My weekly template for the fall semester

Here’s my template for the fall semester. I use color coding for the different major activities: writing, research, email+admin, appointments, MSc + PhD student appointments, service, workouts, personal time.

The date range you are seeing in September has one particularity, which is that I am then teaching an intensive graduate level course 4 days a week 3.5 hours (during two weeks). In those weeks, I’ll make sure I have a larger block of time in the afternoon to myself to rest and reset.

While in non-pandemic times, I follow my weekly template quite well, there are a few things that are not factored in in this template yet:
– Morning time with my daughter. After she wakes up, we spend about an hour together: to get her dressed and to have breakfast. I want to give her an unhurried morning, and on good days that means I get to read her a story while she finishes up her breakfast and we do one small activity together before my husband takes her to grandma for the day. On bad days, I am juggling calls from the Netherlands (the 7am-10am time slot is my time for calls as well) with a kid who is running around the house naked and screaming like a wild animal.
– School. Schools are not allowed to open here in September, so my daughter will have online classes for preschool. That means, somebody will have to sit with her to operate the computer (grandma doesn’t work with a computer), as well as supervise her between the virtual instruction. I don’t have a solution for this yet.
– Arrival time of my daughter. In my planning she arrives at 5pm, but this really depends on when my husband gets to pick her up*. Prepandemic I was home every day before 4pm, to have 2 hours between my getting home and dinner/bath/bed to do things together. If she arrives, and it’s dinner/bath/bed directly, I miss spending time with her on something that marks the day.
– We’re in a pandemic. Who knows what the next month will look like, really.

* As we’re still in partial lockdown, most people who don’t work in critical industries are allowed to drive only on certain days of the week (I have Monday, Wednesday and Friday). My husband has the permit to drive every day and outside of curfew hours, so he gets to do the driving with our daughter, but since he’s out in the field, the time of the day when he returns and gets to pick her up is variable.