Two jobs. Four classes. An internship. Family. Friends. No sleep. How do you figure all of it out?
KEEP A CALENDAR.
I cannot stress this enough. I personally use Google Calendar which has proven to be a lifesaver. It’s helped me improve my time management so much and has made my chaotic brain much easier to be in control of. It connects to your Google account and can make its way to any of your devices. I have a lot of meetings that I need to keep track of, and it can hook up Zoom links and the like, so it makes that much easier as well. My friends and I add lots of our hangouts to the affectionately named G-Cal to keep track of what we’re doing. This may sound like an ad for Google Calendar–I swear it’s not–but it’s genuinely so helpful.
Make time for yourself.
You can’t be successful professionally or academically without being a functional human being. I forget that a lot, but it’s something that needs to be ingrained into everyone’s brain. If you don’t get any sleep, don’t drink enough water, and don’t go outside, you are not a person. You are a vampire.
Keep your space organized.
It is so important to live/work in a space that you can navigate easily. If there’s garbage, clothes, and other nonsensical things everywhere, there’s no way that you’ll be able to get anything done. Trust me, I know. I’m speaking from experience. Make time in your planner to clean your space every so often, maybe for a weekly or nightly reset. Not only will this help your general time management, it’ll also help your mental health.
Prioritize.
Say you have four assignments due all on the same day, and you haven’t started any of them. What are you gonna do? Prioritize. The way that I do it is by doing the easiest things first. Some people prefer to do it the other way around, as a means to get the bulk of the work done first. I’d rather get the easiest assignments turned in, as after the hardest piece, you may feel burnt out from all of the expulsion of brain power. Build up, don’t burn out.