Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Unsinkable Student Organization System
Study Hacks: "As the back to school season transitions from looming to present, it’s time I turned our attention back to the technical details of becoming an outstanding student. In this post, I want to tackle a topic that’s relevant on the very first day of your new semester: staying organized."
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6 comments:
It's amazing how often I see the 80-20 rule (or Pareto Distribution, or harmonic resource allocation, or Zipfian distribution) reinvented and promoted as the latest and greatest. It's something that works amazingly well, but it's nothing new, Pareto made the first observations of it in economics around the turn of the last century and it's been steadily reinvented every few years since then.
I'm not sure if I agree about the notebook thing, but I'm coming to see the point to having a central calendar and consulting it regularly. as things get more and more busy I have a more difficult time tracking everything I need to do here.
In regards to the 1 notebook per class, I've found that the 1 notebook that I keep for all of my classes has been effective (except that it's starting to fall apart) at keeping material for a class together. For the calendar, though, I've found it essential to keep it well organized on my computer, but then print it out each week and stick it in my notebook so as things change I can pencil them in on paper and refer to the paper during the week.
One notebook per class isn't always the best idea, because it becomes a lot to carry around. I buy two 5-subject notebooks at the beginning of the year and they work just fine. A calendar is definitely a must; you need to be able to view all of your deadlines in one space.
One note book + folder per class simply doesn't work for me because I would never remember to bring that all to class, and really dread carrying around all that weight. Like Hannah, I'm a fan of the 5 subject and a folder. I file at night when I get home, and import all pertinent dates and info into my calendar database -- Daylite. A plug about Daylite here as its relevant. Daylite is a product made by Marketcircle www.marketcircle.com/ which is a database that combines a calendar, contacts, tasks, projects, objectives, etc -- much like Outlook. While the program is fantastic, and Mac based at that, the best part by far is Daylite Touch -- the iphone/ipod app. Syncing via wifi (treating the laptop as a server) Daylite Touch has been my saving grace for staying on top of my life here at CMU. I would highly suggest the suit for any and all Mac users. It does come at a hefty price tag, and is really aimed at small businesses rather than individual users, however, seems like an investment that will carry me into the future as a young working professional.
I know from experience that there's no such thing as an unsinkable organization system. Also, 1 notebook, 1 folder for each class... that's a pretty ridiculous amount of stuff to carry around.
So far the only thing in terms of calendar and organization systems I've used is a free program for MAC called Schoolhouse. It's pretty great.
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