Time Management: The Ideal Way to Remind Yourself
Junho Son
Disclaimers: This article is not sponsored.
High school, especially for those of you serious with your schoolwork, is often a time of burden both physically and psychologically. With countless quizzes, tests, and projects, we slack off from our ideal time management routine with even the smallest scheduling error. To make matters worse, almost every class seems to have a test on the same day. This leads to procrastination, especially its worst variant: passive procrastination. When I started KIS in grade 4, I’ve always had problems being productive. My teachers, as well as my peers, emphasized the importance of time management as if it was the solution to all of my problems; I am sure your experience mirrors that of mine. If you’re having trouble keeping up with all the work, you’re in the right place. Here’s how I learned how to manage my time efficiently.
Disregarding all the general, not-helpful solution of just better time management..., most time management strategies involve setting reminders for good cause. Unless you have a perfect photographic memory, there’s simply no way you’ll be able to remember all of your tasks perfectly. Even if you could, you’re better off using that brain storage for something else. So if you haven’t already, implementing an organized system of reminders should be one of your top priorities. Although you might not be able to escape the vortex of procrastinating, you can still regulate yourself from passive procrastination and utilize the benefits of active procrastination.
But how do you choose between all the different options? To make things black and white, there are 2 main mediums to organize your tasks: paper and digital.
Being a white piece of empty space, ready to be smeared upon, paper allows for creative organizational structure. As a user of paper todo-lists for for about 2 years, I can confidently tell you there’s nothing as malleable and flexible as a physical memos. Post-it style notes could be used to stick to objects you use the most such as your MacBook or your notebooks. This could be useful when remembering items that have a particular relationship with an item. For example, if you want to remind yourself to wipe your MacBook screen every morning, there's only a handful of other methods that could be as efficient as a small post-it note by your MacBook. Another benefit of choosing paper, if you choose to buy paper without any lines, is that it could provoke creativity in terms of the actual organization itself. Unlike template-based reminders, you could draw pictures, draw a timeline, scribble some notes, the possibilities are endless. Besides the visual appeal, personalizing your reminders could not only help with your information recovery, but also makes you emotionally attached to things you’re sticking it at, which reduces your chances of losing it. Furthermore the actual practice of writing has benefits of its own. The benefits of physically writing things down have been proven numerous times.
However, paper does have its downsides. As much as the portable and malleable nature of a post it memo comes in handy, the temporary nature of a non-permanent sticker is always the downside. For those of you who like to keep your items clean, a plaster of post its will ruin the glossy finish of your MacBook or other materials in that fashion. Furthermore, it’s quite unlikely that you’ll actually utilize the blank paper. To be clear, an experienced student who took his/her time to get over the steep learning curve will eventually learn to maximize the potential of the blank paper. However, note this is an extremely hard skill to perfect. Unless you know you’re a really creative person who will take advantage of the flexibility of paper and willing to temporarily take a hit with the learning curve, I recommend going digital. Plus you might be able to save some trees.
Amongst the infinitely wide pool of options for productivity-oriented digital reminder apps, some notable ones are WunderList, Todoist, or Google Keep/Tasks. Starting from Google Keep/Task, Google Keep/Task’s greatest advantage is that it’s built in to the Google ecosystem. However, its functions are mostly limited comparable to lined paper. Given only a small lined paper limited to typing words, Google Keep/Task is essentially a digital lined paper. Unlike a blank space where you can put down your ideas in a creative fashion, Google Task/Keep makes limits your creativity. Sure, this might be a good option if you want to simply digitize your reminders, but surely doesn’t do a good job on maximizing the advantages of going digital. Besides being interconnected with your devices, the main advantages of using a digital platform is its general organization, and the digital-exclusive feature it provides: notification reminders, mostly because they’re what traditional paper reminders are incapable of. Therefore, I recommend programs that maximize these capabilities.
In that matter, I recommend Todoist, the king of digital productivity. From the different color-coded tasks, wide range of support (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Web), reminder notifications, to its system of organizing tasks based on projects, a digital platform like Todoist, or Wunderlist to a lesser extent, could greatly boost your productivity.
Stay tuned for a run-through of utilizing digital productivity platforms to the highest extent.