The College Playbook
What do I want to get out of college?
How am I going to get it?
Whether you’re looking forward to, starting, or in the midst of college, these are questions we all ask ourselves. If you’re reading this article, you believe you can be answering them better (if only by a small margin). If you don’t believe this, your time is valuable, and would likely be better spent elsewhere.
For most, succeeding in college means earning good grades, building quality relationships, having fun, learning interesting things, and making impact in organizations. In college, you’ll learn a lot about how the world works. But you’ll also learn something equally important: how you work — how you learn best, what’s important to you, and what you think will set you up for success in the long run.
Over the last four years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking deliberately about these questions as a college student because I believe that by building systems and ingraining habits to make ourselves more efficient, we can enjoy more, learn more, and achieve more in our time in college. Most students believe that hard work and intelligence are the only keys to succeeding. Sure, there are a few geniuses, and a few “grinds”, but the truth is that study skills, not off the charts brilliance, are the defining characteristic of most highly successful college students. And study skills, luckily, are learnable.
In my four years, I’ve spent time with some of the most successful students at my school. I’ve learned a lot and achieved a lot of what I set out to. If you’re interested, you can read about my background here. I don’t stand to profit from this article; I instead hope that by learning the systems I use as a student, you will be able to get more out of college in the ways that are meaningful to you. The purpose of these systems is not to constrain you, but instead to give you the space to think strategically about what you want to do and to give you simple, reliable ways to make sure you get it done without stress.
So how will you spend your time? What habits will you build to make yourself the most efficient student you can be? In the sections that follow, I hope you will learn the fundamentals of my systems for managing my time and executing tasks in college so you can get started improving immediately. With the systems, I also present my rationale — the underlying principles — so that in the long term you can customize my systems, or build your own, in the way that works for you, so you can grow towards being the most successful college student you can be.
Time Management Skills
Why are time management skills important?
There is a huge difference between being 99% and 100% present. Have you ever been out with friends, but found yourself feeling uncertain about when you’ll be able to do the work you need to? Have you ever been working, but repeatedly caught yourself wondering about your schedule for that night?
These were situations I faced constantly as a Freshman. When your time management skills are lacking, uncertainty about your schedule will force a part of your brain to be devoted to ideas popping up about your schedule/social life/work life. When you’re hanging out with friends, you want to be 100% there instead of thinking about when you’ll do your paper tomorrow. When you’re doing your paper, you don’t want to be thinking about when you should have dinner since you have class at 5 and rehearsal at 7…etc. Furthermore, because you’re not focusing on these thoughts, you won’t figure out good answers to the questions they pose; you will just end up distracted from what you’re attempting to focus on.
Good time management skills remove this uncertainty, allowing you to get the most out of every moment spent — whether in the company of friends or an old book in a dusty library corner.
Tips on how to manage your time effectively
Make your calendar the single source of truth for your events. This means that writing on your hand, half-baked reminders in your phone, and emails sitting unread in your inbox are out. If you’re going to remove uncertainty about your schedule, it should all be in one place.
The night before, work out your schedule for the next day. See the section on Daily Shutdown for details on this process. Knowing your schedule before going into the day removes uncertainty for the rest of that night and for the morning of and allows you to dive into deep focus right away.
If you have a mac, use the Calendar desktop app. I use Google Calendar to store all my events. I use Apple Calendar to display the Google Calendar because of low latency on app, ease of access, and sweet shortcuts (e.g. command + n, then type in “dinner tomorrow 7–8pm”; command + t to go to current day…etc).
If you have a smartphone, add events directly from the voice assistant. E.g. In Siri: “Create an event on Wednesday 6–7pm dinner with Matthew”. This saves you the time of writing the event into a document or messing around with the time pickers on the mobile apps when you’re on the go.
Routines. I block out time to do homework for a class right after its lecture ends. I schedule this in my calendar and always try to respect it. The more routines you can build in to get work done, the less willpower you’ll need to use. See “Task Management/Energy Management” for principles underlying this habit.
Repeating Events. At the beginning of the semester: create all classes and routine blocks as “custom repeating” events, ending on the day classes end (e.g. Monday & Wednesday 9:30–11). By doing this, you don’t have to add them each week.
