Looking for Priorities

I often come back from class asking myself, "What do I start with?" It is always hard to choose what is more important and what needs to be done first. I always end up doing things that are fun and usually leave some important things to do last. Then when I realize its 11PM at night I ask myself, "Wow, why do I have so much?" If I set my priorities straight, then I would have already finished the work and at 11PM I could have gone to sleep or continue doing what was fun. I'm sure a lot of you have gone through this problem.

Starting this Wednesday I decided to try ranking priorities. In categories of A, B, and C, A being absolutely essential I listed all the work that was due this week and even the regular homework assignments. If you look at the picture, in the A category I listed all the exams and assignments I need to finish this week. Everything on the A list tells me that those things are absolutely essential and I need to study for the exams and get those other work done before I can do anything else on the list. On the category of B, I have the regular homework assignments that I have to do every week. I'm used to these assignments so I can find ways to get them done after doing what is more important first. These are things like reading assignments in biology and IR and also the journals for CLS 105. Lastly in the C category I listed all sports and fun activities because these are not my priorities as a college student. If my A and B categories are not done then I cannot proceed to my leisure and fun activities.

This week, I just had a lot of things to take care of and if my priorities weren't straight I wouldn't have been able to pull off this week. Already having 2 exams right before the weekend brought a lot of burden on my shoulders. I also had remaining 2 faculty interview to finish so I definitely had to plan something out. By having this list on my desk I had reminders to focus on the absolutely essential assignments and then proceed into the less important things. What I noticed was that, because I really wanted to get to the C category, I was able to work efficiently in studying for both of my math and IR exams. I pushed myself to finish all the necessary work and keep proceeding into the next category. Every time I finished through the list, I became more anxious to really focus and finish thing efficiently. When that time came for me to go play basketball with friends I realized, I have gone through a lot to be here and I found myself enjoying more during that time than usual. After taking both of the exams I felt very relieved and happy because I knew I did pretty well on both of them. It showed that this strategy worked for me well.

One thought I had while working on this strategy was that if I can somehow incorporate last week's strategy like the D's Due and Do and this ranking priorities I feel like I can be even more efficient. For example, on each things for the Due's section, if I rank the priorities of the assignments then I think that will have an interesting outcome.

I suggest that everyone try this strategy out because it has really worked for me and it will be interesting to see what others think about this strategy.