First of all, I would like to be straight forward. School is crazy. With all those AP History essays, varsity practice and remembering if you have to work in the closing shift at Chick-fil-A tomorrow, there are too many tabs opened in your browser. It is exhausting and stressful to keep track of all of the information in your head. You need something that works harder than you. That's where color coding comes in, and believe me, it is a lifesaver.
Just imagine yourself playing a game with no HUD. You have to know your health bar and ammo count instantly. The same idea is true for your week. You have to be able to see what's coming at you without reading each line of text. By changing colors of an event, you turn a boring tasks list into a visual map of your life.
The best thing is that you don't need to buy some fancy planner to do that. Most likely, you already have everything you need right in your pocket. Google Calendar is free, syncs on all of your devices and has an awesome color scheme. Apple Calendar works in the same way, but for the sake of this tutorial, we will talk about Google because it is standard in almost all schools which use Google Classroom.
First of all, you need to understand how to use Google Calendar. After you log into Google Calendar on your laptop, you will see "My Calendars" and the list of your classes on the left sidebar. And here comes a trick that most of the people don't know about. You don't need a separate calendar for every item. You can change colors of events. Just click the three dots button or right-click the event in the grid and color palette will appear.
What you have to do is to give every color a certain meaning. That's why color coding is useful. If you choose colors randomly and it means nothing to you, then you are making a mistake. You need to come up with a legend. For example, all of your school assignments will be blue, all of the sports-related stuff will be green and your work shifts will be red. Now, when you see your week, you don't see a wall of text anymore. Instead, you see a balanced meal of blue, green and red.
Speaking of "Homework" category. This is where you drown. You may have three classes, and all of them give you homework assignments on Monday. If you see grey blocks, you think that you face a mountain to climb. But when you see that English assignments are light blue and Math assignments are dark blue, you instantly understand that there is a lot of dark blue tonight and you should start with Calculus.
Another psychological side of this technique is called "batching". When you color code your week, you can start noticing some patterns. For example, you may see that every Tuesday is filled with green because of practice. It is a visual clue that you shouldn't make any plans of study groups every Tuesday. This helps you manage your energy, not only time.
Now, let's talk about setting it up on your phone. It is not difficult at all, though the interface is a bit smaller. In Google Calendar app you just tap an event, then tap pencil edit button. There you will see an option to change colors right at the top. Of course, it takes you a couple of seconds more to do it when you add an event, but it saves you a lot of time when you are looking at your week in the bus.
Don't forget to set a color for "Me Time". This is extremely important. If your week is full of work and school assignments, then you will burn out. Make a reservation of an hour just for yourself to play games, to scroll through TikTok or do nothing at all. Use yellow or orange color for that. It will feel like a reward when you see bright yellow color in a sea of blue and red.
One pro tip: you may use "Goals" feature of Google Calendar to automate some of your activities. If you want to exercise three times a week, enter it into your goals and the application will help you to find and insert necessary events. It will color code them, usually, with some special icon. It is automation in action. You don't need to schedule every training session manually.
How do you deal with group projects? They are the worst part. But this is how you should deal with them. First of all, assign a special color, for example, purple for "Group Work". This way you will understand that you have to do something with other people and you have to check your messages and social media. Thus, you will enter a different state of mind while working on "Group Work" rather than "Solo Study", which may be blue.
Maybe, you are thinking: "This sounds like too much of a setup". It isn't. You may spend around ten minutes to create a legend. Write it down on a sticky note and put it on your monitor until you memorize it. Once it becomes your routine, there is no turning back. You will look at your friends with their plain white calendars and wonder how do they even cope with it.
There is a visual clarity that comes with color coding. It turns abstract time into concrete blocks of colors. You will stop being afraid of forgetting anything because colors will scream at you. Red block – money or work. Blue block – grades. Green block – fun and physical exercises. It is simple, effective, and costs you literally nothing.
So, open that app right now. Don't procrastinate until the semester starts. Do it right now. Choose your colors, enter your schedule for the next few weeks and you will feel how control comes back into your life again.
0 Comments