Distinctive

By Adrian Cho, Ph.D.

“All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.” –Barbara Kingsolver

When I was in high school, I didn’t keep any notes. In my youthful arrogance, I believed that I could keep everything in my head, and no parent or teacher was going to convince me otherwise. Oh, but I was so wrong. Pretty much by definition, if I could keep everything in my head, then I probably didn’t have enough going on. But more likely, I fell into the pernicious cycle of not keeping good records, thereby forgetting that there WERE things to remember, and so I was self-justified in my refusal to take good notes.

Good organizational practices are luckily something I was able to pick up later in my life, and I honestly could have saved myself a lot of pain and inefficiency had I learned it earlier on. Nowadays, I take lots of notes. I frequently tell people I’ll forget everything if I don’t.

If you’re like the young me, you probably need some practical tips for organizing your tasks and ordering things effectively. My advice and tools have been personally useful in keeping me on task, and given our students who are digital natives, everything I will mention is technological. 

To-Do Lists

Becoming organized is largely a matter of habit and mindset. No matter your choice of fancy and perfect technological solution, if you don’t use it, it does you absolutely no good.

Like any habit, organization can be built over time. An easy way to start is by committing to making a simple to-do list for the week and following through. Whatever that needs doing, throw them on there.

Prioritization

Once you’ve compiled your to-do list, the next crucial step is to prioritize your tasks effectively. Make sure to prioritize the list appropriately and give yourself reasonable deadlines. Here’s an example from my life:

• MON: Get car windshield wipers checked
• MON: Update X’s essay with feedback
• TUE: Update Y’s personal statement with feedback
• WK: Do laundry
• WK: Print conversion form for driver’s license
• FRI: Get haircut
• FRI: Get groceries

This list is not exhaustive of everything I need to get done, of course, but it need not be. It’s meant to provide an impetus to complete tasks that I’m likely to procrastinate on.

Upon completion of a to-do item, relish in the satisfaction of crossing it off the list. It’s important to give yourself positive feedback for a job well-done.

Divide and Conquer

Sometimes, you will make the error of putting too large of an item on the list. “Friday – finish the application for UCLA” is likely too big of a task if you are starting from scratch. Something like the following might work better:

• Thursday – Fill out all the demographic and academic information for the UCLA app
• Friday – Finish fourth essay for UCLA and upload
• Saturday – Review activities and awards list on University of California Application
• Sunday – Conduct final review for UCLA app and submit

The deadlines I put above are arbitrary, and you can change them to fit whatever pacing you desire. The point is to create useful intermediate checkpoints that take you meaningfully toward the end goal, step-by-step. Ye olde “divide and conquer” strategy.

Take Good Notes

Another useful habit to acquire is simply taking good notes on everything. Have an essay idea pop up while you’re talking to a friend in the hallway? Jot it down. A shower thought about writing that annoying email to track down your recommender? Into your notebook it goes. Your best ideas sometimes materialize in transit and can prove ephemeral if you don’t nail them down. Habitual note-taking will help you catch these ideas before they disappear. Building this habit is made orders of magnitude easier with the right tools, and I will discuss them later in this post.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

I look at the mess of PDFs on my computer, all sheet music I’ve accrued over the years. There’s music for 4-voice choirs, solo voice, pipe organ, secular, sacred, an entire folder full of Bach cantatas…. I’m going to need to put them in some order, but how? Options are myriad – I could first divide it up by the era of the composer, then instrumentation, then musical purpose… but I could also just as easily do it the other way around. Argh!

This is a general problem in organization, especially apt to come up when you’re organizing files into folders and subfolders. As soon as you try to impose a hierarchical organization on things that can be categorized along multiple axes, you will find that there are very many ways to sort them (for the mathematically interested, this is related to a problem called optimal radix choice which seeks efficient representation of numbers). If you are at all like me and prone to perfectionism, it will be hard to let go of the idea that there must be one best way to put things in order.

At this point, it is important to just pick a plan and go with it. There will be no such thing as a perfect organizational scheme. The time spent agonizing over which scheme to adopt past a certain point will be time better spent implementing one.

To keep myself organized for the task of helping my students at Distinctive (you, my dear reader), I currently have a relatively simple organization of maintaining a folder on Google Drive that corresponds to each student I work with. In each folder are essay drafts, meeting notes, activities list, and more. Similarly, you might create a folder for each school you are applying to, and use them to keep track of all the remaining items that need to be done, deadlines, supplemental essay drafts, and so on. Whatever you decide to do, make some reasonable choices and simply go with them.

An all-purpose note taking tool

So, perhaps now you want to have a go at taking all kinds of notes – whenever, wherever. Having a good tool for the job will greatly reduce the friction you encounter implementing the practice, but which tool is best for you will depend on what you value. I very highly value ease of access, because otherwise I might not do any note taking at all. I want to be able to jot down my useful stray thoughts while I’m shopping for groceries or waiting in terminal boredom at the DMV. If the note-taking tool is cross-platform such that I can access my notes on my phone or at my computer, even better. Google Keep fits the bill for me. With it, I can create little virtual sticky notes that I use to manage my to-do lists and create reminders for myself, even while I’m out and about. It also has some multimedia functionality so you can store pictures and sound files along with the notes. It really is very good for keeping simple lists.

Slightly different in function and scope is an app called Obsidian. Obsidian is useful if you want to create more complex projects with lots of internal references between the notes – more akin to a mind map. It will allow you to visualize the connections between the notes you make as a graph structure, which can help you structure your thoughts in a flexible, non-linear manner. Obsidian also has cross-platform syncing capability.

There are many more options out there, but ultimately, the best tool for YOU is the one you will stick with and actually use. Maybe for you, that’s a traditional leather bound journal. Hopefully, knowing that there are different possibilities will inspire you to find something that works for you, and ultimately build the habits of organization.

A calendar

With increasing demands on our time and attention from our work, family, friends, and avocations, a calendar is a must. I can hardly believe I used to live without one. The calendar will help you meet deadlines, avoid overbooking, be on time, to say the least.

What actually goes on the calendar is reasonable to consider. It’s certainly useful to put meetings on the calendar. Your class schedule also makes sense. How about time for the gym, shopping, or meditation? In my view, calendar items broadly fall into two groups: Those that involve other people and those that don’t. I find it prudent to definitely put the former on the calendar, and the latter as a matter of taste. Which of the solitary activities you record is something you will need to figure out for yourself over time.

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In college, I wrote a final term paper for my algebraic coding class on the application of information theory to musical structures. It was a pretty good paper given my lack of knowledge back then, with an empirical experiment I conducted. I got an A+ on it. I don’t have that paper anymore. It became lost in the shuffle, and I didn’t keep good track of my work back then anyways. It’s a real shame, and I had wished more than once that I still have it.

Good archival practices are handmaidens to good organizational practices. By implementing the strategies and tools we’ve discussed, you’re not just organizing your present, but also preserving your past and preparing for the future. Good recordkeeping and note-taking will also free your mind to focus on tasks at hand. As you build these habits, remember that it’s not about perfection, but progress.