At this stage, your register of learning activities should be beginning to take shape. Now that you know what to learn, why, how and with whom, the next challenge for you is to decide when to do it.
Design Your Typical Week
To design a balanced and relevant typical learning week, I suggest that you follow the following steps:
Schedule your time for rest, social and family life or hobbies, in order to define your minimum quality-of-life threshold.
Identify the various periods that generally make up your week. You can distinguish work time, travel time and free time.
Next, try to allocate the right activities to the right time periods.
Ideally, deliberate practice (with a performance goal) should be central to your daily schedule. If you are already practicing full-time in the field in which you want to progress, it will be enough for you to bring learning into the heart of that practice. If not, you will need to make use of second-choice time periods.
If you haven't allocated deliberate practice, you could use your free time to do guided sessions.
Reserve complementary activities (listening to a podcast, etc.) for moments when you cannot be more active (e.g., while traveling or walking).
Archive Your Sessions
In the first chapter of this third part of the course, I told you that we would return to how the logbook or learning log works.
I advise you to take a moment, each week and each month, to review your progress. If you realize that you are not progressing as planned, you will need to review your schedule. However, if you have not kept any record of your monthly, weekly or daily activity, you will not be able to set corrective actions. That's a good reason to record your learning time.
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.
To go above and beyond the description and duration of your session, leave comments directly in the tool or in a learning journal.
Let's Recap
Complete your learning plan by scheduling your learning.
First, prioritize time for sleep and other activities that define a healthy lifestyle for you.
Amongst your learning activities, prioritize goal-focused sessions of deliberate practice.
Schedule guided sessions, such as classes or lessons with a tutor, in your free time.
Schedule complementary activities when you can devote only passive attention to learning.
In the next part, you will learn various techniques to implement your learning plan in the most efficient way. In other words, how to get the most out of every minute invested in learning.
Before that, take the following quiz to assess whether or not you are capable of creating a learning plan, for yourself or someone else.
