Organizing Your Calendar
Create a plan for the quarter
Why this works:
The 10-week quarter goes by quickly, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by a busy schedule. Going into the quarter knowing important dates and how they relate to each other can help you to better anticipate how to distribute your work and prevent you from forgetting about important assignments and events.
How to do this:
- Find a calendar template that allows you to look over the entirety of your quarter at once. For example, the Stanford Quarter-at-a-Glance template gives you an overview of the quarter on one page.
- At the beginning of the quarter, comb through your course syllabi for exam, paper, and other assignment due dates. Write these important dates into your calendar.
- Also think about any important personal events such as weddings, holidays, appointments, etc. Write these important dates into your calendar.
- Look over your schedule and write down tentative dates when you would like to start your assignments and complete initial drafts.
- Keep your schedule flexible! Adjust your calendar if any dates shift and add new events as they crop up.
- Remember: it is nearly impossible to follow a schedule exactly as you wrote it over a time period of several months. Scheduling your quarter is meant to be a blueprint to help guide you – it is not a binding contract. Adjust your plans as needed!
Create a plan for each week
Why this works:
Spending time planning your week helps to keep you organized and encourages you to think about time management. Front-loading our scheduling decisions earlier in the week can help to free up attention and energy for the work that we need to complete as the week progresses. Weekly calendaring asks you to think about how long assignments take, what your non-negotiable personal priorities are, and how you want to spend your time.
How to do it:
- Keep all of your event details in one place. Think about what calendaring tools you might find useful: do you like a physical planner or something digital? To get started, try this weekly schedule template or a digital calendar such as Outlook calendar or Google calendar.
- Devote time at the beginning of each week to writing out your schedule. In your calendar, include your classes and other fixed obligations like meetings, appointments, practices, etc. Also be sure to include personal non-negotiables, such as when you're going to eat, sleep, and exercise. Then block off time for specific assignments.
- Be specific about your tasks. When thinking about approaching large assignments, keep SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals in mind. Rather than setting aside an hour to “start on final project,” spend some time thinking about what you can specifically accomplish in that hour, such as brainstorming topic ideas, generating questions for your teaching team, or finding three useful sources.
- As with planning for the quarter, be flexible as needed! Sometimes a new meeting crops up, we underestimate how long an assignment will take, or something happens in our personal lives that requires attention.
For a step-by-step guide for calendaring, check out this helpful CTL video.
Download a pdf version of this page
Organizing Your Calendar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. You may reproduce it only for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University.