As school starts back up again and everyone is forced to get back in the swing of things, figuring out how to do so can be quite a daunting task. Whether you have twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four class credits, whether you work five, fifteen, or thirty hours a week–figuring out how to manage your time is something that is not only incredibly difficult but also fundamentally important in ensuring a successful semester with minimal stress. With this in mind, I’ve decided to make my life hack blog debut themed around setting yourself up for success in the new semester with time management hacks! Continue reading to learn my tricks to an organized life.

Photo By ShotAtLife.org

This semester, I am enrolled in twenty-four credits and I work twenty-five to thirty hours a week, and I like to have a social life, so proper scheduling is vital to ensure that I don’t explode. The biggest part of my organizational life is founded upon the use of Google Calendar for scheduling my time throughout each week. Though my method may be a bit excessive to some, it is something that has made my life much simpler. GCal has many functions that make scheduling easy and pain-free and is the best online calendar that I have found thus far. Here’s what I do with GCal:

Photo by Courtney McDowell

Every semester, I make a calendar for each of my classes, and then I have several indefinite calendars that I use–one for work, one for activities, one for workouts, one for birthdays and holidays. From that point, I put everything that I do into my calendar. The way that I do things for school is a little different than the way that I do everything else, so I’ll split up my explanation.

Photo by Courtney McDowell

For non-school things, I simply make a calendar event and input what I will be doing when I will be doing it. For work stuff that I need to do, I attach the files that I need to use for each particular task so that everything is in one place. One great thing about GCal is that you can set up a reoccurring event, and that’s helpful because I have lots of things that I do every week or every other week, so I make one calendar event, and I can make it automatically occur every week or month or whatever the task requires. For example, every Thursday, I send out an email to my staff with their schedules. I put in one Thursday event that says “Email Staff” and I’m reminded every week.

That feature is also helpful for school things. I put in “RCL” on the first Monday of the semester, and have it repeat every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the semester in my RCL calendar, and my semester is set. From that point, I go through each syllabus and input every assignment and due date into each class’s calendar so that I have one place where every assignment, quiz, and exam is. From that point, as I go through my semester, I look at my upcoming week and plan out when I want to study for something or work on each particular assignment and then go ahead and put that right into my calendar as well. This way, I can take big projects and break them up in my calendar over a one or two week period to that I don’t lose my mind! Yay!

If you have any questions about GCal or time management, feel free to comment below!

Over and Out.

-Courtney