Organization

One of the biggest problems in returning to my studies has been my organizational skills, whilst these are far from perfect there are a few techniques that have worked for me.

Writing everything down into lists

This might seem an easy conclusion to the problem of being unorganized and for me is defiantly the best. I write a long list (including activities unrelated to my work) of everything I need to do, no matter how small. This ensures that every last little piece of work gets finished.

Time planning/ management

I’ve recently started to make plans every night to ensure I know what I am doing the next day. This has helped massively with both getting my work finished and deciding what to do next. It has also made me more confident about my work by reminding me what I have done and what I need to do, before I had this in place I would constantly worry that I had forgotten something and get stressed because I didn’t know where I was up to and what I had yet to complete. I also do a brief plan of the next month with key dates highlighted such as hand in dates and when I would like certain work to be finished by.

Working at home

I have never been a tidy person and loosing work used to be a constant problem of mine. I’ve recently added some shelves above my workspace at home and have clearly labelled storage, This means instead of sifting though mounds of papers from previous projects everything I need can be located easily.