GYST: Time Man­age­ment and Pro­duc­tiv­ity

Col­lege is stress­ful. We all know this. We con­stantly have new as­sign­ments and tasks, tests to study for, prac­tices to go to. Get­ting in con­trol of our habits and our daily rou­tines can have a huge im­pact on our qual­ity of life. Wel­come to GYST. It’s time to Get Your Stuff To­gether. This short se­ries of ar­ti­cles will fo­cus on time man­age­ment and pro­duc­tiv­ity, men­tal health and stress, and self-care and emo­tional health. In this se­ries, we are go­ing to talk about the prac­ti­cal ways you can re­al­is­ti­cally and prac­ti­cally im­prove your daily life, men­tal health, and emo­tional health. 

We’ve all been there. It’s 5 p.m. You have a do list with 17 things on it from this morn­ing. You told your­self that you were go­ing to get it all done to­day, but then, things hap­pened. Your friend asked if you wanted to go get lunch to­gether, you took a nap, there was an episode of some­thing on Net­flix that you wanted to watch. Be­fore you know it, it’s 5 p.m., noth­ing on your to-do list is done, and now you’re ei­ther go­ing to be up late try­ing to get as much done as pos­si­ble or you’re just not go­ing to get it all done.  

Time man­age­ment and get­ting things done on time is an im­por­tant part of col­lege. As much as we all wish that was­n’t the case, it’s prepar­ing us for our fu­ture ca­reers and jobs. (Oh no, you mean to tell me that all the teach­ers who have told me that be­ing re­spon­si­ble is im­por­tant were right?) Get­ting things done well and on time can re­move a huge amount of stress from our lives. In this ar­ti­cle, we’re go­ing to look at some strate­gies we can im­ple­ment to do just that. 

How to Get Your Stuff To­gether and Get More Things Done

• Set Self Rules (right now!)
• Use an MIT sys­tem (every day)
• Ditch the To-Do List (kinda)

Set Self-Rules

Im­ple­ment­ing rules might seem like the far­thest thing from fun that you can think of, but there are proven ben­e­fits to set­ting rules for your­self and fol­low­ing them. I’m not talk­ing about rules like “go to the gym” or “drink more wa­ter.” Those are more goals than ac­tual rules, and they won’t help you ac­tu­ally get things done. Matt D’Avella, a min­i­mal­ist film di­rec­tor, pod­caster, and Youtu­ber, cre­ated a rule for him­self to make him­self go to the gym, and it worked. The Two Day Rule meant that he could­n’t take more than one day off from the gym back-to-back. If he skipped Wednes­day, he had to go on Thurs­day. No ques­tions asked. For a stu­dent at Maryville, this might look like set­ting a two-day rule on sleep­ing in or get­ting to bed on time. Drink­ing enough wa­ter, go­ing to the gym, or spend­ing a set amount of time do­ing home­work each day are also great op­tions. Set­ting pro­duc­tiv­ity rules can help you cre­ate a sys­tem of re­spon­si­bil­ity and self-man­age­ment. They might not sound glam­orous and ex­cit­ing, but they work. And hey, is­n’t that the goal here? 

Set MIT’s

Most of us use to-do lists to keep track of every­thing we have…well, to do. Here’s the thing though, how of­ten do you look at your to-do list of 17 things and go take a nap or watch Net­flix? It’s just too easy to get over­whelmed by all of the things we have to get done. Even when we’re mo­ti­vated to work on that list, there’s no way we can fin­ish it. Sorry, brain, no dopamine for you to­day, we did­n’t fin­ish all 149 things we had to do. 

Hu­mans have some­thing called “The Plan­ning Fal­lacy.” The Plan­ning Fal­lacy is where hu­mans un­der­es­ti­mate the amount of time a task will take and show a clear op­ti­mism bias to how much we can re­al­is­ti­cally do in a day. In sim­pler terms, we as­sume that the things on our list will take less time than they will, so we plan on do­ing an un­re­al­is­tic amount of work in a day. Again, this is­n’t great for the dopamine lev­els in our chem­i­cally-de­pen­dent brains that tell us that life is bor­ing when we don’t have any dopamine in the im­me­di­ate vicin­ity. 

The so­lu­tion to this is min­i­mal­is­tic. Lit­er­ally, by de­f­i­n­i­tion. In­stead of hav­ing lit­er­ally every pos­si­ble thing you need to get done on your to-do list, min­i­mize that crap down to 3 things each day. Three of the most im­por­tant things that need to get done. Your MIT’s (Most Im­por­tant Things) should be what gets done first. If your three MIT’s are home­work as­sign­ments, do­ing dishes can wait (and so can Net­flix, you’re not fool­ing any­one with hav­ing Net­flix on “in the back­ground” trick.) Sa­dia from Pick Up Limes dis­cusses MIT’s in one of her videos: you can watch it here. Macken­zie Steiner, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Maryville, said that keep­ing an MIT sys­tem helps her stay or­ga­nized. “My to-do list was huge—I lit­er­ally never got it com­pletely done. Do­ing MIT’s changed how of­ten I ac­tu­ally got every­thing done in a day.”

Set­ting goals that are doable will make you feel more ac­com­plished and give you more dopamine through­out the day. 

Ditch the To – Do List (Kinda)

Or­ga­ni­za­tion can make or break a stu­dent. Most Im­por­tant Tasks are only use­ful if you know where you put that stu­pid sticky note that you wrote them down on! A sim­ple list is­n’t go­ing to be much help to you if its so dis­or­ga­nized you can’t use it (or if you can’t find it.) There are many dif­fer­ent or­ga­ni­za­tion sys­tems out there to­day, but plan­ners and jour­nals are some of the most ver­sa­tile and pop­u­lar out there these days. Mary Boser, a third year com­mu­ni­ca­tions ma­jor at Maryville, uses a plan­ner every week to help her keep track of as­sign­ments: “Sun­day night, I al­ways take 15 min­utes to sit down with my plan­ner and look at my week. This way, I’m re­minded of any up­com­ing com­mit­ments or as­sign­ments I have and make sure I’m pre­pared for them.” A pop­u­lar al­ter­na­tive to hav­ing a plan­ner is bul­let jour­nal­ing. 

You may have heard of bul­let jour­nal­ing al­ready, but let’s talk about it. Bul­let jour­nal­ing is an ana­log sys­tem—a way to keep things in line and or­ga­nized in a phys­i­cal (or dig­i­tal) way. It’s for track­ing habits, sched­ules, tasks that need to be com­plete. It’s meant to be a sys­tem that can be cus­tomized—to be all things to all peo­ple. You can learn more from the founder of the bul­let jour­nal sys­tem here. It can be com­pli­cated and beau­ti­ful like Aman­daRach­Lee, or sim­ple and pow­er­fully ef­fec­tive like Nathaniel Drew. No mat­ter how you choose to im­ple­ment the sys­tem, it might be the tool that you’ve needed to get and stay or­ga­nized and pro­duc­tive. 

Your Next Steps

Col­lege is stress­ful, but it does­n’t nec­es­sar­ily have to be. By plan­ning ahead ei­ther with a plan­ner or a bul­let jour­nal, con­dens­ing your to-do list into man­age­able MIT’s, and set­ting some self-rules to keep every­thing in check, you can man­age your time ef­fec­tively and ef­fi­ciently. By do­ing this, you can start to min­i­mize stress and have more time for the fun things.

Re­sources