A Strategy that anyone can Do to help organize Due Date

Having trouble managing your time? If you answered yes to this question then I have a solution for you and if you answered no to this question keep reading to find out about efficient tips for managing study time. Time management is a topic that the majority of college students struggle with. Time management goes hand in hand with procrastination. In order to become successful student, time management must be mastered. I used several different strategies this week such as the 10 minute Technique, the 20 minute test prep, the D's Due & Do Organizer, and Jeopardy Note taking to develop better time management. The strategy that I benefited from the most was the D's Due and Do strategy. The D’s Due and Do strategy helped me plan and become more organized.


The D's Due and Do organizer is very simple to do and anyone can do. In order to do this strategy you need either a monthly calender or a planner. After you have your planner, you look through all of your syllabi then write down all of your due dates on the monthly calendar like this

February Monthly Calendar

Then after you write all of your due dates in your planner like I did for the month of February, you
then divide your weekly calendar into 2 columns a do column and a due column. In the do column you write down what is homework you plan to do and on the due column you write down the homework that is due for that date. Here is a picture of what my weekly planner looked like this week after I applied the D's Due and Do organizer to it:

Weekly Calendar for Feb 7-13

I am a visual learner so this strategy was very useful for me because I need to see tasks in order for me to complete them. So by writing all of my assignments out for the month and having them on both a weekly and monthly calendar it helped to see how much homework I had in class. In addition, this strategy also helped me to schedule realistic amounts of time for each assignment which is something that I have trouble with. I also liked the D's Do and Due because it forced me to set due dates for assignments so that I did not end up doing assignments on the night before they were due which as a result led to me having more free time.

I used the D's Do and Due for my WRT 205 class and for CHE 116. On Monday my first essay for WRT 205 is due so it was very important for to be organized this week. For WRT 205 I chuked the task of writing the essay. On Monday I wrote a 3 page draft then on Tuesday I went to the writing center to get tips for making my essay better then on Wednesday I wrote an introduction to the essay after that on Thursday i wrote the conclusion to the essay and finally on Friday I revised & completed my essay and I went to the writing center again. I also used this strategy for my homework assignments for CHE 116, every friday I have a homework assignment and a tutorial due. I usually forget about these assignments being due until thursday night or friday morning so I am always stressed and rushing to do these assignments. This week however since I broke down the homework into smaller assignments for example on tuesday I did 5 problems from my online homework then on wednesday I finished this homework then on Thursday I did 5 problems from the online tutorial and I finised the last 5 problems from the tutorial on Friday.

This strategy does not only have to be applied to course homeowork it can also be applied to a person's work schedule or extracurricular activities schedule and even exam preparation.

While this strategy was helpful for 2 of my courses it was not useful in all of my classes. This strategy did not really work for my ETS 107 class where I have to read a book weekly. This strategy did not work for me in this class becausewhen I read the book somedays I wanted to read more pages then I planned on and other days I wanted to read less. In addition, it was difficult to determine how long it would take me to read a chapter of the book depending on how interesting the book was or whether I felt like reading the book. Another reason that it did not work was that it sets dates so it strict and not as lenient as other strategies so it does not allow changes to be made to it. Overall I still like this time management strategy because it prevented me from procrastinating, kept me focused, and allowed me to finish work before it was due.

If you are having trouble with managing your time just remember that using the D’s Due and Do strategy is a very effective tool that you could try using. I would recommend this strategy to everyone and I am going to continue using this strategy for all of my classes.