86. Underrated College Resources and Using Blank Planners for Task Management (Q&A)

Episode 86

In this Q&A episode, I answer two questions submitted by listeners of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast.

Question one is from a student. He asks about the most underrated parts of college. (Oof, there are a lot!)

Question two is from a working professional. She asks for some ways to use her blank planner to track work tasks without using time blocking.

What You Learn:

• Why office hours are one of the most underrated opportunities in college—and how to actually use them

• Hidden campus resources that can change your academic, professional, and mental health trajectory

• How to evaluate whether your current planner setup is helping or hurting your productivity

• A simple method for identifying your top 3 daily tasks (even when everything feels important)

🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:

• SchoolHabits University (Parents, go here)

• SchoolHabits University (Students, go here)

• College Note-Taking Power System (Brand new program!!)

• Episode 5: How to Create a Task Management System

• Episode 12: Are Your Systems Broken?

• Episode 77: Time Blocking Strategy

• Episode 83: Anxiety's Hidden Cost in School

Never stop learning.

▶  ✏️Get my FREE parent training: How to Help Your Student Handle School Like a Pro — Without Study Frustration, Assignment Overwhelm, or All the Drama (If you’re the parent of a high school or college student, this training is for you.)

• Get the Transcription

  The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉

  Underrated College Resources and Using Blank Planners for Task Management (Q&A)

  Hi there and welcome back to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is our q and a episode for August. If you are new here, once a month, I answer questions that are submitted by listeners of the show and that includes students and working professionals. I usually try to answer two questions because I try to keep these episodes to around 25 to 35 minutes, so that is what we've got today. Two questions. One is submitted by a student and one is from a professional. So there is a little bit for everybody today.

  Now, I usually begin each of my q and a episodes with a reminder that listening to other people ask questions and hearing the answers to those questions often taps into some of our own questions that we didn't even know we had.

  So I encourage you all to listen all the way through and see if you can grab some nuggets to start implementing in your own life.

  I am going to answer the student question first. So you, if you have absolutely no relevance to student life whatsoever, then you can jump ahead to the next question. But you could also share this episode with a student you know. That would be awesome.

  With that out of the way, I think that we are ready to jump into our first question about college.

  Okay. Today I am answering a question that I think a lot of college students have, or even high school students who are headed to college have this question without even knowing that they have it. So let me read the question. Hi Katie. This isn't really a specific question, but I'm wondering what's something about college that's underrated and not many people know about?

  Oh man. I love this question. Thank you for submitting it. Um, college is full. Of hidden opportunities, honestly. I mean, there's a stuff that everybody knows, like do activities and do clubs and you know, connect with people. But you know, there's so many other opportunities that many students don't know exist.

  Or maybe they've heard of them, but they misunderstand what those opportunities are and maybe think that they're not for them, and that's a huge loss. Because some of these lesser known resources can honestly make all the difference. They can shape your entire trajectory, both academically and professionally and in some cases socially.

  So I plan to share a few of those underrated things. I'm gonna go into several, but I'm gonna spotlight one in particular that I've seen. Sounds so dramatic, but like change students' lives, but like kind of. So let's start with office hours. Okay. Easily one of the most underused, underrated tools, not tools, well kind of opportunities, whatever, in college. You know, to be fair and honest, I am always fair and honest on this podcast. I never once went to office hours during college. I know. So am I being a hypocrite talking about this? No. I'm here to share what I've learned from my own experience and what I've learned from, um, my own experience is not going to office hours.

  And I've learned from that. Okay. But I honestly never went once. It just wasn't something that I did, partly because I didn't know what they were for. I'm gonna be honest and partly 'cause I didn't feel like I had anything important enough to bring to a professor one-on-one. I'm not saying this at all to be arrogant or anything, but I didn't struggle in college.

  I used all of the systems that I teach inside School Habits University, even though of course at the time I had no idea they were systems. So I just personally never felt the need to go to professor's office hours, um, which I think left a lot on the table and I think I missed some opportunities. But here's what did happen. My senior year, I've talked about this before, I wrote an independent thesis and that meant meeting regularly with my thesis advisor, who's also the professor of one of my, um, Chaucer classes. Those meetings, even though they were required, ended up being the most meaningful academic conversations I ever had in college. That advisor became the professor that I was closest to by the time I graduated.

  Now, there were a couple of other professors who had I, you know, sign up for individual feedback sessions after a paper or something, but that wasn't something I initiated, but something that was built into the course and required for all of us. But again, those were the moments when I started feeling like a real person in the eyes of my professor, not just a name on a roster. Because those short interactions, I mean the thesis advisor meetings, those were long, but even the ones that were required. Feedback sessions with professors, those built connections, they helped me clarify my thinking and honestly, they made me wish that I had started earlier, kind of.

