"My Plate" is a Great Way to Organize Your Time

So I recently used Microsoft Word's charts and wrote down all the items that encompass and take up time in my life at this moment (in the future, this is called a "Refocus" sheet, which I will post an article about).

I call it "My Plate", which is a pie chart that takes all the time I usually have in a day and divvies it up according to how I budget my time. Simple, right? Yes, but its about getting everything that takes up your time written down. My Plate allows you to focus on the time in your day, focus on efficiently using all of it, and allows you to have a nice image of what takes up a lot of your time (or should take up a lot of your time) as well as what should take of very little.

1. I have listed all the items that take up my time
   a.) Academics and Classes
   b.) Student Organizations and Extracurricular Acts.
   c.) Gym and Exercise
   d.) My company (the DRH Design Group [http://www.thedrhgroup.com/])
   e.) Personal and Learning Goals
   f.) On-Campus Job
   g.) Scholarships Apps, Finances, Blogging, and Reading
   h.) Free Time/Extra Sleep
   i.) Sleeeeep of course
2. After that I find out how many waking hour I have in a day. Remember that I included "Extra Sleep" for days that I would like to sleep in a little bit.
   a.) A day has 24 hours
   b.) Find out how many hours you sleep on average: 8 hours for me!
   c.) Subtract that from 24: 16 hours to get things done!
3. Take that amount of hours and divvy it up among your activities
   a.) Academics and Classes: 6
   b.) Student Organizations and Extracurricular Activities: 1
   c.) Gym and Exercise: 1
   d.) My company (the DRH Design Group [http://www.thedrhgroup.com/]): 2
   e.) Personal and Learning Goals: 1
   f.) On-Campus Job: 1.5
   g.) Scholarships Apps, Finances, Blogging, and Reading: 0.5
   h.) Free Time/Extra Sleep: 2
   i.) Sleeeeep of course: 9
4. Put this information into pie chart using Microsoft Word or your favorite online charting program. This will give you a nice image of where you should be spending your time. It could look something like this:

As usual, use this for guidance and possibly integrate it into your daily task list and plugging in times. Good luck, and God speed!

Dustin Huibregtse