Tools for staying organised

As you begin to seriously work towards securing your place in Medicine, you’ll find that staying organised and focused in your UMAT® Exam preparation is entirely up to you to handle. In this article I’ll be running through some useful tools for keeping your life organised and making things easier to handle. Staying organised is a lot more important than you might think: for those who decide to simply wing it, the sheer amount of work can  quickly become overwhelming. Luckily, there are many ways of making this workload easier to approach, and many tools to make this work.
 
First of all, and probably most obvious of all, a to-do list. This is the go-to method of organising tasks, but many people fail to realise that a to-do list is not enough to truly stay organised. Of course, this all depends on the scale of the task at hand, and you should always exercise common sense when choosing how organised you need to be for a particular task. For example, it would be nonsensical to go beyond a simple list if you were looking at grocery shopping. On the flip side, many people will simply stop at a to-do list and while this might work out on smaller assignments, it is not sufficient or practical for larger assignments or group assignments. There are many ways you could incorporate to-do lists into your work, making them very versatile. You can of course use the ever reliable pen and paper (though you risk misplacing your list), or you can use digital versions such as Google Keep, OneNote and a myriad of other online to-do lists, which are harder to get to at a moment’s notice but can never be misplaced or lost.
 
The next most obvious tool to use is a calendar. Unlike with the to-do list, I find that digital calendars are almost undeniably superior to pen and paper calendars or diaries. Digital calendars can more easily and accurately show you a complete picture of what events you might have on in the next few weeks, and have the advantage of being able to quickly establish recurring events, such as weekly lectures/sports meetups etc. If you were to do this with a diary or planner you’d be wasting precious time filling this information in. Another advantage is, with the ubiquity of digital devices in our lives, you can almost always have access to calendar reminders for your events. My foremost recommended calendar app would be Sunrise, as this can be set up to access many other web calendar services. One of the most obviously useful services is Facebook’s calendar.
 
Sunrise is capable of pulling in your event invites and allowing you to respond to them within the app, allowing you to see whether or not you are free in a glance. It also populates your calendar with the events you’ve indicated you are going to. I would recommend you use either Outlook or Google’s calendar service and access them via Sunrise, as you will be able to organise your tasks with a complete picture of the events you have planned. This means your UMAT® Exam preparation can realistically integrated in your other workload and social engagements with minimal efforts. You also have the option to make that calendar available to friends, family or study group, so they are best able to support you during your UMAT preparation.
 
Now that we’ve been through why and how digital calendars can be so useful in giving a complete picture of your plans, we should look at how to actually use them effectively. As mentioned earlier, many people make the mistake of solely using a to-do list, when it should only really be a first step. Scheduling tasks should be the second step, and calendars are your tool for managing this. Having identified the tasks you need to work on in your to-do list, your next step is to 1. identify how much time you need for the task and 2. identify when this task needs to be completed by. This should NOT be the due date for the overall task, and you need to set suitable buffer time in case something goes wrong. On the same note, this is another strength of digital calendars: you can easily move planned tasks around on your calendar.
 
The combined use of a to-do list and a calendar should be suitable for most students, but for larger more complex projects that you may come across in workplaces or research placements, calendars may be insufficient. For large projects it is useful to see timelines for each task separately in their entirety. Calendars are more useful for scheduling blocks of time to be spent on each day, and not so much for time courses such as several days at a time. Instead, a Gantt chart is very useful. A simple yet effective Gantt chart can be created in Excel (or its alternatives) by putting dates down a column on the left and each task in its own column, with subtasks (if applicable) on their appropriate dates. Another column can be used to indicate what other events lie on each date, so you have an idea of how you can schedule these tasks.

In summary, staying organised is completely up to you to enforce, but there are many tools available to make this quick and nearly effortless. You’ll find that once you schedule your tasks, large workloads become easier to deal with and you will feel less stressed because you know that you are on top of things. You must however not fall into the trap of feeling as if organising your tasks is somehow equivalent to actually working towards them: DO NOT spend too much time on this. Micromanaging your tasks excessively will likely waste more time overall. Hopefully with these tools in your hands, you will be able to face any and all tasks thrown at you during the challenges of UMAT® Exam preparation.