  So no, I didn't use office hours in college, but I did get a glimpse of what happens when you connect with professors outside of lecture time. And I now know firsthand just how much those relationships can deepen your learning. They can sometimes open doors that you never, even knew were there, and I'd argue that office hours are critical for everyone, even if you don't think that you're struggling with something.

  And they're especially important in two situations. First, obviously if you're not understanding the material, because once you be, uh, fall behind in college. Like in the content, it can be really hard to catch up. There's less handholding. Nobody waits for you. The classes move, move fast. The material is cumulative, so if you miss something, you kinda like the train keeps going, so the moment you're confused, go to office hours.

  You know, I should say too, that office hours aren't just the professor. It's like the TA just as good. Second, if you are in a huge lecture class, like a hundred students in a stadium style classroom, it is so easy to feel invisible. And honestly, you are invisible unless you do something about it. So introducing yourself, uh, showing up to office hours is how you stop being just a face in the crowd.

  Because I honestly think that when a professor knows your name and sees that you are engaged, that familiarity, Familiarity I'm trying can pay off down the road. Like when you're like a fraction of a point away from the next letter grade, or maybe when you need a recommendation letter or when you're applying for an internship and you want to list a professor as a reference, if the professor has no idea who you are, they don't really have a reason to help. But if they've seen your initiative, your effort, and your face during office hours. They actually have every reason to advocate for you. So that is one underrated part about college office hours.

  Another underrated gem is your school's academic support centers, like the writing center, the subject specific tutoring centers or whatever, and even the library staff.

  These are not remedial services, meaning you don't need to be failing anything to use them. In fact, the best students often use them the most. Why? Well, because high performers. Know how to leverage support. Writing centers can help you sharpen an already good paper. Tutors can help you talk through ideas even if you're technically passing the class right?

  Um, library staff are trained researchers. Not a lot of people know this, but they can save you hours on a project just by showing you the right tools or, you know, steering you in the right direction. Um, another one, campus counseling and mental health resources. Most colleges offer some form of free or.

  Heavily subsidized counseling, and it's one of the most underutilized services out there. College is hard. It's gonna be real. It's hard emotionally, it's hard socially, academically, and even if you're, I'm air quoting this if you're not seeing it on YouTube, but even if you're fine, you still have so much on your plate.

  I've had students book just a few sessions for things like test anxiety, homesickness, or even dips in their motivation that they can't explain, and then they come out with better coping tools and better self-awareness even after just a few sessions. That's not gonna like fix a whole thing, but it's sometimes just enough to get you back on your feet.

  You don't need a. True. Again, like I'm trying to be mindful of my language and I'm air quoting. You don't need a, a true diagnosis to benefit like a mental health diagnosis of some kind to benefit from these services. You just need to care about your own wellbeing and if your school offers that kind of support, take it nowhere else in your life is that kind of support just gonna be available for you. Now, of course mental health is critical at any point in your life, but in college it can be a make or break moment. Um, if you don't get support when you need it. I had an awesome interview recently with Dr. Jackie Park that was episode 83. It's all about anxiety in college and what that looks like and how to manage that and how to come, you know, understand what that looks like.

  So if that's something that you're dealing with, check out that episode for sure. 83.

  Some other hidden or underrated gems. I'm not gonna go deep into these, but I do have just a few, um, worthy of mention ones. One of them is career services.

  This is where you can get resume help, you can practice with mock interviews. Those are fun. I always recommend those. Uh, you can find research opportunities, all kinds of things. And my recommendation is do not wait until senior year to tap into these services.

  For real. They are available from your first year of college. Um, another one. Libraries and maker spaces. Yes. Books obviously, but also tech rentals. Uh, quiet zones, like study rooms that you can rent out. Free software like Adobe programs and things that normally cost a lot of money. And even 3D printers in some place if that's, I dunno, relevant for what you're doing.

  Also, things like museum passes and tickets to local shows. All sorts of cool things are available through your school library. Um, and then alumni networks. These are where you can tap into the huge network of people who graduated from your college. And these are people who have already agreed to be willing and able to meet with you to offer support and mentorship or maybe even career or internship opportunities.

  You know, I remember years ago maybe it was like 10 years ago at this point, I, no. A student from the college I went to reached out cold email to me and was like, Hey, you're listed in our alumni network for Mount Holyoke College, which is where I went for undergrad. And I live in the town next to you and I'm interested in education.

  Can we chat? And I was like, yes, of course. And we met for coffee and it was really good. I mean, I had no like job opportunity to offer her, but it was a wonderful conversation and she was grateful for it and I would totally do it again.

  Um, you know, another one just occurred to me, I remember this is something that I didn't know colleges offered. Um, and maybe not all colleges do, but I think so is my college would offer bus, not you still to pay for it, but like super discounted. Bus tickets to nearby cities. So my college was in Western Massachusetts, and like once a month you could reserve or, you know, buy a ticket for like super cheap, maybe like $10.

