Staying Organized

Hello, beautiful humans.

It’s that time in the semester when I have big, end-of-the-year papers hanging over my head. All told, before I graduate on May 13, I will have completed: three essays, two presentations, one take home final, and one regular final.

On top of which, I’m training for a marathon, which is now less than three months away.

How on earth do I keep from losing my mind, you ask? Or maybe you didn’t but please, go with it.

The answer is organization.

This is my planner:

I’m a little in love with it because it has both whole months and weekly inserts. On the monthly page, I write all the due dates for major projects I have. Here’s April:

I also write other events in here, like my friend Shelby’s birthday, and my long training runs.

Here’s a completed week:

I block out the time for each class with a specific color. On Monday/Wednesday/Friday I have Contemporary American History (HIST 418) which I color-coded red. After I finish the class, I color in the block. I also write homework for that class in red and when I complete it, I check it off.

My runs and other workouts are written in dark blue. Up here I have my Monday run as 4 miles and my Tuesday run as 3 miles. I also have a back and bis workout written in for Tuesday.

Now here’s how part of this week looks:

It’s a pretty busy week when all of my homework is some form of ‘Write paper.’ I also try to estimate how long it will take to do my long run. In this case, I predict my twelve mile run will take about 2 hours. That’s helpful for when I have to decide when to get up on Saturdays.

I didn’t use to plan everything out quite this much. Usually I could get by with just writing due dates down and checking to make sure I wasn’t falling behind. But senior year of college called for me to step it up a notch.

I’ve found having such a detailed plan for each week helps keep me from worrying about whether I’m going to get everything done on time. I have enough stress in my life (like the history paper I’m currently procrastinating on by writing this blog post) without worrying about forgetting something.

I hope this helped give you some ideas for how to stay organized if you’ve got a busy life and want to work in training of any kind without sacrificing in other areas.

Until next time,

Elizabeth