The Her Campus National Editors write about products we love and think you’ll love too. Her Campus has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase. All products are in stock and all prices are accurate as of publication.
A note to start
I just wanted to start by saying that this article is not meant to be taken and used all at once. This article is meant to serve as inspiration to give you ideas that you can implement slowly into your own routine. A lot of times if you completely rework your organization (especially in academics), you’ll get burnt out by how sudden and intense the change is and you’ll revert back to your old organization ways, or worse, to nothing. This article is simply meant to give you some ideas of ways you can better organize your semester to make life easier as you’re going through college.
tips and methods
keep things visual – Use your learning style to your advantage
This is more of a general piece of advice that you can incorporate into all the methods I’m going to be listing, but I’ve found that, especially if you’re a visual person, keeping things aesthetic, pretty and visual is extremely important.
I’m a very visual person. This means that I learn best through visual teaching types and communicate best through visual examples and methods. Think in images and pictures, and can be motivated by visuals and aesthetic things. This is something that I’ve learned to take advantage of by tapping into this with little hacks in order to allow myself to work to my fullest potential.
If you’re a visual learner/person like me, I highly recommend keeping things visual, pretty, and aesthetic, especially when it comes to organization and academics. I love decorating my notes with stickers and washi tape to motivate me to look back at them more and make me excited to take notes. I also love having a color-coded system to manage my notes and keep things organized internally (inside the notes) as well.
Make it fun – Decorative to-do lists
My very first method for organization is a take on the very basic to-do list. I love a good to-do list. What I’ve found is that if I make it pretty, I feel far more motivated to do the things on the list, to keep making lists and feel more productive overall. It’s so funny how something as simple as a pretty to-do list can make me feel like I’m living my romanticized academia life.
Another thing I do in addition to using cute notepads is using simple circle stickers as bullet points. I love stickers, so using these tiny, colorful circle stickers as bullet points (which can be applied with tweezers) lowkey makes having a new task or assignment fun because it means I get to put down another sticker. Don’t even get me started on how satisfying it is to check it off later once I complete the task…
monthly Calendars
I know a lot of the time it feels far more productive to have a weekly or even daily calendar and/or planner where you can list your to-dos and tasks, but I’ve found that a monthly calendar can be equally as useful! I love using monthly calendars as a way to give a nice overview of the month. I tend to make the monthly spread have my main appointments, meetings, etc. and nothing else. The monthly calendar is my most important thing and allows me to generally see what each week will look like, as well as what the month will look like overall.
I feel that this allows me to later divide my tasks, deadlines and projects into each week/day and cater it towards when it’ll be easiest to do. If I have a project due in the final week of the month, but I also have a bunch of meetings during that final week of the month, I’ll probably put it in my to-do list for the week before in order to make things easier on myself.
A monthly calendar gives you that important overview needed for designating tasks and to-dos into each week, and is also a great place to get creative and decorate. My monthly pages are far more decorative because it motivates me to look back at it and it’s also likely to have more blank space compared to my weekly spreads, where I fill most empty space with tasks and to-dos instead of decorations.
Weekly calendars
A weekly calendar is something I also really recommend! I personally pair monthly, weekly and daily calendars, but I think even just pairing a monthly and a weekly calendar would be efficient and helpful as well. I feel like how you choose to organize really depends on how much you can handle and at what point organization stops being helpful and becomes a separate chore.
For me, I love organization, so I have my two main planners and a Google Calendar, which I use the most, and then a Notion and a bullet journal that I use a bit less but still use consistently. For many people, this would seem like far too much and would be overwhelming, but I’ve found that throwing extra organization into the mix means that something is bound to stick (and most things have, just at varying degrees).
There are so many ways to use both monthly calendars and weekly calendars. I love Google Calendar and bullet journaling for monthly calendars and enjoy using my bullet journal, my planners, Notion and Google Calendar for weekly views, all serving different purposes. My bullet journal, which I talk about a bit more in a bit, is used as more of an outlet than a tool. My Google Calendar holds my bare-minimum to-dos, such as classes, meetings, appointments etc., that have set times, and I need to do no matter what.
