As a college student with ADHD, I can tell you that keeping yourself organized is vital to being more productive and keeping your mind at ease. Not only can being organized help you fully recognize your situation, but it's also very helpful for keeping your mind at ease and eliminating any uncertainty you may have in your life.
This past year I've been making a strong effort to get myself more organized with my life and school. If you have ADHD, you already know it can be very difficult to keep all of the things you need to do in order. I've been finding and adopting strategies that keep my life easier and more organized. As minimal as it may seem, being organized can make a large impact on your life and help you think more clearly.
There are many small steps you can take towards making your life more organized and easier on yourself. One of the more basic but helpful forms of organization is planning. If you can plan out what you have to do in a given week and break it down to what you'll need to do day-by-day, you'll put your mind more at ease and you'll feel a strong sense of control.
To do this, I use a whiteboard that I hang above my desk. Every Sunday I'll make a list of all my homework and tasks I need to complete in a given week and organize them by which needs to be done sooner. Having what I need to do during the week written on a physical list really helps me visualize my week and makes me feel more secure and in control of what I need to do.
I also find it very satisfying to check off the boxes of tasks I accomplish during the week and being able to see my progress. It offers me a sense of accomplishment being able to see my progress throughout the week.
One of the biggest things that go along with planning out your week is time management and being able to set aside times for when you're going to work on what you need to do. If you're a college student with classes every day, being able to establish a game plan and set aside time to work on what you need to do can be very helpful and can bring a lot of structure into your life.
Time management also plays in with something I like to call "production management." For me, this means that if I have a project or assignment that I need to work on that I know will take a long time, I'll divide up the work over the course of several days and make progress on it each of those days. I've found this to be very effective by giving me more free time and allowing me to work on other homework.
This method has also significantly helped me reduce the amount of procrastinating I do. Being a college student, or any student, procrastinating is bound to happen. Even if you still end up procrastinating at the last minute, having practiced good production and time management will reduce the amount of work you'll need to do when the assignment is due at 11:59 pm and you're just starting it at 9:30.
If anything, it's better to have half of an assignment done the night that it's due as opposed to having nothing done at all. So practice good time and production management and make things easier for yourself.
If you want to have a better sense of control, it's important that you pay special attention to organization and keeping everything in check. In the end, you are your biggest ally, so you owe it to yourself to make things easier than they need to be. If you can establish different practices and strategies that help you map out and plan your workloads and to-do's, it will make life a lot better and more productive.
