Tips For Excellent Organisation & Planning

Welcome, Queens and Kings to another blog post in our first ever blog series. Today we will be diving into some useful means of efficient organization and planning for an online semester.

Curating your best life and taking care of your self requires a bit of planning. This particular blog can act as a prototype for planning other projects in varying areas of your life. The importance of planning is always chorused, however, for these season of online school at home there are a plethora of distractions from outside noise, parents, television, social media, just to mention a few it is paramount that your fully assess your workload, allocate sufficient time to prepare for the assessment, set reminders and create some form of structure. Additionally, college or high school is unlike high school and requires special preparation.

1. Find out if your college or universities are offering some form of summer online preparations to help with the transitions.

It could be webinars, blog posts or guidelines on how you can best navigate your courses. Check your School's website or contact the administration.

2. Practice for online school by taking free online courses.

Check out sites like Allison, Coursera, edX or Udemy and find one or two courses that suit you. Set the time to take these courses at a designated time for five days in the week. One I am currently taking and would recommend is 'How to learn Online' offered by edX. I highly recommend you take it it's not a heavy course and it gives you useful information for studying in general and also for schooling online. It breaks down the concept of an easy manner and the lessons are offered in with the mix of videos and snippets of information.

3. Familiarise yourself with the different mediums you will use in school

Your professors will be teaching through like zoom (know how to use all the features). I have familiarised myself with zoom, however, the other mediums like Microsoft Teams and others, I haven't yet checked out, but will do so very soon.

4. Detox your Gadgets

Take time to clean up and delete images or unnecessary files from your phones and gadgets. Turn off post notifications on all your gadgets to avoided alerts that lead you astray from either listening to lectures or working on your assignments.

5. Seek Help

When classes start to make use of services offered by your school like a peer educator, Uni buddy, tutor if you have difficulties in a certain topic or subject.

6. Be Early Never Late

Give yourself earlier deadlines for assignments like 2 days before the due date and work towards it.

7. Familiarise yourself with Productivity Techniques

Productivity techniques like the use of the Pomodoro method, study with me videos or studying with brain-stimulating music. Check them out, whichever rocks your boat and use it when you have no motivation to work.

8. Top 3

Assign 3 top educational goals each day in your planners from Do Good Paper Co and complete a large chunk of your work during the first 5 hours of your day

9. Try to study every day.

You will get high compound interest on the study you put in. Not only will you properly understand and retain what you first read, but you will also be able to relate new content to previously read content and make connections. Most college or university test& exam questions require a great deal of critical thinking and interdisciplinary connections. Studying frequently keeps you in a flow state and can make you make connections very easily.

10. Weekly revisit your notes

To enable space retention. After you first learn something you keep forgetting that information as days go by, revisiting it regularly makes you retain it longer and essentially be more knowledgeable for an assessment. Write questions for yourself to answer based on your notes, this will help you to actively recall information

11. Attend Office Hours (time to speak to profs.)to get clarification from your professors.

Schedule one as soon as they open office hours. Email your professors if you have any inquiries. A pro tip is to always send a follow-up email a few days after.

12. Plan weekly reviews to go over your notes and reset to assess your actions in the past week.

13. Course Prep

Download your schedule, read your syllabi for all your courses (as I finish this blog read I am going the syllabus for one of my courses) to or save your timetable and place it where you will see it every day(print & paste on the wall or make it your phone or laptop wallpaper). Place reminders. Show your family members or whoever you live with so they can know not to disturb you during these times.

14. Take notes during lectures.

15. Decide on your Note-taking System.

This could be digital or paper. This could also be using 'Cornell's Notetaking method or using mind maps or the good ole topic & point format. Look up and try and find which note-taking methods fit best with each of your courses.

16. Get necessary stationery supplies(enough of them).

From notebooks(if you are taking paper notes), pens, rulers, calculators, highlighters, flashcards, rulers, white-out, sticky notes, stapler, noise-cancelling headphones (okay I am extra but if you can afford it, get it but I'll just stick to earphones), binder and others. Have a folder for each course.

17. Use a Planner.

Get a planner from Do Good Paper (lol, If you need a marketer just hit me up cause....)and make use of it. After getting your syllabus to write in all the assignments, tests, midterms and exams dates into your planner from the beginning of the semester to the end. This way when you flip the pages you won't forget but instead, be reminded early one and you can start making plans to complete tasks on time or even earlier.

18. Use Google Calendar.

Add your classes and their times, add in your start time, rest time, study time(include location & time), small assignments, big assignments, exams, workshops and other non-negotiable time slots (meetings, church services) you can even colour code them. Google Keeps can be used alongside this to jot down tasks and in sync them to the calendar. Google keeps can appear on the calendar. -----

19. Make and stick to a schedule.

Have a wake-up time, time to start work whether it be pre-class reading or watching a lecture, review your notes, have lunch, schedule in breaks (nature breaks are the best, followed by breaks that don't include the use of technology), place in study time and bedtime (no joke). To stay accountable share this with family and friends, place reminders on your phone and place in an activity you would look forward to doing after completing major tasks. To help when creating a schedule, watch this video 'Why Your schedule is failing ?'

Yeah so I couldn't make it to 20 but you get the gist. I just want to add that these tips are good & all but you have to realise that your high school ways of studying or preparing for school cannot work, you have to identify and assess how you learn best, plan, implement and reassess. There has to be a shift and you have to put effort to prepare; else you will waste your money.

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Thanks for stopping by.

Never stop Curating your best life.

-Y.E.N