Carter's Thoughts

Using Notion to Organize My Academic Life

As a college student, one of my biggest struggles is keeping track of everything I need to have on my radar. Whether that be assignments, quizzes, exams, or even class times, it is all WAY too easy to forget about! My original plan was to just check every morning what assignments I needed to turn in, and what I need to be studying for. While this can work, I ended up checking my syllabi multiple times a day to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything. That was... stressful to say the least. My solution was Notion.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace for note taking, databases, and task management. It basically allows you to make a customized dashboard about literally anything you'd like. I use it for my academic schedule. Here are my main three sections:

1. Courses & Schedule

This section shows all of my current courses, the dates and times of the lectures/recitations, and a page with each of my professors info (name, email, office hours, etc.). It is basically a catalog of condensed versions of my syllabi.

2. Assignments & Quizzes

This section contains a database with all of my assignments and quizzes, along with their respective course, status, due date, and number of days before the due date. This is an extremely helpful little database that I can look at everyday to make sure I have everything turned in, and that I know what is coming up.

3. Calendar

The Calendar is pretty self-explanatory, but it has a couple cool features worth mentioning:

  1. It automatically links to my database, so I just have to update the database and my calendar will reflect the changes.
  2. Notion comes with a personal AI agent that I can message, and it'll add, remove, or organize the events in my calendar. For example, I can message it: "Add a meeting with my advisor at 11am tomorrow to my calendar." And it will make sure there are no conflicts, add the event, and remind me about it 30 minutes before the meeting. It makes keeping track of my schedule frictionless. 😌

Not only does this setup make my life a lot easier, but it allows me to focus on the actual content of my courses, which is ultimately the point of my education. How do you organize your schedule?
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