How to Get Things Done In College: Moving Beyond (Just Calendars)

As a college student, there are many responsibilities and opportunities competing for your attention. How do you manage it all? In another addition to his series “How to Get Things Done in College,” Matt Perman explains that calendars, while helpful, fall short in helping you manage your goals.

Sometimes utilizing your calendar well is seen as the essence of good time management. While calendars are crucial for staying organized and getting things done, they are not enough.

The reason is that there are lots of tasks to do that do not fit well on a calendar. Here are two examples.
Why Calendars Are Not Sufficient
First, some tasks are so small and numerous that it is a pain to put them on your calendar. You don’t know what order you are going to do them in and you don’t totally know how long they are going to take; you may not even have a specific deadline on them. Rather, you just need to get them done as soon as possible. Trying to organize them on your calendar would create a lot of unnecessary work–and re-work when you don’t get them done at the time you planned.

Second, there are some longer tasks where we just don’t know where they are going to fit in our schedule. We know we need to do them soon, but we aren’t exactly sure when will be best. We want to stay alert to the best opportunity to take care of them, while still having a place to park them so we don’t forget about them.

So, how do you handle these tasks that don’t work well with your calendar? That’s what a next action list is for. A next action list is like a to-do list, but a bit more sophisticated. To make a next action list work, you need to know three things.
How to Make Next Action Lists Work
First, if something needs to be done at a specific time, then put it on your calendar–not on your next action. That’s what your calendar is actually for–things that need to be done at a certain time. It’s OK to put a task on your calendar if you need to. But if you do put it on your calendar, you need to make sure and actually do it at that time. If you treat your calendar as a list of things you “might” do at a certain time, it loses much of it’s value. Your calendar should usually represent your hard landscape for the day.

Second, state the actual next physical action you need to take, not an ambiguous word or phrase that you will just have to spend time deciphering when you look at your list. For example, don’t write “chapter 5.” Write “read chapter 5 in economics textbook.” Don’t write, “Jim.” Write, “email Jim about time to get together to study.”

Third, organize your next action list according to your main roles or responsibilities. If you have been following along in this series, you’ll recall this is what we discussed in the last post. If you listed your roles and responsibilities, you can then use those as a guide for how you organize your next action list. Here is one example, with each class serving as a grouping and then some other key responsibilities

Macroeconomics
– Read chapter 5 in the textbook
– Order Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics at Amazon because it is great

Introduction to Marketing
– Write first draft of the marketing plan assignment
– Read chapter 1 of Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow

Principles of Biblical Interpretation
– Revise essay on interpreting the parables
– Email professor Fred for his thoughts on multi-perspectivalism
– Google Vern Poythress article on “the divine meaning of Scripture”

Job Search
– Email career development to set up time to review my resume
– Look through the People List to identify a person to do an informational interview with
– Look through Amazon’s job postings at https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/

Work
[Whatever you have to do at work]

Errands
– Target: Get new dish towels, dish soap, interesting seltzer water, blueberry jelly, Himalayan pink salt, [etc.]

This is not everything there is to say about next action lists, but it’s a good start. Being able to add things to your list as they occur to you, and review it regularly to get those things done, is one of the most powerful productivity practices you can develop.