December is easily one of the most stressful times of year, especially for students. Between studying for finals, holiday shopping, and keeping up with extracurriculars, there often becomes too much to juggle. If you’re anything like me, you get through life by making lists. Lists allow you to remember all that you have to do, they keep all your responsibilities/assignments in one place, and they quite literally keep you sane. Frequent list-makers may run into several problems, however. It’s easy for to-do lists to stack up as we slip into the habit of creating a new list before completing yesterday’s. Also, given the length of our to-do lists, prioritizing often becomes difficult, leading to assignments and responsibilities slipping through the cracks.
Well, fellow list-makers, allow me to introduce to you the life-changing, effective, ULTIMATE to-do list. Last month I was introduced to this idea at a seminar on Mindfulness and Work/Life Balance, which opened my eyes to an entirely new and effective planning strategy. The concept of this to-do list (which is actually more chart-like than list-like) is that by separating your tasks into areas based on their importance and due date, prioritizing is made easy. The chart should look like this:
The tasks in the upper-left box (“important and due soon”) should be completed first because there is a time constraint and a sense of importance. Some items that would go in this category are term papers, internship applications, and studying for a midterms.
The “not important and due soon” box holds all the items that are the sources of our procrastination—things that we feel the need to complete ASAP even though we have much higher priorities. Some of these tasks may include uploading pictures to Facebook or online shopping.
Obviously, the “not important and not due soon” box should always be LAST priority! Although checking Instagram may seem urgent, I promise you that you will feel better if you wait it out.
The goal of this chart is to get everything in the “important and not due soon” box finished before those itmes creep over to the “due soon” box. This is how you effectively prioritize and avoid becoming overwhelmed.
Hopefully this planning tool will relieve some of your finals stress and allow you to take on the world. All in a days work, ladies.