Managing Your Project: Using the holidays well

Many of you will have now finished at University or College for the Christmas vacation.

At our University, the way that the calendar has fallen this year means that there are 5 full weeks before term starts again.

How best to use the time?

My recipe for how to use the time is as follows. Of course you can do exactly whatever you like, but I do get asked this, so I recommend dedicating about 1/5 of the time to each of these activities:

Celebrating with family and friends
Completely relaxing and 'switching off'
Completing any assignments that are set over the vacation
Preparing for next term
Working on your project

You could think of this as "one week of each", or just as a rough guideline of how to allocate activities to your diary.

Celebrating and Switching Off

I think it's really important that you don't try to work for the entire holidays. You're probably not far off the end of your degree and may have been working hard for quite some time now. You're due for a break. So take some of this time to let your brain wind down and not stress about working for a while. There are usually plenty of things to be done around a Christmas holiday.

BUT - 5 weeks of partying or dossing around probably won't ultimately feel that good either, so why not schedule into your diary when you are going to start work again, and what you're going to work on?

Completing assignments

Many of you will have modules to complete - essays to write, programs to compile, reading to do, etc. If these are due at the start of next term, do prioritise some time to getting those finished. Some people find it psychologically helpful to do this before switching off for Christmas.

Again, it's good to break down your tasks into smaller and more manageable chunks, which can be scheduled into your diary and kept as an appointment with yourself.

Preparing for next term and working on your project

Another good way of helping you to switch off is to make a list of what you can do in preparation for next term. It may seem counter-intuitive, but once you've committed this sort of planning to paper (or electronic documents) your mind can relax more, knowing that you have scheduled time to take care of this in the future.

So, have a look through upcoming modules to get an idea of the topics you'll be covering. Look for any reading that needs doing before you attend the taught sessions.

For your project, this is a great time to take stock of where you are up to so far. You might be feeling a bit overwhelmed at how much of the project there is still left to do. One of the best things you can do is to write down all the things that are worrying you, or are yet to be done, and plan some time (maybe after Christmas) when you will dedicate some time to working on these things.

If your project needs specialist equipment or support, then you won't be able to work on that directly over the holidays, but you can read, think, plan, write up what you've done so far, etc.

Wishing you all the best for Christmas.

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Full details on how to successfully plan a project are found in the book, available from the Amazon site below.