Back to the ol Grind

It's about that time again. I've paid for classes, texted the roommate and picked up my room key. For those who need to pay for spring classes, the deadline is in 15 minutes!! Otherwise you'll have to sign up tomorrow, during late registration. Here's a tip on late registration though: avoid it. At all costs. Not only is it bad for your schedule, it's bad for your peace of mind. Personally, if I don't have my schedule laid out ahead of time, I'm a mess. My whole life is on my Google Calendar (4 Calendars in fact), and it always impresses someone when I show them how "busy" I am or how "organized" I am. Here's another tip: all college students are busy. I just choose to organize my schedule in my calendar. In fact, you should have a calendar. I don't care if it's iCal, Thunderbird, Outlook, or a retro paper calendar with inspirational phrases on it, you should probably get a calendar if you don't have one already. Being organized is the first step to success.

I got pretty busy last November

Once you have your calendar ready, it's time to sync it to your phone. That's right you can sync electronic calendars to your phone! Just about any smart phone has this capability, and I think even some "un"smart phones have it as well. Point is, here's what it looks like:

I'm so organized, I'm sure my parents are proud

Ignore Navi in the background

Each of the days with triangles in the corner means I have something happening

As you can see, it's pretty handy being able to keep track of your own life through small glowing screens. You can even tell yourself you have to do something through these small screens and it will hark you about it later. If you so choose, you can allow other people to add things to your calendars and then you'll never see the end of it!

Bottom line is...be organized. If you're in high school getting ready for college, this is something VERY VALUABLE AND WORTH LEARNING, if you haven't done so already. Planners worked for me in primary and secondary school, then once I got to undergraduate studies, it was obvious that I'd need something to plan my work, personal life, other work, and school work with, thus my Google Calendar was born! Of course you don't have to use Google Calendar. MSFT and APPL have their own version of these that host your calendar "on the cloud", and then you can always have a local calendar file.

Look at me going off on a software tangent again. tl;dr: just get organized. It's good for you!