The realms of education are evolving at a rapid pace in the contemporary world. In this era driven by large-scale competition, school students need to be great managers too. There is a lot to manage simultaneously for school students and these prerequisites require fine organizational skills. Besides, the success that an individual attains in his professional life depends a lot on his early learning days.
Hence, if you are going to develop great organizational skills from your school days, you will end up being an accomplished professional. You ought to keep in mind that organizational skills are indispensable ingredients for achievement. Benjamin Franklin perfectly quoted, “for every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.” The salience of having things organized could not have been explained any better.
Do you feel that you are not able to maintain a handsome balance in your life? Do you strive to manage your study sessions, homework, leisure time, assignments, and hikes? Excelling in the present times has become far too demanding. However, to keep complaining is never going to be a remedy. You need to find a way around the obstacles than crib about how grim they are. As a student, you need to prepare yourself well to excel in your pursuits.
In this direction, your journey is going to be more valuable than the destination. Remember, learning is a voyage, and so is excellence. With the right skill set, you can facilitate your journey with efficacy, accomplishments, and undying motivation. Among all these skills, the trait to keep everything organized should be one of your top priorities.
Moving further, some statistics on students’ time management and organizational skills are worth your attention. Around 87 percent of students state that they can attain higher grades if they can upscale their organizational skills. Moreover, almost 90 percent of students feel that they do not have the ability to manage time well. All of them agree that they would want to improve their time management skills to achieve higher academic success.
These insights portray the importance of the skill to organize things with efficacy. What is even more noteworthy is the fact that most students do realize this significance. Even you would agree that these skills can be game-changing for you. Do you think you already have the proficiency that you ought to have to organize your time and resources? Even if you do, there is always a pleasant scope for improvement! Let us find out the various ways in which you can hone excellent organizational skills.
Ways in which you can improve your organizational skills
1. Use a planner
Efficiently planning things and organizing them well are complementary to each other. To organize your assignments, homework, and hobby classes in a worthwhile way, you should use a planner. Another fascinating merit of using a planner is that it can uplift your productivity. Besides, there are many kinds of planners available in this modern era. You can choose between various types of planner journals, planner applications, technology-driven planners, and so on. Here is how you can use a planner to obtain the best results
Steps to use a planner
- Decide upon the most suitable planner for you
- Add daily assignments to your planner
- Fill in all the assigned deadlines
- Add weekly and daily tasks and goals to your planner
- Mark the assignments as done when you complete them
- Use sticky notes and highlighters to classify tasks based on priority
- Add details of the upcoming events and assignments
Essential tip: when you add your weekly goals or any other goals to the planner, add the daily steps you need to take to reach the final objective. Your planner should also have the process and the subsidiary goals for reaching the ultimate objective.
2. Customize the deadlines
Effective organization mandates productive management and utilization of time. As most of us already know, time management and organizing things go hand in hand. As a student, you will often find yourself surrounded by daunting deadlines. But if you manage your time and deadlines well, they will not seem as scary.
Given that, one of the best ways to organize your submission dates well. For that, you should always set a deadline that is prior to the actual deadline given by your educator. For instance, if you have been assigned a project the submission of which is due in 10 days, you should set the goal to complete it in eight days.
This way, you will be able to finish well in time rather than missing the due date or rushing with work on the last day. To manage things successfully, you should aim to complete things on time rather than keeping them hanging.
Essential Tip: when you alter the deadlines, do not set unrealistic goals. Understand the project or the assignment well and then determine how much time you need to complete it without compromising on quality.
3. Classify your tasks
The top CEOs and executives of the world are in the powerful habit of classifying their tasks as per significance and urgency. They categorize their tasks into high-priority, intermediate-priority, and low-priority works. This is the thumb rule of mastering the organization of time and events. You need to figure out which are the hardest and the most time-consuming tasks on your planner. You can get this right in the subsequent ways
- Arrange your tasks in the decreasing order of priority
- In another list, arrange the tasks in descending order of difficulty
- Work on the highest priority and the most challenging tasks first
Most successful and powerful people around the world will suggest that you should go for the hardest tasks first. Also, in doing so, the best of your daily productivity will be used for the pieces of work that have the highest price tags. You can deal with low-priority tasks even with declining productivity, isn’t it? But you do not want to do that with your most significant tasks that require attention to detail!
Essential Tip: Try and understand your daily productivity patterns before you schedule your tasks for the day. The most productive hours of people are subject to vary from one individual to another.
4. Organize your study resources well
You will by default witness an abrupt improvement in yourself when you start making an effort to keep your resources organized. It should not happen that you have no clue where your geometry box or your laptop’s charger is when you sit down to begin your homework. You need to develop the habit of keeping everything in one place and putting them back after use.