Task Management Skills
Goal Tiers
Segmenting your goals into tiers allows you to plan differently for goals that require different amounts of work (e.g. “Get a job as a software engineer” will require longer term planning than “Write English essay”). I structure my goals in the following way:
Semester OKR’s. OKR stands for “Objective” and “Key Results”. Each semester, I use this format to document my big goals broken down by the area of my life. For example, one semester I had the following categories: “Classes”, “Glee Club”, “Personal Development”, and “Job Recruiting”. Within each section, I had an Objective (a large, complex goal) and the Key Results (subgoals to the Objective) under it (I use Sublime’s indentation feature to achieve this). This is kept in a Sublime text document in a folder called “Plans” on my Desktop. For example, one of your categories could look like this:
Deadline calendars. Each class, like “Math 214”, and each other part of my life, like “Glee Club”, “Job Recruiting” each get their own calendars where deadlines are documented. NOTE: I do not put deadlines that are due before the end of the week here because that is handled by the Right Now list (see below). These deadlines are used in the Weekly Shutdown process.
Small tasks. Calendar all day events: e.g. “do laundry”.
Right Now (RN): Running list of tasks to do today, and for this week. This is kept in a Sublime text document in a folder called “Plans” on my Desktop. This list is generated during the Daily Shutdown routine, and items are removed as they are completed. The top of the document contains the tasks I’m doing today. Below that, I have tasks to do for the week, categorized by their area. e.g.
Daily Capture (DC). Daily “catch-all” list processed during Daily Shutdown Routine. Whenever a deadline, todo, big goal, or calendar event comes up throughout the day I throw it in here. I keep this in a Google Doc so I can edit it from either my phone (Google Docs app) or computer throughout the day.
Emails
Students (and working professionals) spend a lot of time answering emails and other communications. Below are some rules I follow to make sure I’m handling my communications without letting them disrupt other parts of my life too much.
Check email, texts, slack, groupme…etc a predetermined number of times at predetermined times throughout the day: Why? Attention Residue. I usually plan to check emails before meals, since I know no deep work will be required of me then, thus the lingering thoughts from the emails will not impede any serious concentration.
Boomerang important emails back to yourself so they don’t get missed: Boomerang is a great app that allows you to schedule when to send, or when to return a sent email back to you if it hasn’t been responded to. This is especially useful if you’re leading an organization and delegating work you want to make sure doesn’t fall through the cracks.
0 inbox: If you are using gmail, use the “unread first” layout, and end every day with 0 emails in your “unread” inbox. This is important because you can relax and go to sleep with no lingering tasks on your mind.
Keyboard shortcuts: If you are using gmail, invest 15 minutes in enabling and learning keyboard shortcuts (up/down to select a message, x to highlight, shift+i to mark as read, shift+u to mark as unread, s to star). This will save you lots of time in the long run.
Immediate todo’s: If a small task pops up that should be dealt with immediately while I’m checking email, I usually do it on the spot to get it off my mind.
Processing learnings
I’ve come to believe that if I cannot convey something simply, I do not really understand it, and if I can convey it simply, I not only understand it, but I will continue to understand it in the future. It is essential for me to condense experiences into their most compact and simple form while the broader context is fresh in my mind.
For classes, I make a single page review sheet of the whole class (see “Study Skills” section below).
For personal growth, especially involving my experiences in organizations, I have a running list of principles I’ve learned, the context they apply in, and examples from my life that vividly demonstrate the principle. I review the principles often and add to them when memorable things happen.
Energy Management
Diet. It will take some experimentation, but it is worthwhile to figure out how much to eat and when to eat to make yourself the most productive. I eat a 2 egg omelet in the morning, a medium sized lunch around noon (if it’s too big, I get tired in the afternoon), and a big dinner. I try to eat as little added sugar as possible. Sugar disrupts my focus and negatively impacts my sleep quality, so I only eat it after my Daily Shutdown on rare occasions. When I do, I expect I’ll get little productive work done for the rest of the day.
Inputs. When I need to focus (i.e. school work, intellectually rigorous student org work), I try to limit inputs as much as possible. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb mode; I don’t check Facebook, emails or texts; and I don’t listen to music (when I do, I find that I feel like I’m working better, but I’ll do less, and what I do will be done at a lower quality). Inputs leave me with attention residue and put me in a hyper, addictive place which is not conducive to deep focus.
Work/Break Balance. 50 minutes on, 10 mins off for no more than 3 hours without an extended break. In the breaks I like to walk around, think, and meditate. No inputs. I use my watch chrono to count up to 50 minutes, and if I find a good stopping point between 40 and 50 minutes, I stop then. Using the chrono removes uncertainty and allows me to fully relax in my breaks and focus in my work periods.
Willpower and routines. Whenever possible, I try to minimize the willpower I need to expend to get something done. Current research suggests that you have a fixed amount of willpower to expend each day, and when it is running low it gets harder and less enjoyable to do what you need to. Examples of what this might look like in practice are below.
