the daily routine planner, my son was struggling to prioritise studying and didn't know where to fit it into his day.  We could have placed it anywhere in the day but decided that it was something he could do sitting down so he wanted to do the practical things in the morning before studying.

Studying was one of the important daily tasks not to be forgotten for my son but 'study' could be any productive task that you need to fit into your day or week.  Even if it doesn't happen every day, it acts as a visual prompt to help you think about anything you need to do.  For example, it might be that you need to do more housework so you might use a housework prompt to remind you to think about planning or doing a housework task or it might be 'pay bills' that is a priority for you and this can be planned in the same way.  

You will see that I didn't suggest a time limit for studying.  Time to study was a tentative subject for my son so I left it to him to decide what would work for him each day and as it turns out, it varied each day depending on his energy levels, whether he'd been to college that day and whether he'd had a good sleep or not.  At it's simplest, the word 'study' prompted him to think about any immediate deadlines for college or things that he was supposed to do and it generally helped him to meet more deadlines (although he is still working on his study skills in general).

Study was a daily task for my son but for some people big tasks like that are better completed in one or two big chunks of time in the week so that there is time to really hyper focus on the task.  Once you have a basic daily routine in place then you can experiment with doing tasks little and often or spending more time on specific tasks on certain days.  I will come back to this another time.  How do you prioritise your important tasks?  Do you break it up or have bursts of time dedicated to it?  Please share your ideas in the comments below.

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