Three Tips to Become Better Organized

Let's go and talk about three tips to get organized for this upcoming year because I am a person that really, really struggled with being organized, especially as a student, even as a teacher, and even now, and it's something that I have to constantly work at. The advice that I'm going to give you in this video is not like some tricks or devices because in my opinion, everybody has to be able to identify what works best for them. I'm not going to give you any specific little tools or anything that you can follow, but what I want to do is just kind of give you a little bit more higher level stuff for you to be able to focus on, for you to be able to look at and say like, all right, here's where I need to do for this upcoming school year to get better. And here's the most important thing. You're not going to become over-organized just by doing one thing, right? There's no app. There's no one little thing that like, oh, once I just have this, everything's perfect. I know when they want to sell you an app or they want to sell you some kind of technique, that's what they're going to claim. And a lot of times those things are very, very helpful, right? I have got a lot of benefit out of some little devices to help me be organized, but nothing is a golden ticket to understand and be organized for everything. Why am I making a video like this? Not because it's just a video for myself, but everything I'm going to share with you is things that I have used and I'm still trying to implement. Because when I went through high school, I was horribly unorganized. I couldn't even do a planner. I was just like, I would forget things all the time. And yeah, that was just kind of a little bit how my brain works. It's still the way my brain works now. But once you kind of get into a little bit more of the real life, which I'll talk about later, being organized can be extremely helpful and extremely important. But I also noticed inside the classroom when I was a teacher that not every student that was unorganized, but a lot of students that were unorganized, you could see it impacted their grade. I don't want your grade to be impacted because your lack of organization. And I'm not saying you have to be perfectly organized. We all know the students that have everything like color-coded and they're organized to the T. You don't have to be like that. But I do want to give you some ideas for you to improve your organization so therefore you can be more successful in school. And if you are somebody that's really, really organized, well, also, hopefully maybe some of even these tips and techniques can just kind of help you maybe bring it up to a different game, take it up to the next level. Because not just being organized, I want to give you some ideas and a way to think about organization that you can expand, just not outside of your own math class or whatever class you are taking. The first thing that I think comes down to organization, and this really is the foundation, I think to make your organization really kind of shine. And that is just comes down to planning. What I mean by plan is like set aside time to plan out your week, plan out the year, plan out the times that you're going to study, plan out the times that you're going to be doing your homework. Have everything set in a place because guess what? Life is going to come up. Things are going to happen that you were not expecting or you're not planning for. But if you have a plan of like, all right, here's what I'm going to be doing in these times. Like you can adjust. It's much easier to adjust when you have a plan. And then also when you have a plan, when you have like a calendar, you have the dates of what are the most important things that are going on for a certain section or semester, you know what to look forward to. You're kind of prepared for what is coming up ahead of you. And one of the worst things that we want to be able to do is a reacting. So we're going through a class. We're like, oh crap, I have a test tomorrow. Crap, I got to go and study. That's not successful, guys. That's not going to push you in the best foot forward here to do the best on that test or in that class. Right? We want to kind of plan out, make sure we know, all right, here's what my next quiz is. Here's what I'm going to plan on studying. Here is like, I have this volleyball game or this baseball game coming up these nights, like get ahead. Like you don't have to be perfect with the time. And again, this is something I still struggle with because some days I'll, or some weeks and days, like I'll have everything planned out. And then other times it's just like everything is so chaotic and I can't stay on schedule and I have to move everything around. But I think the better you can get at planning, writing down important dates, right? Like again, you can use a lot of apps to like, whenever you have like a meeting or something's going on, like put it down, put it down in a calendar, like plan out when things are going to get done. The reality is, especially with me, is I'm going to forget things. I don't have like some alerts or some things reminding me when things are. If I don't look ahead on my week, say, here's what I'm going to be doing this week. Here's what I want to accomplish. If I don't look at things in the quarterly, like here's what I want to plan and accomplish for these quarters. And I'm not constantly looking at that, then I'm just reacting to my life. That's not a good thing. Deciding, oh crap, what was I going to do a live stream for today? All right, let me go and talk about something random. And you can actually look back on my live stream. There were several times I just did Q&A. That's all it is because I'm like, I didn't plan ahead what I was going to be talking for this week. I didn't have a thumbnail. I didn't have a title. I didn't have anything. I was like, oh, I'm going to go live. That is not successful. I don't want you to do that. I want you to make sure that you're planning out time. When you have meetings or anything else, it's like write those things down. Get your app, get a notification, an alert, and then also make sure you know, plan ahead your week, your quarters, your months, your year, so you know what you want to accomplish. Now, here's why planning is so hard because the next thing is, is you have to give yourself time. When you are organized, you spend a specific amount of time on just organization, right? Here's the thing that I struggled with because I always wanted to do, do, do. I never wanted to set on time and be like, all right, I'm just going to spend some time cleaning my desk. I'm going to set some time just organizing some things. I'm going to set some time looking at my goals, looking at how my plan, how my week is going to look. You have to set aside that time. If you're constantly just trying to do, do, do, do work, do work, or study, or go out, you're not setting