To be successful, you need to put graduate school first, always and every day. It is not worth your time or money if you cannot give it your full attention. The following items offer practical suggestions on how to organize yourself and your time for success.

First, I recommend that you acquire a hard copy planner to do semester, monthly, weekly, and daily planning. Yes really! I also keep an electronic version in case I do not have my planner physically handy. Being able to cross tasks off both a physical copy and an electronic copy is a mental nudge to recognize even the smallest successes!

For the semester:

Sit down with the syllabi for all of your classes. Add all class meetings, assignments, work hours, and other deadlines to your calendar.

Get a sense of the time commitment and energy needed for each class. Ask your professor how much time they expect you should spend each week on the course so that you know the approximate times it will take to complete all of your academic work.

Add to your semester schedule any personal or professional commitments such as work or travel. Note any times that are likely to be overbooked so that you can adjust your commitments now (such as by front-loading work on a particular project).

Take a few minutes now to write out your commitments for the semester:

• What is most important to accomplish?
• What is least important?
• What will I do if my commitments conflict?
• What will I not give up, no matter what?

At the start of each month:

Get a high-level view of what is coming that month.

Write out your goals and identify your rewards. Your goals should be small, precise, and manageable (google SMART goals if you need more guidance). Break down larger goals from the semester or year into smaller ones that you can accomplish in less than one month. Be sure to include self-care and relationships among your goals for the month. Rewards should be planned so that you can immediately reward your accomplishments.

Review your productivity from last month – did you accomplish your goals? What went well? What did not go so well? Do you need to revisit your semester priorities? How do you feel about your academic journey so far?

Set a calendar reminder to do this planning each month.

At the start of each week:

Review what is coming up that week. Block out times that you will work on each class or job, and include time for yourself and your relationships. Prepare a task list for items that must be accomplished and those tasks that would be good to accomplish (these often get bumped to later for me, but including them keeps me aware of my commitments).

Review your productivity from last week – did you accomplish your goals? If not, what needs to change this week?

Set a calendar reminder to do this planning each week.

At the start of each day:

Review what needs to be done that day. Ignore any other tasks or deadlines that are looming. Prioritize your task list for the day and immediately start work on the most important task first.

Take frequent breaks (at least once per hour) to move your body and give your brain a chance to relax.

Remember: we cannot truly multitask our learning – our brains can only focus on one thing at a time. Notice when you find yourself doing multiple things and ask yourself: what is the most important task to do at this moment? Do that one thing and nothing else.

Now some truth:

If you find yourself not sufficiently productive in any day, week, or month and routinely not meeting your goals – especially if you find yourself saying you just have to do more in less time, then… STOP! You are overcommitted — at the moment. You cannot do more with less. Burnout is real. I’ve been there; it’s awful. It has taken more than a year for me to recover from my latest burnout.

Before you get to that stage- consider: what can you cut out today, this week, this month? What is essential – right now – and what is not? What can you put off until later, or cut entirely, to make the time and mental space to be successful? Greg McKeown has an enlightening book on Essentialism that offers practical strategies for cutting back your insane to-do list or to-life list.

It is not failure to reassess and adopt new strategies. Learning is a journey. You might stumble and fall. Sometimes saying no and walking away from nonessential commitments are necessary strategies to preserving your mental health. There will always be another day to do those things AFTER you finish graduate school if they are still important to you.

For those perfectionists out there, remember that we always think we can get more done in a day, week, month, or year than we ever really do. Our brains lie to us and then beat us up for it. So try to be super pragmatic when doing your planning. As Jon Acuff argues in his book Finish, we should always cut our goals in half. Once we meet them we can set new goals! But if we set too lofty goals from the start, we might find ourselves defeated and demoralized when we naturally can’t meet them right away. Kara Lowentheil explains that this is why she advises we pick extraordinarily small goals for New Years Resolutions, so our lizard brain doesn’t object and get in our way as we seek to change. She also has some great suggestions in her Unf*uck Your Brain podcasts for how to get organized for success. I love her pragmatism.

Last, remember that you are human. Things that might seem great on paper may not work in reality for you. Don’t beat yourself up. I readjust my schedule every semester based on my commitments and goals but I don’t always get it right. So I try again. It doesn’t matter how often people tell me to do my academic writing first thing in the morning before anything else; It doesn’t work for me. So I have to keep working to find a time that does. Some weeks I’m better than others, that’s for sure. You will be too, and that’s ok! But let’s all give ourselves grace and practice self-compassion, which Brene Brown argues is the antidote to perfectionism in her book The Gifts of Imperfection.

Resources

Several of these strategies were highlighted in the Next 90 Challenge from the Hollis Co.

I highly recommend reading Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (2014).

I first learned about semester planning from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity: https://www.facultydiversity.org/. UD is an institutional member and students can register for free to get their resources — see link at the bottom of this page: https://sites.udel.edu/diversity/accountability-program/