How I Plan: University Assignments
One of my favourite things as a nerd who loves excel is at the start of a semester when I’m given all assignment and test dates is to plan out when I will do each part of one.
The reason I do this (apart from an obsession with excel and colour coding) is that often several due dates seem to be close together so this theoretically reduces my stress levels and makes me get stuff done when I need it and avoid procrastination. Given that I’m procrastinating by writing this post while I should be working on my French presentation that I’m behind on is a testament to how the latter works (or doesn’t!)...
In this post I’m going to walk you through how I set up this document at the start of semester.
I first write down a list of all assignments and exams, their worth and their due dates. The reason why I do this is because for each subject I need to check a different page and I like having it all down in front of me.
As you can see, I write two different kinds of due dates. If the piece of assessment/ exam is due/ occurs in a tutorial then I write down the week of the semester that it occurs in. I only have one tutorial per subject per week so this information means more to me than just writing in a date.
A lot of my assessment consists of essays which we submit online so for those I write the exact date and time that they’re due.
Now that I’ve got everything on paper I create the skeleton of my excel doc.This is what takes a bit of time as I basically make a weekly calendar with all the assignments on the left hand side. After an assessment’s due date has passed I delete its row from the ‘future’ weekly sections. I like doing this because as I go through the semester I can slowly see my progress or at least less stuff to do!
Next it the backwards planning part. I’m going to split this into three categories: essays, exams and misc (presentations).
Essays
I’m in the last semester (and last week!) of my undergraduate degree which means I’ve got a pretty good idea about how I write essays. I’ll be making a separate post on it later on but my five main stages are planning, research, re-planning, writing, editing. I also have a pretty good estimate of around how long it takes me to complete each section.
For example, for a 2,500 word research essay I know that I like to have around 10,000 words of ‘raw’ research before I finalise my plan and start writing. I know that to get that many words it takes me 2-3 days of solid reading or a week of intermittent reading. I also know how long it takes me to write a set number of words in each language (French and English). In English I can comfortably write 1,000-1,500 words in a day (if I’ve done enough prior-research) and that will take up the majority of the day. French has a slightly lower threshold, around 700-1,000. I then add in planning days (around four), editing days (around two) and contingency days (because I know I procrastinate!). I also know that writing an essay during semester (when I’ve got lots of other stuff on) will take me longer than during our exam period (during which I can lock myself in the library for a few days). Therefore, after sitting down and thinking about it I can say that it will take me approx. 18 days during the semester to go from start to finish for a 2,500 word research essay.
I then work backwards from the due date and pencil in when I’d like to be able to do each section. As you’ll probably realise my ‘free’ days are Friday-Monday so that’s when I schedule in the majority of my work. I make any action that I want to be done on that day a bold/ dark colour and then for the days in between when I don’t plan on doing anything I make a lighter colour as I know there’s a possibility I may need to do catch-up work on it or it’ll just be in the back of my mind.
The reason for colour-coding it this way is that I can see at a glance how many projects I have on the go at any given point and how many actual actions I will need to complete that day. The colours I use match up with the colours in my Hobonichi/ bullet journal!
Exams
These are a bit more difficult as I may not know exactly what I need to know until a week before. This is important for me as I’m a rote learner who basically memorises every piece of knowledge that I need to know for an exam. (My record is 12 pages of biology memorised in one night!).
Until I know the format of the exam my actions are limited. I can make sure that I’m up to date with all the material that will be tested. I also have a pretty standard way of memorisation: I write everything I need to know out in a separate revision book and then create flashcards from that. I write the information out over and over, slowly learning it off by heart and do the same for the flashcards but I say them (either out loud or in my head). Therefore, I know that roughly I’ll need a day for the creation of my revision book, a day for the creation of flashcards and a day at the end of each week to make sure that my notes are up to date.
The most important thing is this assessment schedule is tweak-able, especially for things like exams. I try not to tweak essays as that allows me to procrastinate and then tweak the schedule to reflect that but for exams if I’ve allocated for too much or way to little time to one aspect (usually memorisation) I can tweak that easily.
Misc (usually presentations)
As you can see I have one presentation this semester. In week four I found out it was going to be on the book ‘Les Liaisons Dangeureuses’ (Dangerous Liaisons) and would be about the character Valmont. Therefore, I knew that I would have to read and annotate the book, do you work thinking about Valmont and then finally write the presentation and create the powerpoint. Easily the most onerous and time-consuming part was having to read the book (in my third language!) and I knew the presentation itself would be fairly easy to pull together.
Although you can see that I’ve schedule specific reading days and broken the book into chapters (it’s comprised of 175 letters), my reading was more evenly spread out during the week. What I’d do at the beginning of each week was work out exactly how many pages I had scheduled to read that week and then divide it by 7 days.
Putting it all together
Once I’ve put it all together I can see if I’ve scheduled too much for one day or one week. For example, while I know I can write 1,250 words in English and 800 words in French, I know that I can’t write all of that in one day.
Then every week I check my schedule to see what I need to get done and what I’ve already allocated for a specific day and transfer that information to my Hobonichi Weeks.
I really hope this has helped some people visualise or get a grip on their own assignment planning! I’m pretty sure I’ve covered everything but if I haven’t make a comment or send me a message and I’ll definitely try to explain in more detail!
This is part of a series of posts to show how I plan for the busy life I lead!
How I Plan: An Overview
How I Plan: An Overview (video)
How I Plan: my bullet journal as a study tool
How I Plan: University Assignments
How I Plan: Exam/ essay time at university