You need an academic planner/calendar (order one
here or
here). Without a planner/calendar, you will probably be constantly falling
behind because (a) you will tend to
greatly underestimate how long things will take, (b) you will put off things
that are important but not due immediately, and (c) when you must devote all your energy to the things that are due immediately for one class, you will
not be doing the work you should be doing in all your other classes. To make good use of your planner,
and
-
Immediately fill it in with information from your syllabi. Moving tasks from your syllabus or from your memory to a to-do list
will greatly improve your efficiency--and moving information from a to-do list to your calendar will provide another
big boost to your productivity.
-
Break down big projects into smaller tasks and to set self-imposed deadlines for those smaller tasks.
Realize, for example, that "writing a paper" involves more than sitting down and writing a paper. You will probably
have to find sources, read those sources, take notes on those sources, add those sources to your bibliography/references list,
outline the paper, write several drafts, and proof your next-to-final draft.
-
Schedule little tasks (like going over flashcards) for breaks between classes so that holes in your class schedule aren't wasted.
Instead of--or in addition to a planner--you may wish to use one of the apps below:
- Simple online to-do list
- Todoist
- Fetchnotes (Easy to
use--and has an easy way to organize your notes)
- Any.do
- Workflowy (the analogy they
use is that you can put your whole brain on one piece of paper and still
find everything you want)
- Using Google
- Google's Gmail (for a to do list, just select
"tasks" under the "Mail" drop down menu)
- Google calendar (for
longer term projects). You can set several reminder alerts to be texted or
emailed to you before the due date (for an example, see this
screen shot).