Be it your books, your stationery, or other work resources; you should place them in a well-organized manner. You should make a list in your head of the things you are going to need for a particular assignment or project and have them arranged beforehand. Interrupting your work time and again for getting hold of things will be sheer wastage of time otherwise.
Essential tip: Keep a regular check on your stationery and other study resources to not have to arrange them at the last minute. Besides, pack your school bag one night prior and crosscheck with the timetable if you have kept all the books and notebooks. Children often forget their textbooks at home when they pack their school bags in the morning hustle.
5. Set the environment right
Creating a perfect and conducive environment for your homework and study sessions is essential. To elaborate, it is a part of time management and effective organization of duties. Do you feel you are too much addicted to social media or PlayStation? Do these things make you procrastinate and eventually miss your due dates?
Well, you need to organize your time proficiently before your contemporaries leave you way behind in the competition. You need to eliminate all the distractions that often interrupt your schedule. The norm is simple, your study time should be limited to academic purposes, and your leisure time should be restricted to recreation. Mixing the two can create chaos, and you will soon feel the downsides. Here is how you can create a perfect study environment.
- Recognize all the distractions that interfere with your academics
- Keep the gadgets in another room if you do not need them for your academics
- Sit on a proper study table for homework than the couch or bed
- Prefer studying in places that are quiet and free from the possibility of commotion
- If you are using your phone for academic purposes, turn mobile data off for social media applications
- Arrange for all necessary items and study materials before you begin
Essential Tip: Education in present times is a lot more dependent on technology than before. When you begin to study or when you need to do academic research, prefer a laptop to a mobile phone. This is for the simple reason that you are more vulnerable to distractions when working on a smartphone. The constant notifications on Whatsapp or other social media applications will keep distracting you from your objective.
6. Revise your goals for the day every morning
Your goals and targets are not meant to keep waiting for you in the planner. One good way to stay organized and ahead of time is to revise your goals for the day as the first thing you do in the morning. It will not take more than two minutes to do so, but it will work brilliantly to prepare you for the day ahead.
Once you remind yourself of the essential responsibilities of the day, you will plan your day in an effective manner. A quick recap of the task list every morning will fill you with the right motivation and zeal.
Essential Tip: The process will remain incomplete if you do not crosscheck your task list before going to bed. In whatever way feasible, you need to have a checklist to verify at night if you could complete all the tasks allotted to the day. This will give you a chance for self-reflection and for identifying the areas of improvement.
7. Use the Pomodoro technique
Have you heard about the Pomodoro technique of time management yet? If you want to be a pro at time management, this technique is the perfect answer. This amazing tactic by Francesco Cirillo states that you should work in small bursts of 25 minutes each. Moreover, these small spans of work or study should be separated by short breaks. Before you wonder how this works, here is your perfect roadmap to using this method.
- Prepare a to-do-list
- Get yourself a timer or set it up on your smartphone
- Set the timer to 25 minutes
- Work on a single task till 25 minutes are over
- Once the timer rings, record the work done
- Give yourself a 5-10 minute break
- Start over again after the break is over
Essential Tip: Pomodoro method is not about trying to do multiple tasks in one span of 25 minutes. The basic idea is to invest all your focus in one task at a time to get the best out of it. Plus, this is another subtle reminder that organizational skills cannot be mastered unless you are good at time management.
8. Put technology to smart use
There is much more to technology than Instagram, Twitter, or your favorite video game. The expanse of technology is vast, and you can use significant innovations to be a more organized person than ever before. Thanks to innovation and artificial intelligence, setting reminders and tracking progress has become incredibly easy. You can use your gadgets and various applications to organize your work and tasks in the following manners.
- To prepare to-do lists
- To make notes and set up alerts
- To use a calendar planner
- For goal tracking and time tracking
- For working on group projects and assignments
- To proofread and revise grammar for your assignments
The times to come for sure belong to those who know how to get the most out of technology. Technology is a dynamic peripheral that is changing for the better with each passing day. Almost all manual work are now being replaced with artificial intelligence. You need to stay updated with the latest technology verticals to keep improving your time management and organizational skills. Why would you want to lose your precious time to things that technology can manage within minutes?
Essential Tip: No matter how much convenience technology brings, it can also be confusing at times. Therefore, to avoid such demerits, it is recommended to use the least possible number of applications. Besides, look for applications that are free and offer quick solutions.
Conclusion
To encapsulate, good organizational skills find ample purchase in today’s era. Given that, it is better to build these skills at school itself rather than develop them from scratch to fit into a job. In reality, students need more organizational skills than anyone else, for there is an immense burden on them. You often find yourself juggling with too many things on your platter, don’t you? In such a scenario, you merely have two options.
One option is to keep worrying about things, and the second is to begin and finish before time. You certainly want to belong to the latter classification of people. For that, you need to hone your organizational skills which are in many cases synonymous with time management.