My academic planner holds my academic to-do lists and deadlines, while my other planner holds my time blocking schedule of what I’m doing, such as when I eat, when I study, my meetings and extracurriculars, etc. Lastly, my Notion holds my entire gamified system, which, in simple terms, is where each task I complete gives me points and coins that I can then use for rewards like fun activities or things I’ll let myself buy.
Google calendar
This method is one I’ve seen many college students use, and it’s extremely helpful. The Google Calendar is a very useful tool in managing your schedule, appointments, assignments etc. One of my personal favorite aspects of Google Calendar is that it’s customizable and there are extensions you can get to make it entirely your own. Some extensions can change the background to something very aesthetic to make it nicer to look at, while others allow you to better change the colors of the events on your calendar and allow you to save colors and swatches.
In addition to all this, there’s an option to link your Canvas to your Google Calendar to automatically transfer deadlines and due dates. This is extremely helpful because you’ll have a schedule of when everything is due and it’s directly from the source, so there is no chance you accidentally put a due date on the wrong day or anything like that.
Notion
Notion is another one of my favorites. It’s another completely customizable software that allows you to build dashboards and pages that include all that you need for your academics. The best part is that there are thousands of Notion templates out there for beginners who aren’t ready to make their own pages yet. I personally love experimenting with all the fun templates and even combining different templates to get exactly what I want.
I would say that Notion takes some getting used to, but I personally find it so worth it in the long run. Once you feel more confident and start experimenting with different elements and aspects of Notion, you start to realize all that you’ve been missing.
Bullet journal
Another method for organization that I’d recommend is a bullet journal. A bullet journal is a great way to combine a few of the above organization methods, like decorative to-do lists, monthly calendars, weekly calendars etc. I love using my bullet journal more as a creative outlet than a tool, but it is extremely versatile in how you want to use it because of how customizable it is. I love making weekly spreads with pretty stickers and washi tape, and making this my home for all my old to-do list notepads once I’m finished with all the tasks on it.
When taking Notes
My last category for organization is dedicated to all the ways you can organize your notes and tasks themselves, such as color-coding systems and note-taking methods. Here, I’m going to explain my current methods and systems that I use in hopes that they may prove useful to you in some way!
Recently, I’ve moved back to an analog method of taking notes. I’ve gotten these notebook-style binders that are basically notebooks (in that they’re slim and notebook-shaped), but you’re able to rearrange the pages in the same way you can with a binder.
I love these notebooks as they allow me to carry around one to two notebooks in my bag (leaving the rest at my dorm), writing all notes for all classes in the same notebook and then separating these notes pages into different notebooks when I get back to my dorm. This allows me to do physical notes (one of my favorite methods) while still being efficient in space and storage.
Up until this point, I used a digital method of taking notes using note-taking software like GoodNotes on my iPad. I still enjoy doing this and love doing my brainstorming, planning, art, visuals etc. on my iPad, but my main method of taking notes is now on paper.
While taking these notes, I enjoy using a color-coded system. I’m still developing this system as I continue to take notes physically, but currently my color-coded system includes the main section titles in one color, subheadings in another, definitions in another, examples in another and then a misc color for important details. This may sound like a lot, but it makes looking back at notes for a specific thing far easier, as I’m able to just look for a specific color.
In addition to color coding, I highly recommend using notepads and Post-it notes to mark important bits of information. As I mentioned before, I love aesthetic and pretty notepads and Post-it notes, and this is another great way to make your notes aesthetic and pretty and to keep things visual.
Lastly, I recommend catering your methods of taking notes, such as page layout and color-coding systems, to each subject. Different subjects require different things in order to be most efficient, so it’s important to keep this in mind.
A final note
I know this all seems like a lot, but I find the best practice is to adopt a method here and there to test it out on its own or with what you already have, rather than trying everything all at once. Thank being said, thank you so much for reading through my article. I hope you found something that can help you in some way!