My players are making it difficult for me to plan our sessions as a new dm - I really need advice/help here
So I’m a pretty new dm who recently started a small dnd group in my school. I have four players at the moment (which feels like a good amount to run for) and we generally have a good time when I manage to plan things well. The problem is that we don’t have a lot of time for DnD, mainly because I’m autistic and get socially burnt out pretty fast, so I can only just manage what we’re currently doing: roughly two hour sessions every two weeks.
That’s not a lot, and I’m aware of that, which is something I’ve tried to discuss with my players. We don’t have much time to discuss things like clues and plans and what they want to do during the sessions themselves, which is why I’ve *repeatedly* asked them to please start discussing what to do outside of sessions (I even created a separate channel in our discord server to do precisely that) because then we won’t have the awkward phase that we have at the start of almost every session where the players discuss what to do. None of them really take notes, either. None of them have used the dedicated channel, nor discussed anything outside of it. Them deciding what to do before our very short sessions would also make it so much easier to plan something engaging.
We only have a few sessions left now before school ends, and I have a lot of tests and assignments as well as personal stuff to deal with right now, and trying to plan for this group is becoming somewhat exhausting, because I’ve asked them for help that will make my planning work easier and the sessions a lot more fun and well thought out.
What should I do?
(We are in Swedish upper secondary school so we’re all in our late teens, about 17-19)