Trying to study in the same room as your chatty friends will force you to fight off the impulse to talk to them. Instead, study in a quiet place.
Buying Oreos and putting them on the counter will force you to choose not to eat them every time you walk past the counter. It takes less total willpower for you not to buy them the first time.
Scheduling time to do work for a class right after its lecture. Why? It takes energy and willpower to fill your brain with the context of the class. Right after lecture, this context has been given to you, so you don’t have to work for it.
Putting a TV with an Xbox and Fifa in your room will force you to choose between that and sleep, or a more calming and ultimately fulfilling activity like reading or journaling.
Results vs Time Based Mentality. Imagine the following situations involving a typical student: College Connor.
A. Connor works efficiently, and is 80% done with his work with a little over 2 hours left of free time before he’s told himself he will stop for the day. Connor doesn’t need 2 hours to finish the last 20%, but since he knows he won’t stop working until his cutoff time anyways, he subconsciously slows down and takes the full 2 hours to finish. He go to sleep tired, but satisfied.
B. Connor has a lot of work to do. He works efficiently, and is 99% done when he hits the time he’s decided he will stop for the day. The remaining 1% is small but annoying to do. Connor knows that if he does it now he’ll be able to do it quickly, and if he does it another time he’ll have to spend a lot of time to fill up his brain with the context required. The 1% is annoying, though, and he promised himself he’d stop at this time. He goes to sleep, and finishes the next day.
These are examples of what I call a Time Based attitude towards work, and they happen to me all the time. Throughout college, I’ve learned that focusing my thoughts as much as possible on the Results, instead of the time required, has been helpful. In the first situation, if Connor had been results oriented instead of focused on the time available to him, he might have saved 2 hours, and been able to relax or hang out with a friend in that time. In the second, he could have pushed a little bit harder to finish, and saved himself the time required to build up that context.
This, of course, must happen within reason. Sometimes it is far better to cut off work for the sake of sleep or complete lack of focus.
Creativity management
When I need to be creative, I always make sure to get all the grunt work out of the way and understand exactly what needs to be done in your creative time. Once I’ve done this, I take a walk, meditate, get food, take a shower, or do something else that relaxes me and gets the ideas flowing. I limit inputs in this time for best results. Usually, it’s helpful for me to build in enough time (a few days at the minimum) for this process to work its magic, and I make sure to take down thoughts when they come to me throughout the day.
Note: Sublime Text Editor
Sublime is beautiful, incredibly lightweight (opens fast when you click on it), has smooth zoom in/zoom out functionality, and makes indenting left or right easy (this is KEY, because it helps you organize a complex hierarchy of thoughts, and you can easily “collapse” all the indented text under a heading). I use a custom Sublime theme. The examples of my lists you’ll see are from Sublime.
Weekly Shutdown (WS)
What is it?
A reminder from the Task Management/Goal Tiers section: Semester OKR’s are semester long goals, Deadline Calendars supply the deadlines, and the RN (Right Now) list stores daily and weekly tasks.
WS is a process where I map Semester OKR’s and Deadline Calendars to RN. I usually do this every Friday afternoon, so I go into the weekend feeling confident about the work I’ve done, and understand the work I have ahead of me.
Why is it important?
Without systems like these, we often fall into a stressful, weighed down place, where our tasks are always on our mind, distracting us from what’s right in front of us (even if what’s right in front of us is an important task). Life can feel like an endless stream of tasks without a cohesive purpose or strategy connecting them to our larger goals. Creating Semester OKR’s and doing a regular WS and Daily Shutdown (next section) give us the space to step back and prioritize how we’ll spend our time before executing on it.
How?
Go through your Deadline Calendars for the next three weeks and Semester OKR’s and generate the RN document with what you want to accomplish for the week. If there are deadlines you worry about forgetting, I usually add them to the task name in RN (e.g. Math Homework due Wednesday).
Daily Shutdown (DS)
What is it?
A daily routine to clean up small tasks and map week long tasks (in bottom of RN list) to the next day’s tasks and schedule (top of RN list)
A daily routine to process todo’s that came up throughout the day, do small things that you shouldn’t spend time scheduling, and figure out your schedule and tasks for the next day. The process usually takes about 30 minutes.
Why is it important?
1. To be 100% present in your day, you should know your schedule for the day’s events and for what work you’ll do before beginning it. Knowing what work you’ll do before the day starts is helpful because it limits the need for willpower to get started when you sit down to work, and because as you’re ending your previous time period and going to work, you can prepare yourself mentally for what awaits you.
