It’s time for another semester! With the Easter semester upon us and the new year in full swing, now is the perfect time to revamp your organizational habits. It’s super easy to lose control of things when chaos take hold but fear not! For here are 7 tips, tricks, and tools for a more organized semester!
1. Develop a system for your class materials and stick with it
Don’t just throw all of your papers into your backpack and call it a day. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have some kind of system for class materials. Whether that’s a notebook and folder for each class or a binder for each class or a five subject notebook for everything, just come up with an easy way for you to keep track of things and have your notes and papers all together.
2. Keep an agenda
This is one of those things where when you start, you can be really enthusiastic about it and fill it out everyday but overtime you tend to forget about it and then one day when you’re moving out of your dorm you find it somewhere under your bed. However, agendas can be a really useful tool to knowing what things you need to get done and where you need to be at certain times. You don’t have to obsess about it, but it’s nice to only have to look in one place for all of your responsibilities.
3. Spend some time once a week organizing your dorm room
College can be pretty hectic and sometimes it feels impossible to keep your room feeling clean and organized but when your room is clean, life can feel a lot less stressful. A good way to make sure your room doesn’t spiral out of control is to just breeze through once a week and put everything back where it belongs. A great time to do this is whenever you’re doing your laundry. With a regular cleaning schedule, your room never gets too messy and your roommate will thank you for it.
4. Schedule your chores
To expand on the task of cleaning your room once a week, it’s good to have an overall schedule of when you’re going to do all of your different chores instead of just eventually getting around to the (hopefully). Set aside time to do your laundry on Wednesday afternoon or to go to the store on Sunday morning. And it’s just as important to hold yourself accountable and make sure you actually do them when you say you will.
5. Keep a clean desk
This is a tough one for a lot of people, but having a desk free of clutter helps a ton with feeling organized. Every night before you go to bed just try to make sure that there isn’t a pile of papers strewn about your desk and you’ll have a much easier time of always knowing where everything is. Having to shuffle through things on your desk when you’re running late to class is not a fun thing to have to do.
6. Work and play in different areas
Don’t do homework in your bed. Beds are for the Three S’s: sleep, sickness, and sex. If your brain knows that your bed is for resting, when you cuddle up to write that ten pager the night before it’s due (please don’t do this), your brain is going to have a really tough time focusing when all it really wants to do is sleep. However, if your brain knows that the library or an empty classroom should be used exclusively for working, it’ll be more focused when you’re trying to study. There’s real science that goes with it but I’m not a scientist and I trust that you all know how to use Wikipedia.
7. Keep your email clean
I always see my friends logging into their email and they have something along the lines of 1,987 unread emails and 6,732 messages in their inbox. Don’t do this. Organize your email and only keep things that you absolutely need. Take advantage of the filing feature that most email services provide. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I have 0 unread messages and 27 messages in my inbox and it feels great.