  And the bus would take you to New York City for the, for the, what was it for the day or for the weekend. I forget. I feel like it was for the day. Like you leave Wicked early in. Yeah, it was for the day. 'cause I'm like, there's no way I could have afforded like sleeping in New York City for the night. Um, so you show up like wicked early in the morning on a, on a Saturday morning, and the bus takes you and then just drops you off in New York City and you do your own thing.

  You can go shopping, just go to the park, whatever you want, and then the bus, um, you all meet at a certain spot and it brings you back to the college later that night. And when else would you be able to just get, you know, a prearranged. Bus to New York City from your door stop basically. Right. And there were some other cities that were, that they had bus transportation too, but I think New York was like the coolest one from where my location was.

  So check to see if they have like weekend adventures. That's something too, that's not that obvious because it's easy to walk through an experience like college thinking that everything important is gonna be announced and obvious, but that's really not how it works. The best stuff, the best opportunities is often the stuff you have to go find yourself.

  'cause honestly, the resources are there. You just have to be curious and bold enough to use them.

  Okay, let's move on to the second question. This one is from a working professional who has a question about task management. She writes, I have a planner but not one with times broken out. I find it does not work well for me.

  I use a weekly and monthly planner and put my appointments in the little boxes, but I do not put my self-employed work in the planner. Can you suggest the best way to use this type of planner for the day-to-day business tasks (bookkeeper) That I have to do? Okay. I love this question primarily because it gives me permission to talk about planners, and if you've been around the block at all, or if you've met me in real life, you know that I have a strong affinity for a paper planner.

  Some might call it love. Tomato, tomato, but I am at heart a planner girl. Um, and this is also a great question because it gets, lets me remind listeners about something that I really try to emphasize on this show. So, and that's this. As much as I share strategies and systems and tools and frameworks for learning and working smarter, the ultimate skill, the real best way to upgrade yourself in school and work is the ability to evaluate yourself and adjust when things aren't working. There is no single productivity or a task management system that works for everybody. So if I'm talking about a particular task management strategy or time management system, I'm never coming from a place of this is the only way it can get done.

  I am sharing frameworks and core principles behind learning and working smarter. But the ultimate way to learn and work smarter is to evaluate what you're doing, to evaluate your own systems and evaluate your tools and ask yourself, honestly, are they working for me? Is this way that I'm doing things, making my life easier or harder?

  I have a podcast episode called Are Your Productivity Systems Broken? That's episode 12. I'll leave it linked in the show notes, but that's a really great place to start and I have a self-evaluation checklist in the show notes of that episode that can help you start that evaluation process. But the listener question indicates that she's already done that work.

  She's saying, I am using a paper planner and I have done the work to figure out that a planner with individual time slots, kind of like an appointment planner or like a time blocking planner, doesn't work for me or doesn't work for her. Okay. Now time blocking works for many people, but not for everybody.

  If you're like, Katie, what the heck is time blocking? I cover that in episode 77. Back to the question, it sounds like you're using a planner with the daily and monthly sections, which is great, and that's what I always recommend. Okay, and you're asking what's the best way to track your daily tasks for work in each day's blank section of the planner?

  For example, let's say that you have 10 tasks to do on Monday. What's the best, best approach? Just write all those 10 tasks as a list on Monday's section, or is there a different way to go about this? A couple different ways to think about this. You can absolutely just keep it simple and just write all of the tasks that you have to do on Monday space. If you have to do them on Monday, you write them on Monday space. You can prioritize them if you want to, and I'm gonna talk about that in just a moment.

  But the most important thing here is that you are getting them out of your head and onto the paper. For some people that strategy is enough, just writing them down in whatever order they occur to you. And then throughout the day, you just work on those tasks in whatever order makes sense for your schedule and your energy and your time.

  That is the most basic way to go about doing this. But if you're looking for a little more structure, which obviously not the full structure of time blocking, 'cause you already said that doesn't work for you, i'm gonna suggest coming up with the top three. So I do talk all about task management in episode five.

  So I really want you to go back and listen to that episode. If you haven't, or if it's been a while, maybe listen to it again even on, you know, 1.5 x speed. But there is something to be said about identifying your top three tasks for each day. And putting those at the top of your list. Now, some people call this the VIP method.

  So your three VIP tasks. I've also heard it called the MIT method. So your most important tasks, MIT. I like to keep it simple and I just call it your top three. Okay? This is what I personally do for myself and my own paper planner. 'cause I have found that it works for me. This is what I teach inside School Habits University is one strategy.

  So if you know what your top three tasks are for the day, as you are generating your brain dump or your schedule for the day, that's great. And you can just write those top most important. Three, three top, most important. I got that all scrambled. Three most important tasks first, and then list the remaining tasks in whatever order.