2. A lot of little things come up throughout the day (e.g. “pay credit card bill”); DS gives you a time to batch those together and complete them so they don’t distract you from more thought intensive work throughout the day.
3. At the end of this process, you should be totally “turned off” for the rest of the night. This is incredibly important, since it allows you to completely relax afterwards. Occasionally, I leave myself one interesting task to tackle after DS, but I won’t check email/texts or think about scheduling or other tasks. This relaxation time is key for creativity, stamina, social time, and sleep quality.
4. If you have personal growth goals that you want to track over time or small daily habits, this is a good time to do it (e.g. You want to do 15 pushups every day for a month, and you’re keeping track in a spreadsheet; this is a good time to mark that spreadsheet).
How?
The process is simple, but has more complex dependencies than this article editor supports, so I’ve included a picture below.
In Step 3, how to choose which tasks to do tomorrow and when to do them?
I use a combination of the…
Difficulty of the task. I allocate the hardest task to my highest energy period. For me, this is the morning.
Urgency of the task. How soon is it due?
The type of task and the schedule for the next day. I try to do tasks after an event that corresponds with them (e.g. doing math homework after math lecture, doing glee club work after a meeting), and I often batch small tasks together in the same block of time (e.g. “Dryclean suit”, “Clean kitchen”, “Do laundry”).
Study Skills
Papers
Key idea: separate idea generation, outlining, writing, and editing to get the most out of each process.
Example schedule
Start — 14 (days before the deadline is due): as quickly as possible, understand the prompt and generate an initial list of ideas about it. Over the rest of this period, add to your ideas. This gives you the time for the creative process to work its magic.
14–12: create initial outline
12–11: meet with Professor to get their feedback on outline.
10–5: add to and change outline
5–3: write
3–1: edit for content/structure, line edits (word by word), line edits
Taking notes
Technical classes: The most important thing is that you take down example problems. Write the problem statement with the label “Good Problem” or “*GP*”. Then write “Solution” or “*Sol*”. Under “*Sol*”, write the solution steps. This is important because you’ll want to be able to test yourself on the problems without seeing the solution when you’re studying until you’ve finished.
The second most important thing is to take down formulas / intuitions to help you understand concepts. This is not as important because you can usually glean this from lecture slides if they’re posted.
I label my notes simply with the form <Type> <Number >/<Page>. For example, a typical notes sheet will have a box at the top with “Lecture 10/1”, and on the other side will be “Lec 10/2”.
I use plain white printer paper so I can shuffle through my notes quickly and group them into piles when I study (see Technical Exam Studying).
Nontechnical classes: It can depend on the class, but I usually write down most everything in shorthand, then I parse for importance when I do my review sheet (see Exam Studying section).
Organizations: I create one “everything notes” document in Sublime for the organization. This is helpful because you often want to be able to search, and splitting notes up into different documents makes that difficult. Sublime’s search functionality is great, especially if you take the time to learn the different advanced search methods.
Technical Exam Studying
Studying for technical exams is an interesting challenge. You need to understand all the important concepts, and you need to understand them well enough to be able to do them quickly under pressure. Successfully studying for a technical exam is an iterative process of probing your understanding of the material, discovering where it is inadequate, improving it, and solidifying your understanding to the point where it is intuitive, and can be accessed effortlessly under pressure. You’ll see these principles in action in the example schedule below.
Start — 10 days (before the exam). Organize all notes (and lecture slides if need be), homework problems into related piles. If memorization is required, create flashcards (I use Anki, a free flashcard software that uses a Spaced Repetition Algorithm to show you cards you’ve missed at a higher frequency at intervals that match the “forgetting curve” of the human memory). By the end of this process all the notes and problems you need to review should be easily accessible and grouped together (I use small pieces of paper to label each paper clipped pile).
10–4. Go through note piles (and lecture slides). For each note pile,
Add key concepts to a review sheet. I use one piece of blank paper front and back for review sheets for each exam — I find that writing small forces me to simplify and understand the material, and I love having these sheets after classes end so I can review what I learned in a way that makes sense to me.
Do GP’s you encounter in your notes. To do this, I scan each notes sheet, if I see “*GP*” I, get a blank sheet of paper and cover the sheet of notes. I move the blank sheet down until I see “*Sol*”, then I do the problem on the blank sheet, looking only at the prompt. When I’m done, I take the paper away and check myself against the solution under “*Sol*”.
Do related homework questions.
