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College students do a lot of assignments each week. I recently counted how many pages I will be writing this semester—about 125— it’s a lot of content. 

It’s only doable because each assignment is small. But they can compound if you fall behind. 

The problem is, staying ahead is exhausting. It requires you to keep track of everything, but if you miss anything, you’re in a bad place again. So how do you keep track of everything without giving yourself a terrible headache?

Make it visible. 

By that, I mean put all your assignments in one place where you can see them. Use your syllabi. Writing them down takes an hour or two, but it will save time in the future. 

Most students don’t keep their due dates in one place. This creates a problem where you have to look at every syllabus any time you want to see what’s due. 

It doesn’t really matter what system you use—calendar, Kanban board, checklist—so long as you have a cohesive system. I find a mix of physical and digital calendar works for my current needs. I use a physical wall calendar for class due dates and a digital calendar for my non-class schedule. 

Recently, I’ve been trying an app called Things. I want a way to track small tasks, but nothing seems to work as well as a Kanban Board does. 

Here is an example of what I used for homeschool. But find what works for you and even if you find a good system—keep experimenting. 

It can be hard to cut out the time to make a wall calendar—with so many seemingly more pressing tasks.

I couldn’t find time to make my calendar until three weeks into the semester. Without it, I was surprised by how much time I actually spent doing important tasks. More of my time was spent stressing about assignments, not doing them. When I made my tasks visible, I didn’t have to keep track in my head anymore. I could trust my calendar. 

Putting everything in one place takes a small time commitment, but the time saved is exponential. 

Try it. You might be surprised.

 

Introduction

Every college student knows the stress of an upcoming deadline. Most students could describe a time when they failed or nearly failed to turn in an assignment. Last semester, I put off a paper until the day it was due. I got it done, but I finished it eight minutes before the deadline.

I hadn’t procrastinated, I worked hard, and somehow it wasn’t enough. I didn’t have time to rest, but I also didn’t have time to finish my paper. And this happens to college students all the time. So what’s the problem? 

There is too much to do. You are going to run out of time, guaranteed. No matter how hard you work, how much you “hustle,” you can’t do everything. 

That’s the bad news. 

The good news is this: even though it feels like everything carries equal importance—it doesn’t. But how do you decide what not to do? 

It’s called 80/20

The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle was first popularized by Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. He discovered that 80 percent of Italian landholdings were owned by 20 percent of the population. And it turns out, the 80/20 rule applies to more than just Italian real estate. The 80/20 rule applies to most things, from sports to taxes to music, it seems to be universal. 

The 80/20 curve looks like this, where R is results and E is effort. It’s not linear. Twice the work doesn’t get you twice the results. The initial 20 percent of the effort gives 80 percent of the improvement. This is usually called diminishing returns. Once you reach 80 percent results, it takes exponentially more effort to progress. 

This is good. We get most of our results from just a few things. The improvement from 60-100 percent effort is minimal, so that stuff matters far less. At some point—working really hard gets you almost nothing. 

Applying 80/20 at School

You probably shouldn’t aim for 80 percent on your homework unless you’re happy with a B minus, but it doesn’t take 100 percent effort to get an A.

Choose what you won’t do. off. Ignore something that costs 1 percent of your grade so you don’t lose 15 percent when you run out of time. Save your best energy for what’s most important. 

I have a class where we read and discuss ancient literature. My professors prefer that I take notes inside the books, but they don’t require it. I only lose a small amount of comprehension by not taking notes, but I read about three times faster. So I stopped taking notes in my books. My grade is unaffected and I spend much less time doing homework.  

Here I can reasonably assume that taking notes falls under the 80 percent effort/20 percent value. But it might not be the same for everyone and it’s not the same for every class. With some professors, I find I remember lectures much better if I take notes by hand, with others it’s the opposite. 

And So

Experiment. Find what’s essential in each class and focus on that. Ignore the rest. 

Don’t worry—if you have time you can circle back. But start by doing what affects your grade most instead of spending time on stuff that doesn’t. Choose what you won’t do so that you can focus on the high-value stuff.

 

When I started college last year, it surprised me how differently I approached school than my peers. For example, when my classmates and I had a large paper due, with 30 percent of our grade on the line. I finished the paper with plenty of time to spare. Many of my peers pulled all-nighters. 

I was confused. These were all brilliant students—who I often felt intimidated by—scraping past the deadline. I realized then that there is a gap. That there are intelligent and hardworking students worldwide, who find themselves struggling to keep up. Not for lack of intelligence or drive, but because they lack effective systems—systems that high-school generally fails to teach.

I have been lucky. I have learned from people who do this stuff really well. And though I certainly haven’t figured it all out and my system isn’t perfect, I’m experimenting and discovering new ways to do things. I want to share what I have found to work at college so far as well as my ongoing experiments. College can be hard. I hope I can make it a little bit easier.