The Only Actionable Tip You Need to Maximize Your Productivity in College
Ultimately, there are tons of factors that play into your “success” in college, such as your dedication, smarts, work ethic, problem-solving skills, and the list goes on. However, there’s one tiny secret that a lot of students are not aware of. This secret will slash your workload 15%-30% (theoretically speaking) and will boost efficiency along with your income. Believe it or not.
So what is this mystical magical secret? It’s repurposing your content. Everything from your essays, speeches, class work, scholarship entries and your own content if you run a blog. And I mean really repurposing everything. Why write something entirely new when you have perfectly fine existing content?
Throughout your college career, you’ll be taking tons of fluff classes and around 10 “main” classes which generally speaking, hit on the same topics. With that said, last June, I wrote a blog post entitled “Answer Your Emails Within 24 Hours”. I spent about 45 minutes writing it just for my own Medium content, but I flipped the piece and used it for a 1 Public Speaking assignment (3 hours of work) a scholarship entry (2–3 hours of work) and 1/2 of a Consumer Behavior and Analysis report (3 hours of work). I saved myself 9 hours of work by taking an existing piece of work that took 45 minutes to write and earned an extra $70 on top of it from winning that scholarship.
I’ve been repeating this process in multiple ways — Flipping class work for scholarships, blog posts for class work, class work for other class work etc. Since last year, I saved myself approximately 50+ hours that I was able to put towards even more schoolwork. Along with $156.20 in scholarships.
How Can I Do It?
It really doesn’t matter where your content comes from, as long as you’re repurposing everything at the appropriate time and place. You can start by making folders for your main content sources to keep this process top of mind. Here’s a peek at my extremely disorganized yet organized desktop.
Put literally everything you write into those folders. You never know when the opportunity for repurposing will come up, so a paragraph of seemingly “random” content just might save you 30 minutes. This is extremely intuitive, but you can pick and choose as much as you want. A paragraph, half of an essay or a section from a blog piece, whatever works. Once you start getting used to this process, you’ll start remembering what words come from where and what pieces you can combine into other pieces. Before you know it, you’ll have tons of copy to choose from.
Tip: If you’re not already using it, use Google Docs. Microsoft Word and other word processors are notorious for crashing and losing hours of hard work. By saving everything to the cloud, you can avoid that devastating problem.
If you’re an incoming freshman, save your high school papers. College professors and most college courses obviously require a lot of papers and writing, but they usually don’t care about the topic you write on — they care about the format and how it’s written. Odds are you can flip some of your high school papers or college scholarship entries for your basic English classes, Public Speaking and electives.
What About the Money?
Scholarships are an actual pain to apply to because they take forever to apply to. If they were that easy to win, a lot of students would not be in debt. The easiest way to win scholarships is to sink about 7+ hours into creating a killer 1k+ word template that answers all the basic questions. Most scholarships require 350–1k words, so by writing an 1,000 word template, you can easily modify it by chopping things out.
Unigo wrote a great piece on the most common scholarship questions [read it here] but to give you the quick overview, here are the five questions you need to address in that template:
- “Tell us about yourself”
- “Give us an example of a time you overcame adversity”
- “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
- “How do you plan to use the scholarship money?”
- “Why do you deserve this scholarship?”
If you can nail those topics in a creative and compelling way, the bulk of the work will be cut out for you. So whatever scholarship/s you apply to, you’ll have an amazing template you can send out in bulk. And I don’t wanna be your mom, but apply to literally every scholarship you can to increase your chances of actually winning something.
Flip, Flip, Flip
This is by far the most time saving tactic you’ll ever come across to when it comes to maximizing your productivity in college, so please implement it into your routine. (Although outsourcing your Algebra homework to India via Fiverr is also proven to be just as time saving, but that’s a topic for a whole other article). If you can get this down to a science, I’ll be waiting for a thank you. 😛
