losing track of what you’re doing now, what needs to be done next, and what’s most important for tomorrow and next week. This is the time to create a calendar for the rest of the semester. Not just a daily list of Stuff To Do, but a full calendar that will take you right through the middle of May.
You can print a calendar one month at a time at https://print-a-calendar.com/. If you’re feeling stressed out because you need to get so many things done, then you should definitely print off April and May. Pick a version that doesn’t have a lot of clutter and has as much room to
write as possible. Then sit down for ten minutes and put all your academic commitments into that calendar. Put in all the due dates for everything.
Now add all the other important commitments in your life, perhaps in a different color. Does your child have a doctor’s appointment? Put that in. Have you got a meeting for your church group? Add that. Anything out of the ordinary routine, anything that you might forget about, any commitment that you must remember – put that into your monthly calendar.
Now that you’ve laid out your commitments for the month so that you can see everything properly, take a good look. If your grades in any class aren’t what you would prefer, then you’ll need to decide how to handle the class for the rest of the semester. The first thing to do is put more or better study time for that class into your schedule.
If you haven’t been studying, find places in your schedule to fit that in. If you’re going to be sitting in a waiting room (or your car) at the doctor’s office, that’s a great time to read a chapter of American History or run through a set of flashcards for Med Terms or watch a YouTube video about protein synthesis for General Biology. If lectures are online, you can probably prop your phone on the windowsill and watch them while you wash dishes. If lectures are delivered in the classroom, you can probably get your instructor’s permission to record them and then listen to the lecture again while folding laundry or walking the dog or driving. If you know you’re having trouble because you haven’t had time to study enough, be creative!
If you have been studying, but your efforts haven’t been paying off, or if you just don’t know how to tackle the material effectively, an EXCEL tutor would be glad to discuss your assignments and help you break your studying into approachable, manageable tasks that you can then add to your calendar. That will give you a much better idea how to handle any challenging class. Adding specific, well-defined study tasks to your calendar is the single best way to make sure you do indeed study, and that you study on a schedule that will keep the work from piling up into an overwhelming mountain that threatens to topple down on top of you. If you’ve tended to get behind with your work, this is the technique that will help you most to keep up and succeed in your classes.
But you might wonder why a paper calendar, instead of just using the app on your phone. If the app works for you, great, but there are many reasons why using a paper calendar works better for a lot of people. The primary reason is that there are no extra distractions with a paper calendar. It's just a calendar, with no social media or entertainment or other distractions. Additionally, there are some studies that show writing the tasks down make us both more likely to remember them and more committed to completing them.
So, if you’ve been feeling stressed about your classes now that we’re heading into the home stretch of the semester – print a calendar, lay out the commitments you need to meet, and fit your classes into your life in a way that lets you manage both!
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