(upbeat music) - All right, what do we have next? - Okay, our next question is about weekend planning. - Weekend planning, okay. - Hi, Cal, my name is Lucia. I'm a law student from Spain. Thank you for your writing on your student advice. It has helped me a lot.

My question is this, you recommend that people don't time block their weekends because it may lead to burnout. However, we students often need to work on weekends in order to live up to the study load. How do you recommend that we approach weekend planning? Thank you so much. - For a student, what I would rely on is my autopilot schedule philosophy, which is where you figure out all the work that regularly needs to be done, and you get the days and times in which that work is actually accomplished.

So I always use whatever Thursday mornings is when I do the problem set that's due on Friday, and I do my lab write-up right after my lab on Monday. I have a two-hour window where I just stay in the science library right there, and I do the lab write-up that's due every week.

And so you just have fixed on your schedule, here's the times when this work gets done, this work I know that always has to happen. So that gives you a realistic vision of how much do I really have to do, and where does it fit? And now if you're already filling that up, autopilot the weekends.

So you might have autopilot things scheduled on the weekends, right? So I don't have to think about it, I'm working on the weekend, but I don't have to think about when or how I do it, this is just what I do on Sunday afternoon, this is what I do on Saturday morning.

So when you're building your autopilot schedule as a student, feel free to just use the weekends as well. And this is different than time blocking. Autopilot scheduling is different than time blocking because you just get used to, I always do this work on this point. And that's very different than I'm wrangling a whole day, beat by beat what I'm doing, I have to keep turning my attention from one thing to another, a complicated intricate schedule where you're locked in until you're done.

Now on the weekend, it's like, look, I do Sunday mornings and Saturday afternoons, I just always do that, I go to the library, I don't have to think about it, it's not gonna burn you out the same way. So you're right to note that students often do make use of the weekends, but let your autopilot schedule do a lot of that work.

Now, what about the one-time things, papers and exams, studying for exams, writing papers? For that, what I used to recommend in my books on this, and also my writing on the Study Hacks blog, is that you are going to create a plan for prep and execution for these one-time big things at least a month in advance.

And you figure out what really needs to be done to study for an exam, what is gonna be involved in writing this paper? And you get that work onto your calendar far in advance. And I would even suggest, when I used to talk about this to students, I would say at the beginning of every semester, go through your syllabus for each class, find a major one-time things, find the exams, find the papers, go back one month from each and put a note on your calendar that says, make a plan for this.

So you do that at the beginning of the semester. Now, as you're going through your semester, executing your autopilot schedule, everything's fine, you're not time blocking every minute of your day, you're just executing the schedule that's the same every day, every week. And when you get to this note that says, hey, time to start thinking about the midterm, then you make a plan and you put that work on your calendar like doctor's appointments or other classes.

And now you're back to just say, I'm executing. Autopilot schedule, oh, my autopilot schedule plus today, I have a block of time on my calendar, so let me do that. Oh, today I only have it Saturday, I have my Saturday afternoon where I always work on my CS problem set, but you know what?

This Saturday I have a study session in the morning on my calendar because I have a midterm coming up, so let me just do that too. And when you're starting a month out and really spreading this stuff out, what you avoid is this thing is due on Monday, it's Saturday morning, I now have to work all day and all night and all day the next day and all day the next night to try to get something done because you're spreading work out.

So you have plenty of breathing time, plenty of time to recharge. And it does not feel the same. An autopilot schedule augmented with these pre-planned sessions for papers and exams does not feel the same as let's say my situation where I will say, okay, I have eight hours I'm working today and I need to get everything out of those minutes.

Let's go. Because as a student, you do not have that chronic overload issue of people are just piling work on you, you have more in your plate than you could ever imagine actually doing. No, you can actually wrap your arms around your work as a student. You autopilot schedule the regular stuff, you pre-plan the one-time stuff.

If that's too crowded, get an easier schedule, make sure you don't have too many extracurriculars, you can control this. And it's not gonna be nearly as stressful as time-block planning, even if this work is happening on weekdays and weekends. The good news about that question, that caller we should say, is that she's thinking about this.

That's the biggest issue with college kids in these issues and with student stress in college is that most students that are doing the traditional I'm 19 doing a four-year residential college, those type of students is they don't wanna hear it. I don't wanna hear study advice. It's gonna make me uncool or something like that.

I'm fine, I can just do it. And it's so needlessly stressful and overwhelming. College, if you do it right, if you keep your schedule reasonable and don't do the 70 extracurricular nonsense and don't do the triple major nonsense and you autopilot schedule and pre-plan your exams and papers, you don't have to work at night.

And you rarely have a busy day. It's not that much work. It all changes when you get out there in the real world if you follow and have an ambitious, difficult job. So it doesn't have to be that hard. But the main thing is thinking, I'm actually going to be systematic about how I approach my job as a student.

That's the zero to one binary for college life that makes all the difference. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)