3 Ways To Up Your Productivity In College

By Julia Dunn on May 9, 2016

The single quickest way to fall behind in college is to be unorganized.

As many students know, life at a university is extremely fast-paced (students on the quarter system especially know this to be true, as 10-week quarters fly by much faster than semesters do). You’ll find that getting organized greatly assists with time management, and that getting organized allows you to accomplish much more than you may think.

To minimize stress and stay on top of coursework while still making time to relax a little, try a few different organizational strategies to see which one works best for you in terms of productivity.

1. Make large posters to learn complex material.

Have you ever been completely overwhelmed by a chemistry exam that covered eight chapters at once? Do material-heavy exams scare you immensely?

For some learners who benefit from visual aids, buy a large pad of artists’ paper (yes, the huge pads of paper that are several feet long). Allow yourself just one or two posters per chapter and try to condense the material to fit onto just that space. Seeing the confined space on the poster will make you think harder about what concepts are major and which are extra details that may not hurt you if you can’t remember them on test day.

Image via Julia Dunn

Use large colorful markers to write out the most important information (and draw pictures to go with it). Once you’ve made posters for all the material you need to know, hang them around your room so you can soak it in. Read over them when you’re standing around brushing your teeth at night, or eating a breakfast bagel before work.

Taking time to nicely concentrate difficult material on a manageable space like a poster can increase your interest in the subject just because it’ll look nice. If you’re spending money on such large paper, you will feel more compelled to use it as well as you can. Furthermore, you can organize complicated information better on a poster than you could on a small sheet of printer paper, because once you get all the pertinent information down on one poster, you’ll see more easily how interrelated concepts work together.

2. Use Google Calendar.

There aren’t enough words to describe how great Google Calendar is for a busy/highly-involved college student. Google Calendar is a free Google application that allows you to enter all of your classes, meetings, events, and other responsibilities into a digital calendar accessible from anywhere as long as you know your Gmail address and password. iPhones even sync your Google calendar with your phone’s internal calendar, and you can toggle settings so that reminded notifications pop up before your events begin.

Image Via Pixabay

Color-coding your various commitments in Google Calendar makes it incredibly easy to know what your days and weeks look like all at once, and it’s simple to make repeating events if needed.

Digital calendars are fantastic ways to get organized because they hold you accountable for getting done what you need to get done. If you’ve set up a 3-hour block for biology homework and you get lost on Facebook, you’ll visibly be able to see time passing on your calendar by following a red line on the event — if you feel bad watching time run out, you’ll be more likely to stay on task.

3. Establish achievable goals.

Giving yourself only two hours to read 60 pages of a text translated from Ancient Greek to English for your literature class isn’t quite realistic. It is also unrealistic to plan a 6-hour block of reading with a 4-hour block of physics problems right after it. Although it is a great goal to complete a lot of homework at once, make sure to schedule your homework in increments of 2-3 goes each and leave a 30 minute or 1-hour block in between each work session. You can never tell what unexpected delays may occur throughout the day (the universe doesn’t always follow schedules!)

Additionally, you’ll feel less strained if you give yourself room to fritter away on Tumblr for an hour in between study blocks. Scheduling your time as though you live in a perfect world will likely lead you to frustration with yourself for not being able to abide by that perfect schedule. Planning realistically is always the best option for students who juggle more activities and classes than they know how to manage.

In retrospect, productivity and organization are the catalysts for college success. If you find yourself having trouble using these or any other techniques to get organized, reach out to advisers at your university who may be able to help you set up more personalized plans that fit your lifestyle. The secret to getting all your work done and still having fun is all tied to how you divide up your time, when you divide up your time, and what you do with your time.

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