  Doesn't matter, I guess. Or if you wanna sort of just brain dump all of the tasks that you have to do in a day as they occur to you, You could do that, um, somewhere else, like maybe on a list. And not filter, not prioritize, not be like, oh, this has to do for me first and this second. Just get them on a list and then go back to your list and you can put stars or some kind of indicator next to the three that you have identified as the most important.

  maybe you do a brain dump on a separate piece of paper and then transfer them over into your planner. And as you transfer them over, you are prioritizing them. That's an extra step. And maybe you're not looking for friction. I would just dump 'em in your planner and put stars next to the three after you, you know, and they might not be at the top of the page, but there's gonna be three stars in there.

  But that's all options for you. Now, a follow up question I get a lot to this is, well, how do I know what my top three are? How do I know what's important? And honestly, that's where the skill of prioritization comes in. I can't tell you what your most important tasks are. You know, from your question, you say you're a bookkeeper.

  I don't have a lot of experience. Well, I don't have any experience bookkeeping, so I don't know what those, you know, three important tasks are for you. But I will tell you some ways to think about this. I'm gonna use my own business, for example, 'cause that's the only experience I have to draw from. I mean, I could talk about other clients too, but most of my other working professionals who have some kind of task management system.

  Uh, are at the point where they can identify what their most top three are. Um, but then that's usually followed by Yeah, but like, everything's important. But anyways, I essentially have two businesses. I have a brick and mortar business that I run out of a separate office in my hometown. Um, that's where I see students in, clients in person or on Zoom.

  That is my coaching business with private clients. Now, the other part of my business, which takes more time than I like to admit, and anyone can really imagine is the digital part of my business. That's the YouTube channel. This podcast, my blog, my School Habits University course. I also have a brand new awesome program available right now to everybody.

  There's no waiting called the College Note-Taking Power System. I will leave that link below. Hint, it's only $47 and it's pretty sick for college students. Anyway, it's awesome. That's really the, the digital tasks, that's where I have to do the most prioritizing because for the seven to eight hours a day that I am with clients, like that's what I'm doing.

  Like I don't need to prioritize that. Like whoever's sitting in front of me, I'm prioritizing them. But on the other days and the other hours, I need to be in charge of managing a million irons in the fire and I need to prioritize what those tasks are related to the digital side of the business. So I always prioritize my blog posts on school habits.com.

  Um, I make sure that it's written and added to my website on Mondays and the images are made and the Instagram post that goes with it is created and posted. My Pinterest pins are in descriptions about that are up, and I've done all of the marketing that goes with that post. So on Mondays, even though I have a thousand other things to do, my most important tasks are write blog, market, blog post, make the graphics for the blog posts for like, you know, the, um, what's called thumbnail and all that stuff.

  And then usually my third one is some kind of editing either for the podcast or for a YouTube video. And under my top three are approximately 4 million other tasks, and I do my best to get to them, but I know at the end of the day if all the junk hits the fan, which let you know, it tends to do because this is life.

  If I've completed my three most important tasks, I am mostly good. And then anything that I don't get to on Monday gets moved to Tuesday or to another day. Not just some random abstract time in the future, but to a specific other day. And that's the thing here, you can write all of your tasks down for a particular day, but if you don't get to them, which is fine, right?

  It's important to move those tasks to another day, either the very next day or another day in the week. And I know personally what my most important tasks are, 'cause I have goals in my business and my tasks are related to those goals. And there's something called the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts.

  So that means if you wrote down, I'm gonna keep the math simple, but if you wrote down 10 tasks in a day, two of those tasks, so 20% are gonna give you about 80% of the results that you are looking for. So my question to you is, what is your 20%? What two things are you doing on most days that aren't busy work?

  They aren't admin work. You would use an admin block for your admin work, but that move you toward your business goals? Right? And, and you have to know what your business goals are. Now in terms of formatting these daily sections in your planner, that's totally up to you. You could use a certain color for your top three tasks.

  You can draw little check boxes next to your tasks so that you have something to tick off. All of that's up to you. But the recap here is that you write all of your tasks down for the day, either all at once, or you prioritize them as you write them down. And then in, you know, maybe in some way, shape or form, identify your top three.

  That if the day went down, You know, in your heart of hearts that those are the most important things for you to do.

  Okay. I feel like I talked really fast. I hope that question, or I hope that answer was helpful. I think it was a great question. And again, as a reminder to everybody, you can submit your own questions by filling out the form at Learnandworksmarter.com.

  It's right there on the homepage. You can also find links to everything I mention in today's episode, including my brand new program, the College Note Taking Power System. In the show notes, which is at Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/86. Thank you for your time. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep doing the hard work, keep showing up, and never stop learning.