Timeturner Required

However, are these superstitions or just a lack of confidence in my own abilities? Recently, I’ve been more and more convinced that it is a lack of confidence, but even though I acknowledge this as a bad thing or I do not attempt to change my way of thinking. My longstanding motto in regard to this is that it is better to be pleasantly surprised rather than unpleasantly disappointed - by removing my confidence I feel that I, in some way, am safeguarding or protecting my long-term mental health and aspirations. This probably isn’t healthy but it is what it is. 

I have been under extreme pressure this semester. I overloaded at university so as to graduate on time, I’ve been working a paid, part-time job that should be full time and trying to juggle two pretty intense volunteer positions as well as attempted to run 5 days a week. This is nothing compared to the academic pressure I have experienced. Quite literally my acceptance into Honours (or at least it seems that way to me) rests on one essay grade, which was horrible to write given a lack of direction and research to write about. (For non-Australians, Honours is an optional research year added to the end of a normal, three year degree, they are really competitive to get into, especially at the bigger and high-ranked universities). Knowing this only served to heighten by anxiety about it which was worsened by having to make a decision about whether or not to graduate before I receive its grade. If I don’t graduate and don’t get into honours I am truly and utterly stuck, however, if we are doing honours, my university prefers us to not graduate. I will not receive an honours offer until around graduation time. 

I’m writing this today because I received my marks for another essay and it was astoundingly high - I can’t quite believe it. I’m so happy and relieved that honestly I feel like crying and may do so when I get home and can let my hair down. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come but even as I typed that out I cringed - my superstitions are rearing their ugly head again, now it feels like I’m going to get a bad mark in the Essay Of Doom (in reality, I submitted it two weeks ago - there’s nothing I can do, say or think that will change its grade). 

I first write down a list of all assignments and exams, their worth and their due dates. The reason why I do this is because for each subject I need to check a different page and I like having it all down in front of me. 

As you can see, I write two different kinds of due dates. If the piece of assessment/ exam is due/ occurs in a tutorial then I write down the week of the semester that it occurs in. I only have one tutorial per subject per week so this information means more to me than just writing in a date. 

A lot of my assessment consists of essays which we submit online so for those I write the exact date and time that they’re due. 

Now that I’ve got everything on paper I create the skeleton of my excel doc.This is what takes a bit of time as I basically make a weekly calendar with all the assignments on the left hand side. After an assessment’s due date has passed I delete its row from the ‘future’ weekly sections. I like doing this because as I go through the semester I can slowly see my progress or at least less stuff to do! 

Next it the backwards planning part. I’m going to split this into three categories: essays, exams and misc (presentations). 

Essays

I’m in the last semester (and last week!) of my undergraduate degree which means I’ve got a pretty good idea about how I write essays. I’ll be making a separate post on it later on but my five main stages are planning, research, re-planning, writing, editing. I also have a pretty good estimate of around how long it takes me to complete each section. 

For example, for a 2,500 word research essay I know that I like to have around 10,000 words of ‘raw’ research before I finalise my plan and start writing. I know that to get that many words it takes me 2-3 days of solid reading or a week of intermittent reading. I also know how long it takes me to write a set number of words in each language (French and English). In English I can comfortably write 1,000-1,500 words in a day (if I’ve done enough prior-research) and that will take up the majority of the day. French has a slightly lower threshold, around 700-1,000. I then add in planning days (around four), editing days (around two) and contingency days (because I know I procrastinate!). I also know that writing an essay during semester (when I’ve got lots of other stuff on) will take me longer than during our exam period (during which I can lock myself in the library for a few days). Therefore, after sitting down and thinking about it I can say that it will take me approx. 18 days during the semester to go from start to finish for a 2,500 word research essay. 

I then work backwards from the due date and pencil in when I’d like to be able to do each section. As you’ll probably realise my ‘free’ days are Friday-Monday so that’s when I schedule in the majority of my work. I make any action that I want to be done on that day a bold/ dark colour and then for the days in between when I don’t plan on doing anything I make a lighter colour as I know there’s a possibility I may need to do catch-up work on it or it’ll just be in the back of my mind. 

The reason for colour-coding it this way is that I can see at a glance how many projects I have on the go at any given point and how many actual actions I will need to complete that day. The colours I use match up with the colours in my Hobonichi/ bullet journal!

Exams

These are a bit more difficult as I may not know exactly what I need to know until a week before. This is important for me as I’m a rote learner who basically memorises every piece of knowledge that I need to know for an exam. (My record is 12 pages of biology memorised in one night!). 

Until I know the format of the exam my actions are limited. I can make sure that I’m up to date with all the material that will be tested. I also have a pretty standard way of memorisation: I write everything I need to know out in a separate revision book and then create flashcards from that. I write the information out over and over, slowly learning it off by heart and do the same for the flashcards but I say them (either out loud or in my head). Therefore, I know that roughly I’ll need a day for the creation of my revision book, a day for the creation of flashcards and a day at the end of each week to make sure that my notes are up to date. 

The most important thing is this assessment schedule is tweak-able, especially for things like exams. I try not to tweak essays as that allows me to procrastinate and then tweak the schedule to reflect that but for exams if I’ve allocated for too much or way to little time to one aspect (usually memorisation) I can tweak that easily. 

