So I finished up High school earlier this month and a reality set in, I’m about to be paying a large amount of money to a university (Samford University, and no that’s not a typo, my parents are rich enough to bride Stanford’s rowing team) to learn and take on a large amount of hard work. I’m excited for the challenge, but it’s a little intimidating. This will be more workload than I’ve ever seen (so I’m told).
My HS life was about as unorganized as it could get. The only Calendar I used was the one Google Classroom gave me for due dates, the best To do list I had was just maybe throwing urgent tasks in iNotes, note-taking was limited to the couple classes that gave me headaches (and I had none my senior year), I’d procrastinate to the last second on writing assignments, and barely study.
This worked fine in high school and for the most part, I got good grades (as long as we don’t talk about foreign languages) and just dealt with the inconveniences of my “method” (if we can even call it that). This often meant me getting swamped and confused very quickly, pulling all-nighters or getting assignments out the minute it was due. I was the most disorganized person I knew.
Now, let’s fast forward to a week after I graduated, chilling and texting one of my buddies in college, and after hearing about the workload, the way classes work, and the difficulty of the work; it was clear my High school ways weren’t going to fly.
I decided to change everything. Old habits die hard and I knew it would be a challenge. I’ve tried to get organized in the past and all those attempts lasted about 3 days, so I knew I’d have to change something up.
First I looked at what I had before and it all had one thing in common, I was more into the application itself than I was at the actual workflow. I would use programs I thought were cool, didn’t bother looking into expert advice, and would end up giving up on the system after a couple of days of it doing nothing but inconvenience me. I had to give up on trying to overdo everything (so no CLI apps) and get something that worked everywhere I need it to and does everything I need it to, all without adding any friction to my day.
This was made a little easier by giving in to the dark side. My Grandparents generously got me a 14in MacBook Pro as a graduation gift. Now as many of you know I am a massive Linux fan, but this laptop blows anything I’ve ever had out of the water, and in the end; UNIX is UNIX. It also gave me access to a ton of fantastic productivity tools that I previously wouldn’t have (or would’ve been web-only).
Very quickly I settled on Notion (it’s easy to use, everywhere, and still lets me program it a little) and Fanstical (everywhere I need it and NLP calendar event, which is amazing). There are already a million posts and videos on these tools and the world doesn’t need another notion template so I’m not going to deep dive into the tools themselves (at least not in this post) because, in the end, it’s all about preference. What I do want to get into is how I’m using these tools and how it’s completely changed the way I operate and have me confident in handling college.
Now I haven’t tested any of this beyond my everyday life and normal work things, so we’ll see how this all works come college (and it’s a flexible system so I can change anything I need on the fly). The first thing I did was get my texts, DMs, and emails to inbox zero (well on texts and the like, just left no messages unread), created a Notion file called “Quick Notes” and stuck it on the home screen of all my devices. These are “inboxes” that contain new information that needs to be processed. As I go through the day I add stuff to my quick notes, get emails, and get events over my text. and whenever I get 5 to 10 minutes I go through my inboxes and put everything in its proper place (as I heard someone say, put stuff where you need it, not where you found it)
This inbox strategy alone has saved me a ton of time and really enhanced my life, I don’t have to worry about saving emails or forgetting about events, random ideas don’t waft into the wind I’m not going through my text trying to get the time of something. I’m a forgetful person and having a process for fast and predictable information intake has been huge.
Now where does everything go after it’s in the system? Well, it goes into either my master reading list, master task list, master note document, or calendar I’m not using folders for these but I am tagging them with “Personal”, “Work”, and “School” and each of those areas has a dashboard that access the central lists and filters it so I can get any info I need in one place, at a glance.
This translates into me, opening my personal page and seeing something I wanted to read or something that needs to get done, then doing that instead of watching something mindless on YouTube.
Also has led to my recording pretty much everything I’m reading or watching, making myself more intentional about what I consume. I imagine as life goes on and I want to take a peek at some I read 8 months ago with notes it’ll be very nice. (as opposed to trying to Google it)
Now I don’t need to explain why having a calendar is nice, I don’t forget about events and I don’t send “when is <event> again?” texts.
Note-taking has also been huge in remembering and keeping track of things. It really shined when working on a project that I may or may not turn into a blog post, I wasn’t re-reading the same thing over and over again and I wasn’t having to keep tabs open out of fear of losing them. I noted what was important, recorded the link I wanted, and jotted down my questions. Leading to me figuring stuff out way faster and not having to worry about forgetting about everything I did in two weeks.
I also built a note-taking system that lets me schedule when I want to review my notes next and they automatically pop up in my student dashboard on the scheduled day, but we’ll see how well I like it after school starts up.
So yeah, that’s about it. My inner essay writer doesn’t love this post, but it covers what I want to say. I hope this was at least kind of helpful to someone and I welcome any input y’all have on my ideas. I think I’ll make a little series of posts about my college experience so if that sounds interesting or you like reading some random kid’s tech rambles subscribe! Catch ya on the next one.