Sort Out Your Life
Written by: Jessica Steffens & Irina Liakhar
9E Journalism

Are you wasting minutes upon minutes of your break and lunch trying to get your stuff together? How is it that all of your assignments go missing? Are you losing marks and social experience from procrastination? Running out of time to raise that grade? Do you have any time management skills? Didn’t think so, that stops here.

No doubt, there is at least some disorganization in everyone’s lives. The wasting of your daily time needs to come to a halt. What is understood in this paragraph is all about you, and organization. Stop the disorganized papers, no more time wasted, just you and your assignments, only this time, you will be organized. For further information about organization, this site explained the 7 habits of organized people.  (http://www.lifeorganizers.com/home/organized-people.htm)

For the most part, school organization starts with your binder. “...Dividers...” that’s about all you hear from your teachers the first week or even months of school, so why don’t you just do it! Separate what needs to be done. No more flipping frantically at the start of class. Keep your subjects and homework apart. It’s not like you need a different binder per subject, even one binder is good. Not having dividers creates loss of time at the start of every class.

Generally speaking, coming to class with your binder divided doesn’t always cut it. Look deep into the rings and zippers. Overstocking on pencils, pens, erasers, and whiteout, those are the essentials to almost every class, even drama you need a pencil or pen once in awhile. If you need to, personalize them. In other words, there’s no point in getting a whole bunch of

school supplies if you can’t keep them for more than a class, Add a little initial, a spot of color, or get a completely colorful set of pencils. Personalizing makes organization your own, you don’t have to make it plain and dreary, just organized, even just fun shaped paper clips and binders, almost making fun for your organization.

Homework and procrastination is the worst case of disorganization. It doesn’t matter if you’re the volleyball captain or the lead in the school play, if you procrastinate it can affect extra-curricular activities too. Teachers don’t give much slack in junior high, their life focus doesn’t depend on your assignment being handed in. To them it’s just one less thing to mark, but to you it’s one more failing or falling grade. Furthermore, if entering high school is in your near future, forgetting your work is a definite NO. To shorten the procrastination and homework time, to create space for your social life, try to do most of your homework at school. If you have a free class, don’t use it for socialization, but for that homework you just got from math or science. Once that’s done, you will have way more time for socialization after school. If you do have homework, from personal experience, try and keep an extra duotang, binder, or folder just for your homework. One of the main issues of homework isn’t actually doing it; it’s keeping it until the due date. Instead of stressing out as you search through your binder, you will have everything all in one, not including your textbooks, but those are simple to carry.

All of these sum into one thing: time management. Without time management, organization is next to impossible. These are some tips to get into gear:

1. List: your needs, and due dates on a ‘to do list’ or the calendar in your day timer. Your parent paid for it anyways, so why don’t you use it!
2. Prioritize: your list/ calendar/day timer, in order of the due dates. You don’t want to be working on what’s due next Wednesday before you even start tomorrow’s work.
3. Break up Your Projects: don’t rush and do all your work all at once, use your time and break each project into pieces. Leave time for your social life, but homework is a  priority.
4. Relax: take a break in between projects or between the bigger parts of a project. Relaxation helps keep that stress level to a minimum. If stress is the real reason for all your disorganization, then try a counselor, or maybe a hotline. 1-800-668-6868 is a toll free phone number for all your stress and daily counselor needs. You can also find them on the web @ www.kidshelpphone.ca .The less stress you have the more organized you can be. Even our own school’s Ask Andy can help you out or lessen your stress.
5. Check: take time in the morning before school or at night before you go to bed, to check your homework for mistakes and completion. It will save you time and reduce your stress. Also, see what’s ahead for the next days or week.

You can find more tips on organization at http://www.bellaonline.com/site/organization.

Even one of the emperors of Rome organizes. “The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious. You have power over your mind” that is just one of the many organized people in this world.

One of the most organized teachers procrastinates but in different ways than you might think of. Procrastination isn’t just about homework and school, but about everyday life. We interviewed her to show you readers, how procrastination comes within some of the most organized people.

What do you think about students and procrastination?
-“I think all students procrastinate in some way or another.  Even the best students will sometimes waste class time or wait until the due date is looming before they kick it into gear.  It’s just natural, people want to have a good time, and work (school or otherwise) isn’t really a good time!  But, students who are always waiting until the last minute to do something never really get the marks they deserve.  They never see their full potential, what they could have done had they not been rushed.  In the end, I think students who procrastinate are just people with bad time management skills”

What about procrastination for yourself, do you have your own procrastination problems?
-“I am usually very well organized.  I do procrastinate, but I know how much time I will need to get something done, so I only procrastinate until that point, I don’t wait for the last second.  Since having my kids, I find I procrastinate a lot more.  It’s hard to come home from work and do marking or planning when all I want to do is spend time with my kids.  And once they’re in bed, I really have to force myself to sit and mark because all I want to do is relax a little bit.  So there are definitely times when I procrastinate with my marking, I try to get it done, but sometimes life gets in the way.  That’s why I understand where the students are coming from too.  Their lives involve a lot more than school.  And although it is their responsibility to do well in school, I know why they leave stuff for the last minute… sometimes there are just too many other more interesting things to be doing! J”

Are there any ways to help keep on track, without procrastinating, and without spending too much time and/or money?
-“I write myself little “to-do” lists.  I find if I have a list to follow I can keep myself from feeling overwhelmed.  I also like to do some things way before they have to be done.  I start Christmas shopping in Sept.  Or I take a weekend when I don’t have too much marking and I do things around the house that don’t have to be done yet, but are easy to get out of the way.  For a student, I would suggest the same things.  Write down the things you have to get done, then break them down into parts or do the easy things first.  If you have a big project to do, it’s way easier to spend 20-30 mins a night on it for a few days, than to spend 2 hours on it the last night.  I also use rewards to keep from procrastinating.  So if there is a show I really want to watch on TV, I tell myself I have to get a certain amount of work done before I even turn on the TV.  Then I keep the TV off until I’m done, otherwise I would be tempted to watch and I would end up procrastinating.”

How do you keep your classroom and/or life organized?
-“Well, anyone who knows me knows how crazy I am about keeping things in order.  I like to make sure everything has a place, that way everyone knows where that certain item belongs when it’s time to clean up.  In my classroom, I keep it clean and organized by getting students to help in tidying up at the end of the day.  I’ve found that students don’t mind picking up the garbage from the floor if you only ask them to find one or two pieces… it’s their garbage anyway!  As for my home, well, again, everything has a place where it belongs… and I’ve been teaching my kids at a very young age to put their toys back in their (labeled) bins after they are done playing with them.  I would have to say one of my favorite b-day gifts was my label maker!  J  I love to label things!”

Any tips for keeping students organized at school and in general?
-“As for tips for kids on how to keep organized, I think if they give everything a place to belong, then they can put it where it belongs and also know where to find it later.  That goes for work in their binders, to things in their rooms.  If you always put things in the same place, you are much less likely to lose them.”

What is the hardest part in becoming an organized individual?
-I think the hardest part about being an organized person is really committing to it.  If it’s not something that comes naturally, you really have to force yourself to keep up the good habits, or else it’s easy to slip back into the random habits you used to have.  You have to really decide to make a change then really make the effort to keep it up.

So we’ll leave you with this to think about: you can make organization hard or easy, it depends on how you take it in and look at it. It can create increasing marks, or boredom of your life. By the time finals come around, having all your notes ready, and your time prioritized for studying, an eighty to ninety percent will be easier than actually organizing. If it is taken in and used in a way that works to fit any personality, then it will just be another everyday thing through your young, slightly messy lives.