Misc (usually presentations) 

As you can see I have one presentation this semester. In week four I found out it was going to be on the book ‘Les Liaisons Dangeureuses’ (Dangerous Liaisons) and would be about the character Valmont. Therefore, I knew that I would have to read and annotate the book, do you work thinking about Valmont and then finally write the presentation and create the powerpoint. Easily the most onerous and time-consuming part was having to read the book (in my third language!) and I knew the presentation itself would be fairly easy to pull together. 

Although you can see that I’ve schedule specific reading days and broken the book into chapters (it’s comprised of 175 letters), my reading was more evenly spread out during the week. What I’d do at the beginning of each week was work out exactly how many pages I had scheduled to read that week and then divide it by 7 days. 

Putting it all together

Once I’ve put it all together I can see if I’ve scheduled too much for one day or one week. For example, while I know I can write 1,250 words in English and 800 words in French, I know that I can’t write all of that in one day. 

Then every week I check my schedule to see what I need to get done and what I’ve already allocated for a specific day and transfer that information to my Hobonichi Weeks. 

I really hope this has helped some people visualise or get a grip on their own assignment planning! I’m pretty sure I’ve covered everything but if I haven’t make a comment or send me a message and I’ll definitely try to explain in more detail!

This is part of a series of posts to show how I plan for the busy life I lead!

How I Plan: An Overview

How I Plan: An Overview (video)

How I Plan: my bullet journal as a study tool

How I Plan: University Assignments

When starting a new semester I first set up a title page - I try to make this a bit arty and I list my colour there as well. Each subject has a different colour. My reasoning for this is it’s important to be able to differentiate what subject it is that I need to work on, writing out ‘Week 11 Reading - Origins of the Novel’ takes a lot more time than just being able to write out ‘wk 11 reading’ in a certain colour. It also gives me a good overview of how balanced my day is looking - I get bored if I’m working not the same subject for a long period of time so I try to work on at least two subjects per day.

In the colour code I also include colours for all my different commitments. Sometimes people ask if I have a hard time keeping track of all the colours but after a couple of days they’re easy for me to remember - especially as some colours carry on over semesters (French has been purple since I was 13!)

The next page is usually an Attendance Tracker

At my university we have a minimum attendance for our tutorials (75-80%). This allows me to track which ones I have attended. I normally allow myself to skip one per semester. I was also thinking of being able to track whether I’ve completed notes for a class (eg. if I was in attendance I’ve probably done the notes) but this didn’t really work out and I think next year I’ll have a separate reading/ notes tracker. 

After the Attendance Tracker I normally include a weekly schedule. However, I’m really superstitious about filling it out because I know that I’ll never be able to follow it. This is definitely something I’d like to work on for next year. I don’t need a specific schedule (ie. Making History reading Sunday 8am-10am) but having blocks laid out for study, cooking, work etc would be nice.

100 Days of Productivity

This is a great idea - though since about August I’ve forgotten to track it! The concept behind 100 days of productivity is simple: every day you do something productive that takes you one step closer to your goal/s. On tumblr you’re also meant to post a picture every day of something productive. I definitely want to re-start this, it’s a good and visual way to motivate me.

Assignment Schedule

This is such a biggy that I’m pretty sure I’ll end up making a whole post for it. (Edit: the post is here!) At the beginning of every semester I backwards plan all the assignments and exams that I have onto an excel sheet. Then, I transcribe the to-dos for each day/ week on a weekly basis into my weekly spread (which is currently housed in my undated midori weekly insert).

 I know this strictly isn’t bullet journaling but given it uses the same colour-code and legend as my bump and is arguably the most helpful thing I do for myself every semester it is definitely worth a mention!

Reading Tracker

This semester I’ve had to read quite a few novels in French which has been an interesting, and sometimes welcome challenge. To help me track my reading and motivate me I’ve made trackers for it in my bullet journal. The tracker depends on the kind of book, for Les Liaisons Dangereuses which is comprised of 175 letters I have simply tracked each letter and coloured in a box when I’ve read it.

For Mon Pays La France it was divided into typical chapters. Because I had to create my own deadline for this (it’s pre-thesis reading) I decided to aim to read 10-20 pages per day and that’s what I broke it down into on the right-hand side column. I then matched up the chapters on the left-hand side column (rounded to 10 pages) so I could see my progress that way and wrote the chapter numbers in between. 

Revision

I also track my revision for the rare exams that I have. For French Translation we have an exam every four weeks where we’re tested on theory, idiomatic expressions as well as our translation skills. For each exam I make a separate revision book where I write out each item I need to know until I can write it perfectly. I then create flashcards and say each thing until I can say it perfectly. I use a spread to track my progress. Every time I write or say a point/ definition/ thing correctly I give myself a tick. It really helps me to see at a glance which things I need to work harder on/ repeat more often.

There’s one last thing that I definitely want to mention and that’s Forest. Forest is a productivity app either on your phone or as a chrome extension. When active on your phone it blocks you from using anything on your phone otherwise you’ll kill the tree that you’re growing. On chrome you can specify certain sites for it to block. On both you can change the time it’s active for and once you’ve ‘planted’ enough virtual trees you can choose to trade your points for a real tree to be planted! I track my Forest hours in my hobonichi with one square representing 30 minutes of that day that I’ve used the app. It adds a bit of art to it as well as gives me more motivation to use the app! 

I hope you found this helpful or gave you ideas on how you can make your bullet journal more productive for you and your study!

This is part of a series of posts to show how I plan for the busy life I lead!

How I Plan: An Overview

How I Plan: An Overview (video)

How I Plan: my bullet journal as a study tool

How I Plan: University Assignments