“It’s time to get serious” I’ve heard many teachers say in their pep talks to students.

But as one student said to me earlier this week –

“What do they mean by this? What do I need to do to get serious?”

Firstly, here’s what I think your teachers mean when they say, “It’s time to get serious” –

Upper school is different from your other years of school in the sense that what you do now impacts on your future career and education choices. Want to go to university? Then, it’s time to knuckle down (i.e. get serious).

Bear in mind, even if you fail all your school subjects in Australia, there are other backdoor ways of getting into university and you can get a second chance (don’t expect many teachers to tell you this though).

But here’s the thing, why waste 2 precious years of your life faffing around? Get on with things I say. Give it your best shot.

This doesn’t mean that you need to walk around looking glum 24/7 with your head buried in a book. In fact, I firmly believe that you should have as much fun with your studies as possible. Why? It will make for an easier, more productive year and more effective learning.

At the same time, concrete action is required to move you closer towards achieving the things you want in life. To put it simply, if you don’t take action then expect mediocre (if not poor) results.

So if you want to get serious about your studies, here are 5 practical things you can start doing –

1. Boost your productivity: no more multitasking

Want to get more done in less time and boost your intelligence? Then focus on doing one thing at a time.

If you have a tendency to do two or more things at the same time (e.g. homework, Facebook and television playing in the background) you’ll find yourself feeling frustrated and anxious. Research indicates that you may also be up to 40% slower to complete the task at hand. In addition, you can expect to experience a drop in IQ more than twice that found in people who are high on smoking marijuana.

2. De-junk your environment

Being disorganised and working in a messy, overly cluttered environment can cause unnecessary anxiety, tension and heightened levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Do yourself a favour, clear as much of your stuff off your desk as possible before you start your homework or study. This will allow you to focus intensely on what you need to do, which means you’ll be able to get your work done in less time.

3. Invest in time management tools

Managing your time more often than not involves managing yourself better. I highly recommend investing in the following 3 time/self management tools.

a) A diary: A diary helps you to capture all the things you need to do and when you need to do them by before you forget them. Let’s face it, there are limits to our short term memory. Research tells us that we can only hold 7 (plus or minus 2 bits of information at a time) in our short term memories and we can only hold it there for an average of 20 seconds. So if you overload your brain with too much information or don’t write it down witin 20 seconds, chances are you won’t remember it.

Have your diary (or a notepad) and pen close by so you can capture your ideas and the things you need to do when they come to mind.

b) A wall planner: The beauty of a wall planner is that in one glance you can see what you need to do for the week, the month and year. For this reason, you’re able to plan ahead and be prepared for particularly busy periods and make the most of quieter periods. They only cost a few dollars and will help you feel more in control of your life.

c) An electronic timer: These devices can help you track your time and allow you to easily work in focused sprints for set periods of time. If you tend to have trouble getting started with your work, use your timer to work in 8 minute power bursts. All this involves is setting your timer for 8 minutes, taking out your work and saying to yourself “I’m going to focus on doing this for 8 minutes. No distractions”. When the timer goes off you have two choices: 1) Go take a break (only if you’re really struggling though) or 2) Keep going. Most of the time you’ll want to keep going.

4. Be kind to your mind and body

If you don’t look after your mind and body, you won’t be able to study effectively. Being well rested with a good nights sleep (8.5 – 9.5 hours of sleep each night), having a good low GI breakfast and exercising to clear you mind and energise yourself are all pathways to study success.

5. Develop true GRIT

Grit is defined as the ability to persevere in the face of challenges and setbacks. In other words, it’s the ability to keep going when things get tough. Most of the time, when things get tough, what we tend to do is give up and do something easier and more enjoyable (e.g. go to the fridge to get a snack and log onto Facebook). However, if you have grit, you don’t do that. You feel the discomfort and you keep going. You push forward.

Grit has been said to be one of the major factors of individuals success in a variety of fields (sports, academia, chess, etc). It’s been suggested that it’s more important than an individual’s level of intelligence.

So want to become grittier? Practice working on a task with complete focus for 20 – 30 minutes (no distractions). When things get difficult, stay with the task. Don’t try to avoid it. Push through the discomfort. You may just find that after a short period of time, the discomfort subsides.

So next time your teacher tells you it’s time to “get serious”, consider asking them exactly what they mean by this or what practical actions you would need to take to achieve this state. At the heart of it I believe they are trying to say that they want you to do your best by engaging in the things that matter most and will move you forward towards a positive, bright future.

Why do you need to use a diary?

Let’s consider the limitations on our short memory for a moment.

Psychological research tells us that we can only hold on average only 7 (plus or minus 2) pieces of information in our short term memory at a time. Your brain cannot handle too much information all at once.

In order for you to learn new information effectively in class it’s going to make a difference if you can reduce the demands on your memory/mind. You need to reduce your mental load.

How can you reduce your mental load?

By far the easiest way to reduce your mental load is by using your student diary/organiser. You will be able to learn more effectively in class if you take things out of your head (e.g. “English essay due on Thursday” and “Swim trials on Monday”) and dump them into your organiser.

Tips for using your diary

1. Treat your diary like your school pants – don’t go to school without it!

Think of your diary as being like your school pants or skirt. Would you leave home for school without wearing your school pants/skirt? Of course not, it would be ridiculous, incredibly embarrassing and stressful upon realising you were wearing no pants or skirt. In the same way, if you leave home without your diary and your teacher tells you to write something down in your diary and you don’t have it there with you, chances are you’re going to feel stressed out. If you don’t feel stressed out then you’ll most likely feel stressed out upon realising that you forget to do whatever the teacher told you to do (e.g. your assignment).

So bring your diary with you everywhere, every day!

