This one is for all of you students out there – whether you’re still in high school or already off studying at uni or college! As a student myself, I can relate on a personal level to the struggles of staying organised and productive all the time. However, I’ve experimented with some study (or, if you’re not yet a uni/college student, school) related spreads in my bullet journal, and today, I’d like to introduce you to four of them, in order to hopefully make your everyday student’s duties a bit easier.
1. Semester Overview
A spread which I like to set up as soon as I know what classes I’ll have for the semester, and before classes actually start, is an overview spread. The central aspect of this spread is in my case usually my timetable for the semester. Another helpful feature I like to add to this spread is a section for all of my assignments, deadlines and exams. A little extra I like to add to my overview spread from time to time (usually at the beginning of a new academic year) are my academic goals for the term. That way, I see them actually written down every time I go back to my overview spread, which keeps them more present on my mind. In the end, you can add anything which seems helpful to have in an overview spread and leave everything out that doesn’t seem helpful to you.
2. Study Plan
Another spread that has truly helped me staying organised and on top of my studying is a study plan. For this purpose, I usually create a table with all classes I need to study for in the columns and with one row per week (up till the week the actual exam takes place). That way, I can easily split up which topics of a certain class I study in which week leading up to the exam. Essentially, how this works is that writing everything down like this makes me hold myself accountable for actually getting my studying done. Furthermore, it also makes the whole study process seem more manageable since you get to study in portions (which also gets reflected in the table), rather than doing everything at once.
3. Assignment Planner
The probably most specific spread on this list is an assignment plan. So far, I’ve created such a spread for two papers I had to write (one of them was my Bachelor thesis), and both times, I found it to be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to time management. This spread helps me a lot with staying organised and on top of everything I still needed to do for my paper. Depending on the type of assignment you need to get done, on its complexity and lastly of course on your personal preferences, you can add various different elements to such an assignment plan. I few things I like to add are:
- due date
- research questions
- points to discuss
- structure
- writing schedule
- relevant literature
4. Productivity Tracker
Last but most certainly not least, I found that tracking my productivity helped me a lot with motivating (and maybe even pushing myself a bit) to be productive. On the other hand, keeping such a tracker allows you to analyze in retro-perspective on which days I’ve been more productive than on others. Together with other habits you might track, this step hopefully gives us an idea of what we need to do in order to be more productive. What I mean by this is that maybe you notice after tracking your productivity for a while, that you were more productive on those days on which you worked out first thing in the morning, compared to the days you didn’t do so? Discovering patterns like the one in this example can actually help you establish a routine, which in the end effect hopefully gets you to be more productive.
But – now that we’ve established why tracking your productivity might help you with being more productive in the future – there might be still another burning question on your mind. You might be wondering, “but Stephanie, how do I measure productivity?”, a question I’ve got pretty much every time that I’ve posted a picture of one of my productivity trackers on Instagram so far – and, admittedly, a good one. At first, I tried tracking productivity based on my subjective feeling of how productive my day had been. The scale I used varied from ranging from “- – -” (very unproductive) to “+ + +” (very productive) to being a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 being very unproductive and 5 being very productive). Currently, however, I’m tracking my productivity in hours that I’ve been productive. As you can tell, there are various different ways to track, and not every way might be working for everyone. My advise is to play around with it: change everything about a tracker which you feel isn’t working for you (anymore), and try other options, until you find one that feels right and works for you.
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