If you ever get a problem wrong or think it’s worth redoing, put it in a “GP” list (you can either take pictures of the problem and solution and put them in a document like OneNote, or reference where to find the problem in the list — e.g. “Lec 10/5”, if you’ve labelled your notes like I do). Important note: DO NOT look at the solution before doing the problem. It is extremely common that students will look at a solution and think they could have done the problem from scratch. This is a classic case of confirmation bias, so watch out for it!
Take down any questions you have, and either ask immediately on Piazza, or store in the document containing your GP’s and ask at Office Hours.
4–1. Do all GP’s from the GP list you generated while you were reviewing the note piles. Also do any practice exam problems you’ve been given (again, without looking at solution). If you get a problem wrong or feel shaky, put it back in the GP list at the bottom so you’ll redo it until you’ve got it down pat.
If you have time, and if this is helpful to you, answer questions on piazza. I often find it helpful because if I see a question I can’t answer, I’ve exposed my lack of knowledge and I would benefit from seeing the answer. If I can answer the question, but it takes me a while to put the answer simply, I don’t know if well enough, and the process of simplifying my thinking will help prepare me for the rigor of the exam.
1–0. Relax, do a few of the GP’s that you missed one or two times, review flashcards if applicable. Most technical exams require more than understanding the material: they require focus and creativity. To have these, you need to be well rested, and to have had a break from your studying.
General Note on Studying for Technical Exams. I once heard that you should spend 70% of your total studying time “Actively” reviewing in the way described above — doing and redoing GP’s from scratch — instead of “Passively” reading. I try to match ratio that as closely as possible.
Nontechnical Exam Studying
I treat this process similarly to how I approach technical exams with a few minor changes. I usually make my review sheet on computer instead of paper (since formulas are not important and there’s usually more to write). I use my review sheet and notes to generate a lot of Anki cards, and I try to spread memorization out over as many days as I can. I practice writing essays and working through central points from notes.
Taking Exams
General Principles. There’s no substitute for preparation, but once you’ve prepared, you want to make sure you can perform to your level of understanding. Exams are about maintaining confidence and focus, and finding creativity within yourself. You’ll see these principles in action in the playbook below. For additional reading, I would recommend Josh Waitzkin’s book “The Art of Learning”, particularly the chapter about “Building your Trigger”, for how to make sure you’re at your most creative during an exam.
Playbook.
2 hours before — start of exam: relax, read a book, meditate, go for a walk, do light tasks or things you enjoy. I would not look at the material you’ve been studying. You want it to coalesce in your mind, and you want to get yourself into a relaxed state. Get to the exam 10–15 minutes early, so there’s no stress.
First 5 minutes: read over the whole exam, mark hard problems (I mark with an “H”). This is important because it settles your nerves and shows you that you know how to do most of it. Uncertainty is the biggest problem for me in exams. There are usually a few problems you’ll be uncertain about. Make sure you read and understand these problem statements; this will give your brain what it needs to work on the problem in the background while you complete the rest of the exam.
5 minutes in — last 10 minutes: do problems in order from easy to hard. if you encounter a problem you don’t know how to do, don’t waste time beating your head against a wall. This will only tire you out and depress you. Mark it with a * and fold the page of the exam so you know to come back. Finish all the other problems, then come back. Your brain will have worked on the problem in the background, and you might be pleasantly surprised by what you produce when you come back.
Last 10 minutes: review (if you have time)
A Bird’s Eye View
The most meaningful takeaways from college are not a string of high letter grades or a well developed set of time management skills. Those will come in handy in your job applications, but they won’t define the experience. That honor will go to the warm, vulnerable moments you have with close friends at late hours; to the heated, passionate arguments you have about something bigger than you; to the moments you can’t help but learn from; to the experiences you can’t forget.
That said, while becoming a better student won’t be your end goal, pursuing it will push you to improve in significant ways outside of your life as a student. Being a successful college student in and outside of the classroom requires that you compartmentalize your thoughts, relax when you can, organize your work, and execute efficiently and creatively on ideas large and small. If you can achieve at the highest level in hard classes with an engaging social and extracurricular life and a healthy dose of free time, you will have gained skills and habits that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
Done right, I see college as an iterative cycle of intense growth, meaningful application, and utter relaxation sprinkled with heartening accomplishments. I hope the tactics and principles in this article aid you in your journey, and I wish you the best of luck.
Credits
Many great thinkers deserve credit for the thoughts in this article, and have been cited inline. Two had a particularly profound effect on me, and deserve special mention. Cal Newport’s books formed the basis for my interest in this topic, and are due the vast majority of the credit for this article. Josh Waitzkin inspired me with his interviews on the Tim Ferriss show and his incredible book The Art of Learning.
