Flashback: i did this as a student. I was a full time commuter student for several years and often had days where I had classes at 8 o’clock, 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock (or some variation). I stayed on campus all day, usually, and obviously tried to complete homework during the in-between hours (in addition to picking up chicks, of course)— but to do this, I of course had to have brought the right books from home.

At some point, I got tired of having to check my syllabi every morning, decide what assignment should take priority, and pack books accordingly. So, eventually, I made a document template that showed a week’s worth of “on-time” (classes/other commitments) and “off-time”— and i assigned each specific block of “off-time” to a specific category of homework (e.g., Mondays 10-1 would ALWAYS be “do this week’s reading for American Studies,” etc.) I carried a folder of these blank templates, and each week started a new one, using it the way i had previously used an assignment book: as the professor reminds of the reading for the next class, write it into its assigned block. And then there were also “wild card” blocks for stuff like “work on pending long-term papers”, etc.

This had the benefit of injecting structure into what otherwise tended to be long periods of laziness alternating with short bursts of frantic activity. Plus, I could use what I knew about my own work habits: better suited for reading than statistics homework in the afternoon, better suited for paper-writing in the morning, and so on. And finally, it tended to keep me from stretching tasks out for too long— i could tell myself that i had budgeted 2 hours to get the AMST reading done, and that’s long enough, and get down to it, and if you finish early, well more time for picking up chicks (because that was “free” time in that everything else on my to-do list was plugged into somewhere else on my schedule). That was a great incentive for not dragging my feet…

It worked pretty well— i kept at it for a whole semester. Then, the next semester, it just didn’t work as well. If i had, i would have moved on to the next logical step: spiral binding a bunch of these suckers so i’d have a whole semester’s worth bundled together.

Though my girlfriend teased me mercilessly about my “nerd sheets,” i was secretly quite proud, basically because IT WORKED FOR ME and I INVENTED IT ON MY OWN.

Thanks for letting me share.