 So, to make a weekly calendar, you're going to need to have a few things handy. You're going to need a syllabus or a class website for all your classes, so that you know what you're going to have do and what kind of assignments you need to make time for during the week. You're also going to need a calendar like this one, and you'll probably want to start keeping a running list of to-dos, of things that you want to make sure you accomplish during the week. You can use a paper weekly calendar like this one. You can also use an app like Google Calendar or any other app that will give you a weekly schedule, but whatever you use, make sure that it starts and ends at times that work for you. The first step of working through a calendar is to write in all of your immovable commitments. So let's say that you are taking classes all morning, and you have math that goes from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. every morning. Let's say that immediately after math class, starting at 9, you have French every day, and then you have English at 11, and history at 12, and then you have biology at 2.30. If we imagine that biology happens every day from 2.30 to 3.30, except for on Wednesdays when you have a biology lab that also goes from 3.30 until 5.30. You need to block off a little bit more time on that day for biology. You can write that in if you've got that biolab that goes a little bit later. So once you have all of your classes where you're actually spending time in class and you need to physically be there written into your calendar, you want to add in other things that are immovable commitments. You might, for example, have a work-study job, and perhaps your work-study means that you need to be at the front desk working work-study from 7 to 9 on Monday, and you also work there from 7 to 9 on Thursday. So you know that you need to be at work on those days at those times. You may also have a weekly commitment to participate in practices for a sports team. So you may have practice from 4.30 to 6 every day that you can be there. And of course, you can't be there because of biology on one day, but the rest of the days, that's where you're supposed to be. So we will put your sports practice. So this is the calendar with all of your immovable commitments. These are all the things where somebody expects you to be there, attendance is being taken, and it matters whether or not you show up. And you can already start to see where there is space in the calendar and where there's not space in the calendar. The next step is to write in things that you do regularly that are optional, but that are really important to you. That might include things like club meetings. It might include things like extracurricular activities, worship services that you might attend. It can also include things like social activities. If you and your friends regularly go out to dinner on Friday night, and that's really important to you, you may want to go ahead and mark that off that after 8 o'clock on Friday night, you are out with friends. If your very favorite TV show comes on Tuesday nights at 10, you may want to mark off that that is your favorite TV show. Essentially, anything that you know is going to happen every single week and that is very important to you, go ahead and mark it off. Because it doesn't do you any good to pretend that that time is free if in reality you know that when it's time for this show to come on, you're going to be in front of the television, go ahead and let this calendar reflect that reality. Another thing that you'll need to do is think about travel times. If you know, for example, that the time after your sports practice requires you some time to go back to your dorm and to take a shower, you may find that you need to knock off a little bit of time after each sports practice to just remind yourself that, hey, this is a time when I need to be traveling to and from my next activity and when I need to get a shower. Also, if you know that it takes you a long time to walk to where your biology class is held, you may need to bark off a little bit of time in the time period before biology class just to remind yourself that you are not free right up until the time that that class starts. You have a little bit of travel time that you need to work into your schedule. The next thing you need to factor in time for is things like meals and grooming and other sorts of self-care that you have to do. So if you know that the time before math class every morning is taken up with getting breakfast, getting a shower, doing your hair, getting dressed, doing your makeup, if you know that all of that time is getting ready time and it's not really available for study or anything else, you can just go ahead and mark that time off as time that you know isn't available and you can just mark that down as getting ready and make sure that that time doesn't look available to you. You also will want to mark out when do you have lunch. If you're scheduled to eat lunch from 1 to 130, you can go ahead and write lunch in that block of time all week long. And if you need to schedule in time, if you know that you always eat dinner before your work-study job, you can put your dinner hour in there. If it's a little more flexible on other days, you can either leave it blank for now and come back in and write it in on a week-to-week basis or you can go ahead and write in if you know that you always eat dinner at the same time. But the important thing is that you are making sure that you are factoring into your weekly calendar the things that you need to do, not just places that you need to be and activities you need to participate in, but also things you need to do to take care of yourself, like making sure you're eating, making sure that you're taking care of your personal grooming and all that kind of stuff. Once you've done that, you can start to see where are the blocks of time that are actually available. So you can see that in this sample schedule, there's a block of time that's right here, every day, Monday through Friday, that is between French class and English class. You can also see that there is a little bit of time in between lunch and biology right here. There's a little bit of time in between the end of biology class and sports practice, about an hour. There's also, I'll do this lunch one too, and then there's also time after work on Monday between sports practice and that favorite TV show on Tuesday, after Biolab on Wednesday, after work on Thursday, and then in between sports practice and when you typically go out with your friends on Friday night. So that's what time you have available to you. Once you have this calendar established, you may want to make copies of it. If it's a paper calendar, you can just Xerox it or you can rewrite it if you feel like doing that. If it's an electronic calendar, you can use that as a template and just have it copy this same schedule that you've got here onto all of your new schedules for every new week. So once you have this calendar, you're gonna need to look at your to-do list for the week, and we've noticed where you have some free time, and if you've got a to-do list that has a lot of different reading that you need to get done and things like that, you're gonna need to go down that to-do list and make an estimate of how much time each thing's gonna take. And then you can start to plug in all of those times into these available times on your calendar. One thing that's really important to think about is what kind of person you are. If you know that you are much more of a morning person and you get your best thinking done in the morning, you may wanna write in the difficult study sessions that you have. You may wanna use this hour in the morning to when you're fresh and when you feel great and when your brain is working well for you, you may wanna use that time to study complicated material. If you know that this is not a time when you think well and feel good about studying, you may want to instead study down here in the evening when you feel fresher and you feel like you get better work done. So be aware of yourself and be aware of the time demands for each activity that you have to do.