The first week of a new semester- dubbed “Sylly Week”- brings students huge packets of information that they, a day later, promptly throw away. This year, I experienced not one, but five friends gripe about having missed an assignment that was not posted on Canvas in the first two weeks of school. They all complain about having to read the super-long syllabus their teachers gave them, and either just skim it or don’t open it at all.

The syllabus contains information that is seemingly not useful at all to some students: mandatory non-discrimination paragraphs, course descriptions, and academic integrity statements. I understand that it’s exhausting to read. However, there is one part of the syllabus that, if utilized correctly, will only need you to open the packet once and prevent the mistakes that cause missing assignment deadlines: the assignment schedule.

You don’t need to open each syllabi every night in order to check which assignments are due for your classes. Why do everything manually when you can have a computer do it for you?

Microsoft Excel (and alternatives) come in handy in order to streamline your assignment due dates. Here’s a tutorial:

Open a new excel workbook. Create columns for ASSIGNMENT NAME, DUE DATE, and CLASS. Open those pesky packets just one time, and fill in all of the information for the whole semester. Yes, all of it. You know you’re not going to remember to update it in the middle of April. Then, do the same thing for the entire syllabus assignment list for the rest of your classes. It took me around 45 minutes of plugging in values to the spreadsheet, but it’s worth saving your grade later. Finally, select all of the values (including the header), press Home > Styles > Format as Table. The headers should now have little arrow boxes in their cells. Click on the arrow box for your DUE DATE column, and select “sort oldest to newest”.

Then, you never have to open your syllabus, and never have to miss an assignment due date, ever again.

There are alternatives to Excel that are popularly used. You, of course, have the opportunity to be a caveman and write them all out by hand. You can also use Notion (an online life-organizing tool I’ll talk more in-depth about later) and use a template to put the same task list there.

Using Notion or Excel, you can set up checklist boxes/cells in order to remove items that have already been completed to the bottom of the page (check out this link to do it in Excel). Talk about efficiency!

Trying online organization tools can only help, not hurt. If you’re stuck with a stack of papers and can’t understand why everyone is so on-top of due dates, give it a try. If not, let me know how you organize your life, and comment your methods below.