10 Tips to be more organised in college or university

10 Tips to be more organised in college or university

There won’t be any ringing bells or teachers chasing you into class at college or university, whether you do well will largely come down to whether you are organised.

Here are some tips to help you get organised:

1. Start off by establishing your goals. What is it you want to achieve? Once you have realistic goals in place, you can work backwards to work out what you need to do to achieve them.
2. Draw up a timetable for the year and add your exams and assignment deadlines in it straight away so you know what you have to work towards.
3. Now add a detailed schedule for the month ahead. Every day, add all your reports, tests, presentations and other projects you have to prepare for – as soon as you know about them.
4. Add your priorities for the week ahead. Each week, note down on your timetable which sections of your work you must read and which ones you want to revise. List specific chapters and pages – making sure you’re keeping up with the work coming your way as well as revising work you covered in the past. Also breakdown assignments and projects down into smaller parts so you can build on them every week over a few weeks so that you complete them on time. Always leave some breathing space to review your work to make sure you did a good job. This is also super helpful if you lose a day’s work because you weren’t feeling well or had a crisis to deal with.
5. And now add your daily schedule. You know that you have class until a certain time, slot in some time to have lunch and relax a bit, either before you get started on your ‘home’ work, or after (this will depend how good you are at pulling yourself away from the TV or social media or whatever it is you do to relax). If you know you will need an hour to work on your project, an hour to prepare for your test the next day and an hour to complete your assignment due in the next few days, then you can fit in revision and reading up on the next day’s material after that. And if you have quite a full day of lectures, you know that you don’t have time to go for lunch with your friends or take an hour’s break, you have to get straight into it!
6. Study programme. When you study for an exam, schedule 50 minutes of studying followed by 10 minutes of rest.
7. Do the difficult stuff first. Study the toughest material first and do the hardest tasks first so that you can look forward to easier tasks instead of procrastinating because you’re fearing what’s coming.
8. Study during the day. Studies show that each hour during the day used to study is equal to one and a half hours at night. Rather make plans to go out with your friends for dinner instead of lunch.
9. Have your work with you to make use of ‘wasted time’. If you have your work with you and your lecturer doesn’t pitch, you can use that time to catch up on the work you have scheduled for that day instead of wasting the time. You will also have times that you will wait in queues when going to a government department for instance, instead of using that time to catch up on social media, use it to catch up on work.
10. When you start to fall behind, wake up early. Sometimes, for one reason or another, your work will start to slip. Don’t let it get to an unmanageable mountain. As soon as you know you’ve gone off course, wake up an hour earlier for a few days until you’ve caught up. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re not in control of your work.

Follow these 10 tips to get more organised so you can give yourself every chance possible of doing well at college or university.