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Are You Too Busy for Everything? Try This Fool Proof Hack

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UC Merced chapter.

Do you ever have a million things to do and feel like it’s just too much? How do you manage everything when there’s so much to do? Luckily, Tumblr user @howtomusicmajor shared the fool proof solution for how to handle having to do too much! 

 

First, make a 3 by 4 grid to map out everything you need to do. The top row will list the day in which things are due. Are they due tomorrow? Are they due later on? Were they due yesterday and you need to do them now or you will die? Don’t stress we have a solution for that. Along the left side of the grid write how much time will be needed to complete the task you need to do. We divided it up by 5 minutes, 30 minutes, hours, and days. Sounds simple enough right? Here is a sample grid: 

It’s time to prioritize. Do you have an important email that you had to write yesterday and you haven’t even opened your inbox? Do you have a 3-page research report due tomorrow? What do you do when? Here’s how your priorities should go: 

 

  1. 5 minutes due YESTERDAY
  2. 5 minutes due TOMORROW
  3. 30 minutes due YESTERDAY
  4. 30 minutes due TOMORROW
  5. Hours due YESTERDAY
  6. Hours due TOMORROW
  7. 5 minutes due LATER
  8. 30 minutes due LATER
  9. Hours due LATER
  10. Days due YESTERDAY
  11. Days due TOMORROW
  12. Days due LATER

You can follow this list on the sample diagram we provided above.You should always do a task that was due yesterday that will take you 5 minutes first. Any task that will take days to due and is due later should be at the bottom of your list. 

Of course, if you feel like something is completely urgent and needs to be done right away, you can do that thing. The same goes for if you have something that you feel is not that urgent and can be held off on. This hack is meant to help with decision making and hopefully get you started in thinking about what to do when. If you ever feel like you have way too much to do, just remember this easy hack to make life seem more balanced!

Christian Laspada is a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of California, Merced pursuing a Bachelor’s of Art degree in Psychology with a research emphasis in sustainability and a minor in Writing. He has taken a number of courses in his major including Human Behavioral Genetics, Health Psychology, and Clinical Neuropsychology and is working towards becoming a researcher. He is an active member of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. He works as an EcoRep intern on campus where he promotes sustainability and sustainable habits to students, staff, and faculty. Mr. Laspada has been a Learning Assistant for psychology at his university’s Bright Success Center since March of 2017, where he tutors peers in various subjects in psychology. In the future, he plans to research how to increase sustainable behavior with social psychology, how people interact with each other and the natural world, gender differences in sustainable behavior, and climate action and mitigation.