I've just finished my final year of university and (spoiler alert) I did pretty well so I thought I would share my realistic tips on managing your workload effectively during your degree. I realise this is quite a boring topic but I really do feel like I've learned a lot from my three years at Durham and I really hope I can help other people to do well at university. This could apply across all courses but probably relates best to social science and humanities as that's what I've studied.

a semi-relevant photo of my desk from last year

1. Get organised and plan ahead

This is possibly The Most Important piece of advice I have, but in a way it's also the most obvious. I'm lucky that being organised comes naturally to me but I really cannot stress the value of knowing what's coming and planning for it. At the beginning of each year it's worth sitting down with all the information about your modules and creating a comprehensive list of when all your assignments are due - stick this somewhere important and never be surprised by a deadline. Then break it down term by term. Often deadlines won't come at nice even intervals allowing you to take them as they come and focus on one thing at a time, they might be grouped together instead. In my first term of third year I had 6 deadlines, 5 of which were in the last 3 weeks of term, so I knew I had to plan ahead and divide the term up into sections: I allocated 10 days for each assignment which worked fairly well - sometimes I finished an essay a day or two early, other times something else (e.g. tutorial work) cropped up so I lost a day or two focusing on that.

This especially applies to reading, which can be extremely time consuming compared to the value you get out of it. Realistically university terms are short and you only have limited time so it's best to work out how to use it efficiently and effectively and minimise time wastage - this is linked to the planning ahead part too. Obviously everyone has their own way of working, but there are certain types of assignment or assessment that generally require different amounts or different kinds of work. For example, if you have an unseen exam you're going to need to rely on memory, so it's a good idea to spend some time (ideally throughout the year and not a couple of weeks before the exam) doing key readings and transforming the information you need to know into bitesize chunks which you can then use for revision purposes, such as flash cards. Or, if your module covers a few different topic areas or blocks and you know you're only going to have to engage with one or two for assessment purposes, focus your reading in the area you're planning to cover and don't bother too much with the ones that you won't be assessed on. Basically, you need to work out what you're ultimately going to need to know, prioritise, and adapt your study approach to match - the aim is to avoid doing irrelevant work or spending time reading things you won't use. I'll admit this is kind of depressing because it turns education into a production line rather than learning for the sake of learning, but realistically you can't do everything so it's important to prioritise.

When you do read, try to read with a clear idea of what you want to get out of it. I developed a couple of reading 'modes' depending on why I was reading the thing. I would either read for detail and try to make notes that summarised all the main information without missing out too much, which is a useful strategy to adopt for key texts which you can pretty much guarantee are going to be useful in assessments and exams later down the line. Alternatively I would read for relevance, mostly when I was planning essays with specific topics and trying to find useful sources and citations. In this case it might not important to grasp the detail or even gist of the text, but more helpful to skim the majority and just focus on a section or strand or argument which is going to help your overall point or argument in your essay. Obviously these two might overlap within a single text, but again it helps to be tactical as this way you don't waste time.

This is especially hard for me because I am definitely a perfectionist in most things, but when it comes to university work I am able to be surprisingly realistic. I know a lot of people who typically end up working through the night the day before an essay is due, and will not submit it until they are completely happy with it. Although you obviously shouldn't hand in half-finished assignments, it's important to keep things in perspective and resist the urge to keep fiddling and over-editing an essay if it's going to deprive you of sleep or time that could be better spent. Again, if it's midnight the night before a deadline and you've only written a fraction of the thing, fair enough and needs must, but once the bulk of it is done tinkering around with it into the small hours of the morning is unlikely to have an effect on the mark you'll get. More generally, try to resist perfectionistic impulses in other areas. University is hard work and you'll have ups and downs, so don't beat yourself up when you don't do as well as you might normally or if you get a 'bad' grade. Also, it's easy to compare yourself to others but try to remain focused on your own progress rather than thinking about other people.

My final tip for managing a university workload successfully is to find out what kind of extra support or services your department offers and use it! Every university and department is different but they will all have a system for deadline extensions, disability allowances, concessions etc. It's always a good idea to find this out in advance so that you know how to proceed if you do find yourself in a situation where you need it. Similarly, take advantage of lecturers' office hours to go and see them if you have a question or would like them to explain something further, and especially if you're struggling. It's so much better to find solutions to problems early on before they develop into bigger issues and they are there to help you! There are also other non-academic members of staff who might be able to help you with various things, so it's worth finding out who has what role and what they might be able to do for you.

And those are my tips for surviving your degree! Obviously there are loads more aspects to completing a university degree and I've just focused on the very academic angle here, but I think that if your uni work is going well other things are easier to deal with on the whole.

