Hasta La Ideas

Last summer, our intern Julia was heading into her junior year of college, lived in a dorm, and had great advice to share on getting a college dorm room organized. This summer, our intern Tim is working on his Ph.D., is married, and is a genius at writing computer code. Tim’s skill set is perfect for the technical needs at Unclutterer and Dancing Mammoth, but he has been away from a dorm room almost as long as I have.

So, we thought we would point you to three wonderful blog posts we have seen this week on Lifehacker on the subject of back-to-school issues for college students instead of asking Tim to stop writing code. Everyone wins. Enjoy!

Getting Things Done explained for students on Lifehacker:

… Contexts are an awesome way of organizing assignment to-dos. Instead of having one daunting list of homework, you separate each item by what materials you need to get it done. That way, when you’re trying do a little HW at your work-study job, you’re not trying to read books you don’t have with you or look up files that are on your desktop at the dorm …

DesignYourDorm takes the guessing out of moving in:

… Just supply your school, residence hall, and room number during registration, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a 3D model of your room. The site doesn’t have replicas of every room in every university in their database, but they allow users to add floor plans, meaning that in time it’ll only get better …

Also, 10 must-dos for the first week of college:

Start your (note-taking) engines: Get in the habit of writing everything down from the very first meeting of the class. Keeping your hands moving (we mean taking notes) will help you actively engage with the lecture, and will pay dividends when you discover that 80 percent of the midterm is based on class lectures.

Have you spotted any college organizing advice in the past few weeks on other blogs? Share them in the comments.