3 Tips to Handle Your Fulltime Course Load

By Nick Nerov, SchoolFinder.com

It’s the first month of the semester and there is so much to do with so little time. Clubs, friends, extracurricular work and of course… the fulltime course load. At times it might seem that your semester is like a hydra, finish one assignment and three more things get added to your to do list. The end result is you sitting at your desk without a clue of how you will ever persevere through this. But wait! Not knowing how to do something is all that’s separating you from complete chaos and success. Here are the three tips to take control of this monster:

1. Getting down to it First things first, we need a complete list of everything you need to get done. This will include school work, employment, clubs, ect. In this first step it’s important to think about all of your responsibilities, no matter how medial they seem, and just make a list of them. We would suggest going through it section by section. For example, start with school and write down everything on your to do list that is school related. Then move on the next section and so on.

2. Pareto Principle You must have heard this one before, “roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”. To put that in perspective, roughly 80% of your grade comes from 20% of the curriculum. Another way to put it is to say that 80% of your workload comes from 20% of your tasks. So what? Well, now that we have a full list of things you need to get done, it’s time for some critical analysis to determine what 20% of the tasks before you are responsible for 80% of the weight. There are many ways to do it but we would suggest going through each task and marking it either as “Urgent/Not Urgent” and “Important/Not Important”. Each task should have 2 markings next to it when you’re done.

3. The Eisenhower Decision Matrix At this point you might think “gee, I did all this writing and I’m still not comforted by how much work is ahead of me”. Well, this is where the third step of this equations ties the knot on this seemingly untameable monster. Eisenhower matrix is a 2 x 2 matrix with 4 squares. Title at the top are “Important” and “Not Important”. The titles along the left side read “Urgent” and “Not Urgent”. This is where you will slot your tasks to attain maximum visual organization. You can now tell what is urgent and important and what really doesn’t seem to matter all that much. A quick Google search will provide further examples of what it looks like and how to use it.