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Now that uni is basically over I've been spending a lot of time just lounging around reading books, watching films and of course watching a lot of YouTube. But let's be real, I watch YouTube even when I'm super busy with uni work - it's just part of my daily routine and has been for a long time now. I love being able to watch snippets of other people's lives and marvel at the creativity and hard work that goes into video-making, whether that's follow-me-around vlogs, sit-down videos or more poetic montages. However, while my YouTube addiction has been growing for several years now the people I'm interested in watching have changed A LOT over that time and I'm always looking for new and exciting channels to subscribe to. 

On that note I thought I'd share some creators whose work I've been loving recently.

I discovered Annabel's channel about a year ago and frankly I'm obsessed with her videos. The production quality is so high and watching her monthly vlogs is like dipping my toes into a glorious little brightly-coloured world of holidays, thrift shops, romantic picnics and artwork. She's an arts student at Rhode Island School of Design and I think she's just finished her second year there. She has a really interesting personality and goofs around a lot in her videos, which is so refreshing and funny to watch. In general she makes a mixture of content, from the more standard format of travel vlogs and favourites videos to more abstract unique videos of her just chatting or painting or both. As you might imagine, she also has an extremely aesthetic instagram!

While I appreciate high quality artsy videos I sometimes get nostalgic for a good old-fashioned sit-down video, and that's where Zannah's channel comes in. She's a smaller YouTuber and doesn't have a huge number of videos, but everything of hers I've watched so far is so interesting and articulate, covering a range of topics from identity to mental health. Her videos tend to be short but they're some of my favourites to watch, like tiny pale gems. She's currently on a gap year so she's been vlogging her travels too which is really interesting.  She's a very nostalgic, thoughtful person and to be honest I feel like we would get along really well.

This is a bit of a rogue favourite and I honestly can't remember how I came across this channel (something's telling me via John and Hank Green?) but I do know that it's one of the most informative channels I'm subscribed to! Caitlin Doughty is a practicing mortician who makes videos mostly about death, bodies and other delightfully morbid topics. She has a number of ongoing series such as 'Morbid Mysteries' and 'Iconic Corpse', but also does some vlogs and other videos with titles like 'What happens to a body during embalming?' or 'Making your Death Plan!'. Why would you want to watch that, I hear you ask? Well, I definitely have a morbid side but honestly this is the kind of information you wouldn't find elsewhere, and definitely not presented with Caitlin's insider knowledge and wicked sense of humour.

I found Harmony's channel relatively recently but I fell in love with her videos and her unique sense of style. She's a practising witch so a lot of her videos tend to be about her craft, Wicca, spirituality and meditation, but she also makes videos about unsolved mysteries/murders and her own experiences of paranormal activity and hauntings. Again, the latter aspects appeal to my morbid side but I've always been interested in Wicca and witchcraft as well so it's fascinating to learn more about it. Her videos are also really aesthetically pleasing and her makeup skills are incredible.

Jack is a English literature student at Durham, which (if you didn't know) is also where I've just completed my undergraduate degree. Again, I'm not sure how/when I found his channel, but I didn't include him in my 'Durham creators' post I did last July because I wasn't aware of him at the time so it was definitely this academic year. He's a study YouTuber who also has a very swish blog and makes a mixture of videos, from helpful study advice to funny sketches. My favourites of his videos are probably vlogs from around Durham because even though I've lived here for 3 years it's so interesting to see it on a screen filmed from the perspective of a fellow student, especially one at a different college. He also just seems like an all-round nice guy and reminds me a bit of my little brother!

And that's it for now! I'm subscribed to a lot of channels but these are my current favourites. If you're looking for recommendations I'd also throw out there: Conan Gray, Evan Edinger, Hannah Witton, Hi I'm Mimi and Lucy Moon.

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Today I'm going to share with you how I go about organising all my notes and other work for university and explain my process for filing information. I worked out this system at the beginning of my first year and it's really worked well for me over the course of my degree, enabling me to find things easily and keep all the important information in one place and readily accessible. Of course there are many different ways you can organise your work and this might not be for you, but I hope it will give you some ideas of how you might approach it, especially if you're just starting at uni.

First things first, the main program I use is Microsoft OneNote. It's basically a note-taking program which allows you to type or handwrite notes and insert all kinds of media including photos, videos, drawing, screen clippings, spreadsheets, voice notes and so on. There's a huge amount you can do with OneNote as you can share files and work on a document together, and obviously it works on both desktop and mobile devices. I only use the version for Windows 10 which came with my Microsoft Office suite, and I mostly use it for text-based information so in that sense I probably don't use it at its full capacity. However, it's still really useful and flexible and works perfectly for me. Also, I have all my notebooks synced to OneDrive so I can be sure I'll never lose my work.

In this post I'm going to be giving you an overview of how I keep my notebooks organised and then showing you in more detail how I set everything out within a single module. If you're not familiar with OneNote or if yours looks different to mine, the hierarchy I use is as follows: at the highest level we have notebooks (on the left), which are divided into sections (the tabs along the top) which are divided into pages and subpages (along the right hand side).