2. Write it down then and there, or else forget it!

Imagine you’re in class and the teacher says to you “Your science project is due in on Friday the 19th of March”, what should you immediately do? Write it down!

Another limitation of your short term memory is that you can only hold information there for approximately 20 seconds. If you don’t write the information down then and there, chances are you’re going to forget it.

So a good strategy is to have you diary placed next to you on your desk open to the relevant day or week.

3. Use colours

This is a map of Japan’s railway system. For a moment, I want you to enjoy the pretty colours of the different railway tracks on this map.

Now, have a look at a black and white version of the same map. You’ll notice that it’s really hard to separate out each track. The railway system becomes very confusing and overwhelming.

Likewise, I recommend that you use different coloured pens in diary to represent the things you need to do for each of your subjects. This will be more exciting for your brain than black pen on white paper and you’ll know exactly what needs to be done for each of your different subjects.

4. Use prompts to avoid nasty surprises

Imagine that you’ve had a busy week at school (see image above) – your art and health projects have been handed in and you’ve successfully completed your maths test. The weekend arrives and you just want to relax, so you hang out with your friends and don’t touch a single text book all weekend.

Now imagine this – the weekend is over and it’s Monday morning. You’re getting ready for school and you take out your diary, turn to today’s page only to discover that you have an english assignment due in today that you haven’t started! You start to stress out. There is no way in the world that you’re going to be able to get it done in the next 20 minutes.

This scenario could have been avoided by simply giving yourself a reminder the previous week in your diary (see below).

Alternatively, if you had used a wall calendar you would have been able to see in one glance what was happening for the entire month. For $2 and a little effort filling everything in, a wall calender is well worth it.

Do you have any tips on how to use your diary more effectively? Let me know!

In some ways I think I was secretly proud of the fact that I was messy. After all, who would want to be clean and super organised? Wasn’t that for uptight people who had too much time on their hands? I just wasn’t inspired to live like that.

But people who were efficient and able to get things done, now they inspired me! I wanted to be like them and thankfully, David Allen’s book ‘How to get things done’ showed me how I could be and do just this – all for $29.95 (a bargain I say!).

Let me give you a picture of what my life was like before reading this book. In the picture below (click on it to enlarge), I am sitting at my desk feeling overwhelmed by the mess and all the projects in my life.

I have had enough.

‘I have too much to do! I don’t have enough time to do it all’ is something I used to frequently tell myself. I always had this sense that I had forgotten to do something, that I was running out of time.

I knew that there had to be a better way to do things and several people had told me that David Allen’s book had changed their lives dramatically.

So I set myself a challenge. I’d give myself 3 days to read his book and implement his system. I wouldn’t allow myself to be distracted by phone calls, email, university work, appointments, etc. It was just 3 days of me with my clutter and new filing system (as well as the occasional conversation with my partner to stop me from losing my mind).

The beauty about this book is David Allen takes you through implementing the process step by step. It’s like he is there by your side, holding your hand and cheering you on as you sort through your piles of papers and random clutter.

Papers, Papers Everywhere!

My biggest problem was I had folders and notebooks full of interesting articles, ideas and projects scattered all over my house. If you told me ‘Jane, go get me the notes you took while watching Al Gore’s movie’, I wouldn’t know where to look.

David Allen says you need one centralised system, that shouldn’t take you more than 1 minute to find the document you need. If it does, your system needs some work.

Mine clearly needed some work. So I got a box (David refers to it as your ‘inbox’) and started dumping everything into it. Papers, paintings and photos that no longer inspired me, books that were collecting dust, etc. What an emotional roller coaster ride this was! I felt excited and liberated as I threw away papers I no longer needed. At other times, I just felt completely overwhelmed by all my ‘stuff’. ‘Why did I even get this in the first place?’, ‘What was I thinking buying all these cheap toxic textas/stationary when I already had enough?’ and ‘Is David Allen’s system actually going to help me? What if it doesn’t?’ I thought.

YouTube Inspiration

One night (when I was feeling flat after sorting through piles and piles of papers) at 12:30am, I logged onto youtube to see if there was anyone out there who had benefited from GTD. I was excited to find an American woman with purple hair who had been using the system say ‘GTD is about kicking ass!’. That was enough to keep me going.

I then got myself some files and created the following:

General reference folder: for all the articles, notes, etc that I didn’t want to throw out

Someday/Maybe folder: For all the activities and projects that I didn’t want to do now but at maybe later on in the future I’d want to do

Project folders: A bunch of manila folders for the projects I was currently working on (these were labeled with my cool, new automatic labeler)

Already, I was starting to feel clearer and more energised (even if I was starting to have obsessive dreams about filing and my partner setting the table with stationary instead of cutlery).

GTD Notebook

A big part of David Allen’s system is the GTD notebook. It’s a notebook or folder that you create that contains lists of all your ideas, projects, ‘next actions’, things your waiting for from others, etc. It’s a place where you dump everything from your mind onto, because the last thing you want is to waste your mental energy by having the same reoccurring thoughts (e.g. ‘I must remember to return my library books’, ‘Can’t forget to call Lisa’, etc.).

I made sure I bought a book I liked because I had been warned ‘If your materials look shabby, you won’t be inspired to use them’.

Much more to GTD

There’s much more to GTD than I can possibly share with you in one blog post. I mean David Allen spends close to 300 pages explaining it in his book! But don’t think it’s complex, because it’s not. David is just extremely thorough and doesn’t allow for anything to be missed.

So does GTD help? Did it help me? You bet! Thankfully my dreams are back to normal and for the first time in my life, I am in control of my papers/clutter and not my papers/clutter in control of me!

Below is a photo of my desk now.

Sure it looks clean, but it’s not about being clean. If only my camera could capture the sense of freedom and how effective and clear minded I now feel from having a system that works and makes sense.