How to: Stay Organized

Hello lovelies!

Today I thought I would sit down and chat about a few things that I have learned in school and university that will keep you organized throughout the semester.

1. Get a good Planner

The biggest tip I have is to use a planner. For me, I always write down when my tests are, certain projects I have to do, general appointments for doctors, homework, basically anything important that should not be forgotten.

I personally struggle to find the perfect planner for me, I am just extremely picky when it comes to my planners. I want the cover design to be cute, I want the inside layout to look a certain way, it shouldn't be expensive and it should have all the important pages in instead of being really big just because there is so many pages for birthdays, address, holidays, holidays in all different kinds of countries, a map, random text nobody ever reads, pages about you to fill in.. just that kind of stuff nobody really needs/wants in a planner. So of course I struggle to find a good one, so I was incredibly happy when I found out about this site called Mein-Taschenkalender where you can create your own planner.

You can besically design the whole thing. You get to choose the front and back cover, the colour, the colour of the inside layout, the design of the inside layout, you get to add time stamps for the days, or a weather chart, a to-do list, football planner, workout chart, there is so much to choose from. Also you get to choose what extra pages you want to have so for example a calendar for 2016/2017 or an address book, maybe you want a time table.. whatever you wish for.

I absolutely love this website and there's a few different sizes and kinds of planners to choose from as well so you can get a basic A5 planner or maybe you prefer it to be smaller, you can go for A6, or you want it more square, then there's also a 15x14 planner size.

2. Take Notes

Always take notes in class. And also try to focus on the important stuff, do not try to write down every single word the teacher says, that's not going to help you with studying in the end. Listen carefully what you are being told, and write down what you think seems important (or what the teacher says is important).

It's a lot easier in the end when you sit down to study and have your own notes with important thing the teacher told you in class instead of sitting in front of your text book with hundreds of pages that you have to go through, finding out what may be important.

Which also leads me to the next tip:

3. Don't use more than 4 different Marker Shades

Stick with a maximum of 4 different colours when it comes to your text markers. If you use all different kinds of colours to mark the text in your books, you're going to get confused because it will just start to look messy and unorganized. It's not a colouring book for children - it's a text book.

What I like to do is keep the yellow marker for the actual text because it's the most subtle colour out of all markers which makes it a lot easier and comfortable for the eye to read later on (since most of the text you are going to highlight will be in this colour).

If there's something important in the text itself, I mark it orange. Orange, because it goes a lot better with the yellow surrounded text and is more subtle than pink, green or blue as well.

For headlines I will use a colour like green or pink, just so I can see immediately what the following text will be about.

I don't like to use blue because it's the darkest and closest colour to the black text so it's not really highlighting the text. It is prominent, but not highlighted as to where you look at it and can immediately see what the text says, it's a bit harder for the eye to read so I find it defeats the purpose of even highlighting the text.

For subheading I will use a different marker, so either pink or green, depending on what colour I used for the headline. So if I got my headline pink, I will use green for the subheading.

That's all you really need.

Stick to a colouring theme. Don't use pink for headlines on one chapter, go for the text in pink in the next chapter and for the subheading in the next. That as well kind of defeats the purpose of even highlighting in the first place. Your brain will get used to the colours and how they are used. So stick with one colour for each purpose and keep that theme for the entire book, and even your other books as well.

4. Stop waisting your time

Just study! I know it's not the most fun thing to do but if you keep waisting your time doing whatever, you're going to be stressed out the last couple of days before the test.

Same goes for doing your homework or presentations. If you come home, do your homework right away. It sounds aweful considering you just spent your day at school and then you should come home and do more school stuff.. but trust me, if you get it out of the way, you will feel much better and have time to relax or hang out with friends for the rest of the day.

Running out of time is never fun, so just stay on time with your stuff.

5. Plan your Studying

What I always found quite helpful was to organize and plan my studying. I would write down the days and the time on a piece of paper, including what chapters I wanted to study that day.

For example (Biology Class):

Monday - Sexual education & Cells
Tuesday - Evolution
Wednesday - Genetics
Thursday - Repeating the already studied
Friday - Digestion System & first 10 pages of DNA
Saturday - Study Break
Sunday - Repeating the already studied

Repeating is as important as the actual studying process, and so it taking a break from time to time. If you stay on track with your studying, you can afford a break on one or two days. If of course you kept waisting time and procrastinated, you won't be able to take any breaks and your brain is just going to explode. The brain does need it's time to relax and process what you just learned. So just feeding it with new information all the time will not fix everything in your brain for long. Take your time for repeating and study breaks, it's important, trust me.

I really hope this was somewhat helpful and if you'd want me to make a blogpost about how to study right and make it a lot easier, just let me know and I'll do that in the future!

xox,
Julia

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