As you can see, down the left hand side of the screen I have all my notebooks. I have a notebook for each module, and you can see the modules I took in third year here. If I scroll down I have the rest of the modules I've taken at uni in previous years which I like to have to hand in case I ever need to refer back to something or check a past reading list. You'll notice I like to colour-code my modules, and I use the same colours for things like colouring in my timetable. I also have a personal notebook, a general uni notebook (which we're in right now) and a notebook for reading notes. I'll just go through these quickly first.

My uni notebook doesn't have a lot of information in it (you can pretty much see the organisation in the above screenshot) but I use it for organising general stuff about my degree that doesn't fall into specific modules. For example, I have tables of all my deadlines, feedback, my to-do list and other admin-type things. I also have a French module I took in second year as a section within this notebook because I only used OneNote to organise my exam revision and I didn't think it needed a whole notebook.

My reading notebook is where I keep all my notes from every single thing I have ever read for uni. In this notebook the sections correspond to modules, which are colour-coded to match the notebooks for each of those modules. This (below) is a quick look at the section for my Feminist Geographies module from second term of third year. As you can see by looking at the right hand column, I have my readings organised by what I read them for, so for example lectures, workshops, tutorials, formative assignment, summative assignment and exams. This paper I've selected here was a lecture reading (in fact my only lecture reading for that module, whoops!). Each page (or subpage) has all my notes for that reading and is organised in the same way: title of the paper/book chapter across the top in the title space, the reference for that reading in a column down the side (so that I know exactly what I read and I can easily copy it into an essay bibliography if needed) and the main body of notes in the main section. As this was a lecture reading I was reading for detail and background rather than relevance to an essay so my notes are very detailed. In general I like to write in full sentences or phrases rather than just key words as it means I'll find it easier to understand what it was about if I refer back to my notes in the future.

Here's another look at my reading notes for a different module called Neoliberal Life. This module was mostly workshop based so I have the pages organised into readings I did for each workshop (it was a LOT let me tell you), with a couple of more general ones at the top.

Now lets look at how I structure one of my module notebooks. This module was called Power, Politics and Space and it was a year-long 20 credit module. It was divided into three blocks of lectures (Citizenship, Migration and Labour; Geographies of Violence; and Colonialism, Political Violence and Uneven Development), which is why I've got three sections at the top. Within every module notebook I always have a 'General' section where I keep important information for that module, so in this case you can see I have my notes from the revision lecture and revision workshop (which didn't fall under any of the blocks) and then my own notes from planning my formative and summative essays as well as the exam.

This is what the first lecture from the section for the block called 'Citizenship, Migration and Labour' looks like. (I've blanked out the names and contact details of my lecturers just FYI). As you can see, down the right hand side I've got all the lectures for this block in chronological order, and each with a subpage of readings for that lecture. The readings are usually given to us as a list in a Word document on our online learning system at the beginning of the year, so I make sure I copy and paste that information into the relevant subpage for that module as soon as it becomes available. The layout for these lecture pages is quite similar to my reading notes pages: I put the number and title of the lecture in the title space, then the date of the lecture on the left, and the main body is the actual lecture material.

I have a system for organising the actual lecture material too. When the PowerPoint slides are uploaded to our online learning system before the lecture I download them, go through them and copy the information as plain text into a page within OneNote. It's not actually as laborious as it sounds as you can usually do it all in one go by choosing 'outline view' and then highlighting all the text, but I like to go through it all just in case to make sure my stripped-down version is an accurate representation of what's on the lecture slides. This is useful for three reasons: firstly, it means I familiarise myself with the content before the lecture so I have an idea of what it's going to be about; secondly, I have all the lecture material easily accessible with a click of my mouse rather than having to find and open a whole PowerPoint document every time I want to check something in a lecture; thirdly, it means I can take notes directly into the lecture material rather than writing it in the notes box under the slides in PowerPoint, which is what I've seen a lot of people do. This means I'm able to add in notes exactly where they're meant to be and even expand on points as the lecturer goes through them. I always add in my own notes that I take during lectures in a different colour, so I can be sure which bits of information were originally in the lecture material and which I've added in. You can see an example of this below:

And that's basically it! Some modules have a slightly different organisation depending on how they're structured, for instance for term-long modules which aren't divided into lecture blocks the sections at the top are just 'lectures', 'tutorial', 'seminars' or whatever is relevant to that module. Sometimes we don't get given reading lists for each individual lecture but for the module as a whole, so in that case I'll put the whole list in a page under the 'General' section of that module. But that's essentially my system, which I adapt slightly as needed.

I hope this was helpful in some way. As a quick disclaimer, if it wasn't already clear from this post I am an organisation fiend and I absolutely love sorting things out, colour-coding information and creating elaborate systems - so if that isn't your thing, don't worry! This is just the way I've chosen to do it and all I can say is it's worked for me, so I hope it might be helpful for someone else too.

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