enough time to focus on yourself and what your calendar looks like and what is going on and your desk and everything like that. It's going to get out of mess. The thing I kind of like to explain to people is you got to find some time, schedule in some time that you can schedule when you're going to be doing some certain organizational things. I think for a lot of students on Sunday, that's usually a good day to kind of like reset, get yourself prepared for that upcoming week. Maybe sometimes after Friday, you're like, I'm done, weekend's here, I don't want to be doing anything in school. But on Sunday, you got to like, hey, I got to go back, make sure I spend like an hour of just getting myself ready and prepared for this. Because if you don't set aside the time guys, life is going to suck it up. And that is the honest truth. If you don't put forth the time to really focus on doing your planning, writing things down, looking at what's going on, then it's just not going to happen. I constantly have to work on myself with that because obviously my life is very busy stepping away from the classroom as I have my kids, right? And still doing a lot of tons of things on YouTube. If I'm not spending time or saying, all right, I'm just going to for this next hour, I'm going to focus on getting my YouTube videos or my planning and everything scheduled. It just doesn't happen. All those things I want to do, because again, I don't like organizing, I don't like planning. If I don't set my side of time, I'm not going to do it. One of the things that's worked the best for me is one, setting time and using a calendar, using some alerts. But the third thing, this can kind of adjust for who you are and what makes you tick. What this has really helped me out is understanding why you're trying to be organized. Because I think a lot of times, I remember when I was a high school student, my mom was always telling me, you got to be better organized, chaotic, right? But I had no reason to be organized. I was able to get by, I was able to do okay. So it was fine. And so there was no need for me to be better organized. And it wasn't until I started operating this YouTube channel that I started to realize I had the wrong mindset. I had the wrong reason of thinking why I wanted to be organized. Because one, I don't think you just want to be organized, just be organized, right? I know some people are wired, they want to be organized and that's like how they have to breathe, right? Is being organized. I know there's other people like me, there's like, I almost don't like being organized. I like a little chaotic and everything like that. But here's what made me change. Actually, it was before I started my YouTube channel, it was actually, I wanted to create a YouTube course or like a math course, right? And I'm like, I can only create a math course so like I have my stuff organized, I have my math videos and everything else organized. So that kind of prompted me to like start getting much more organized with all my papers, all my tests, all of my math videos. I had to create an organizational structure. Even though I had some reason behind it. And again, that might be for you, right? Maybe I can organize this because maybe I could sell my notes or whatever else online or give them to somebody else, but create some reasoning of like why you want that to be organized. Sometimes for a lot of people, it's for the better grade. You realize, hmm, if I was a little bit better organized, I probably would spend a little bit less time studying because I'd already be organized and I'd probably do better in the class. I think also another thing that we want to focus on is if you're unorganized, it doesn't get any better. You have to get better at that. A lot of people want to be successful and they don't really attribute their success in school like success later in life. They're like, oh, school doesn't really matter. It's nothing worth it. I'm going to operate my parents' business or I'm going to run my parents' business, or I'm going to do something completely different. I don't need to worry about this in school. And I know you can always do a counter example. So I'm not going to say everybody that's successful or has a lot of money, whatever is completely organized because that is not the truth. A lot of people have helpers. A lot of people still go by life being unorganized. I think there can be a correlation drawn that when you are going up the ladder of success, your organization and your ability to be organized is going to significantly help you later on. That's one thing I found from operating a business. I had to get organized. I had to get better. And so that was reasoning for me to start planning ahead better, to have a planner and actually to create my alerts because I would skip meetings and I'd forget them because I didn't write them down. That's not being a successful business owner. And maybe when you're in high school, that's okay. Things happen. You're like, oh, and you could always just text your friends and say, oh, I totally forgot. Make up some excuse that came up. You don't want to be doing that for your whole life. I mean, maybe you do. And if you do, that's fine. Your life is probably going to be very similar to the way it's always been. But if you want to get change, if you want to get better at something, if you want to see a little bit more success, then I would challenge you to get a little bit better at your organizational structure. One of the last things which I always related to goals, sometimes just being organized for success or being organized for future planning is not really a motivator view. Maybe just being organized for somebody else. Your reasoning for being more organized might be based on what somebody else's thoughts are, like how they perceive you, how they look at you, why you clean your room, why do you keep your house clean? Well, again, one, you might like your house being cleaned, right? But the other thing is you might say, well, if somebody stops over or think about your car, do I want my car to be nasty, messy, right? No, you should always have your car clean because you never know when somebody is going to need a ride or you want to hop in. You don't want to be that person that's getting food and everything out of your seat and it's smelling and something's rotting. No, you want to keep your car clean. Even if it's something that doesn't bother you, if there's some dust or whatever else like a little bit dirty in your car, you want to keep it clean for at least other people. And sometimes that is a big motivator or that can be a big motivator if you don't have that internal motivation for it. Again, these are not granular tips for you to be organized, but hopefully these kind of three higher level ways of thinking about organization is going to help you out for this year. And I hope you have a great school year and you get better at doing your organization.