Fall term will be starting soon, whether you’re prepared for the deluge or not. Summer vacation is good for earning money and bonding with peers, but it’s getting toward the portion of summer that would be well spent on getting a few of your higher-education ducks in a row. Getting one’s organization system [...]
Fall term will be starting soon, whether you’re prepared for the deluge or not. Summer vacation is good for earning money and bonding with peers, but it’s getting toward the portion of summer that would be well spent on getting a few of your higher-education ducks in a row.
Getting one’s organization system planned out and ready to go before the second week of the fall term hits and you’re already in too deep to breathe, let alone dig yourself out, is a prudent move. I’m a sick and twisted little girl, and will sometimes let a deliciously unorganized disaster pile up just so that I can dive in and organize it to perfection later.
I did notice, however, that at the beginning of my college career I tended to hold off on the organizational system streamlining until the term was over. Winter, spring and summer breaks were spent cleaning up the previous term’s mess while muttering to myself that next term I would grow the hell up and keep my academic life in order from day one.
By the time I graduated, I was overly super at keeping schoolwork and papers in line and perfect. It turned out, weirdly enough, that dealing with a chunk of information as it came along was a thousand times faster than shoving it into my “Deal With” folder and having to dig through said folder after the term was over, and wonder (a) what the eff it was, and (b) figure out whether to keep it or toss it, and (c) if it was a keeper, then where would I be keeping it?
Arjun Muralidharan over at The Productive Student has a three-post series about organization systems for students. If you don’t have your own personal system designed and perfected as of yet, I recommend checking them out (before classes start).
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Posted by Alexa Harrington
