Updated 2023
Do you know a student who has trouble keeping their priorities in order? Here’s how to stay organized in school!
For high school and college students, effectively keeping track of your assignments and materials is critical towards achieving academic success. Check out these online priority management tools to help stay organized!
Create a priority management calendar.
Agendas and calendars that sync with all your devices can be a huge help for students looking to organize their lives! We recommend using an agenda or calendar app that will sync between multiple devices – your computer as well as your mobile device.
Students attending online classes will appreciate the option to edit their agenda in real-time on a larger screen, while also having the ability to set alarms and reminders on their phone. Most major manufacturers (Apple, Google, Microsoft) offer free cloud-synced options for productivity apps, so these tools should be easily accessible for students!
As older students know, keeping track of upcoming assignments can be difficult – especially when taking multiple classes at once. We especially recommend students set reminders for long term projects that will require investing a lot of time to complete. Learn more about how to create a planner that works for you!
Create different user profiles.
For many students, it helps having their casual browsing kept separate from academic content. For most major web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) it’s easy to create a new user profile exclusively for “School” – this allows you to have separate bookmarks, logins, and tabs saved specifically for your classes and educational resources. Here are some helpful links:
At time of writing Safari unfortunately doesn’t allow switching between multiple profiles yet (more on this below!), but Mac users can always create a new device user account to be used for school. This will also allow having a separate desktop and shortcuts as well, which greatly helps for productivity. Windows users also have the option of simply creating a separate user account.
2023 Update: Profiles are coming to Safari soon! Click here for more info from Apple.
- Tutor Doctor Tip: In terms of priority management, having a dedicated profile for school work can also be helpful for students who are easily distracted and find themselves frequently taking breaks to check social media!
Take advantage of cloud-based apps.
Cloud apps make it easy for multiple students to collaborate and work together on a project or assignment. In the recent past, students would have had to save a word processor document and email the file to classmates for revisions and comments – who would then reply with a modified version of the document. A seemingly endless cycle of “back and forth editing” would ensue, and keeping track of the current version was always a headache.
If this sounds overly complicated, it’s because it was – and thanks to cloud-based apps, all of this is possible now in real-time. Google Docs, for example, allows students to type and share an entire writing assignment that can easily be proofread and commented on by other students (and even their teacher).
Students can also easily scroll through past drafts and revisions to see what changes have been implemented. These are all incredibly helpful tools for students in high school and college where group projects and peer-reviewed assignments are extremely common.
- Tutor Doctor Tip: Using a cloud-based app conveniently syncs your content to your online account, so you’ll never have to worry about accidentally deleting an important file or your computer crashing the night before an assignment is due.
Get organized from the ground up.
Let’s be real – If a student is already having trouble prioritizing their assignments, adding technology into the mix probably isn’t going to solve the problem on its own. Although priority management tools are certainly helpful, students themselves will still need to identify which of their responsibilities are priorities.
This can be more difficult than it seems, and it’s extremely common for students to have difficulties both a) identifying their most important tasks, and b) the time required to complete said tasks. In both cases, working with a tutor can help students to develop critical executive functioning skills that assist in time management and prioritization.
Tutor Doctor’s X-Skills program aims to tackle these organizational difficulties by teaching students to label their responsibilities as alpha or beta tasks. When students are able to start planning their schedule around top-priority items more effectively, they often see an immediate boost in their academic performance.
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