How I Stayed Organised During A-levels

hey friends and welcome back to another a-level video if you're new here my name is ray and i'm a first-year cambridge student studying physical natural sciences and last year i achieved 4a stars in my a levels and i would say that's partly thanks to my organization system as always timestamps will be in the description down below so let's jump straight to the video so

during gcse i didn't really have an organization system and often revised what i felt like and rarely kept track of what i was doing i would often miss homeworks or rush through them and generally lose sheets of paper but this was a problem for me for the most part because i just did enough past papers weeks before my exams to make up for my lack of organization and inefficient work but looking back i wish i had organization system in place because it would mean that i could divide my attention fairly across all my subjects and save time for some hobbies of my own yet when i started a levels i decided to go on the other end of the extreme and end up over organizing i ended up designing a system that was too complex and most evenings i would just spend as much time organizing as i did doing the work i would often procrastinate by organizing even though everything was already quite well organized and i think this may be a problem with many other students who start organizing they don't know how much to organize so end up spending more time organizing than actually doing the work they're supposed to be organizing but hopefully this video will help everyone watch and get an idea of how much organization is enough ensure i have been in both positions of having almost no organization system in place spending more time organizing and planning tasks than actually doing the work but fortunately i managed to find a good middle ground about two months into my ear levels which was great because it meant that number one i could stay on top of my classwork number two i didn't keep losing bits of paper number three i had time to work free past paper questions and number four i finally had more free time than i did at gcse because i knew what i was supposed to be doing and when to be doing it so the principle

behind the system was simplicity i didn't want anything that was too advanced or complex to manage i just wanted something that i could quickly use i could focus on the work i didn't want any fancy color coding or highlighters or half a dozen apps to manage everything i just wanted things to be simple so my organization system is split up into number one my daily drivers which is my paper planner and my ring binder folder number two my kanban board which i use to keep track of more long-term activities and number three my archival system aka having a leave watch folder for each of my subjects so first things first is my

daily planner which is at the heart of my organization system if you're about to click off the video give me a moment to explain why this paper with a bunch of boxes is much better than most to-do apps but before that i'll explain how it is used so it makes much more sense wise better a link to pdf is in the description so you can print one out yourself so here we have the days of the week with the weekdays in bold and we have a box at the top which shows the week we're in now as you can see there are nine boxes going downwards and seven boxes going across in the boxes downwards i just put in the tasks for the day so for example we have unit six science shorts videos physics workbook 10 questions f324 june 2012 paper and matrices homework then throughout the week whenever i had a new task to do at home or at school i would allocate it to one of these days once i did i would cross it off but if there was enough time that day i would just move on to the following day i found this really powerful because i knew exactly what i had to be doing especially during my free periods at school i didn't have to think about what i should be doing i would just look at my list and see what's allocated for that day so i would then check this multiple times a day during my school day and leave it out on my desk when i go home so i can see what tasks i had to finish each day and now for the back side which is used to keep track of homework so here we have one column which is s slash d which is the set date and the due date so that's when the homework is set and that's when it's two then we have s slash t which is the subjects and then the teacher and then we have details which is homework details so what exactly should be done and then we have c slash r which is the completed received so once i completed the homework i just tick off the first box and then once i've given it to a teacher i would take off the second and now i'm going to show you how to fold it in the most effective way which is you first fold it in half like this and often what i would then do is use a pen to make sure these corners are even sharper and then fold it like this so fold it so you can see the days of the week outwards and then do the same to the other side so fold it like that and then you can fold it in half again so now it fits perfectly into your pockets and the advantage of this is that when it's a monday or it's a sunday then you can easily take it out and see what you have to do during that day without unfolding the whole thing whereas if you also then have it stored in your pocket like this then you can easily see these dates as well now there are many reasons why this is better than having a calendar or a to-do list app on my phone but the biggest were number one with a to-do list it's way too easy to set yourself too many tasks for that day and end up getting none of them done despite there being nine boxes vertically i only used up the first four to six which means i had fewer tasks to do each day i was playing the long term game rather than the short term number two with a phone it's far too easy to check your to-do list and then instead of getting the task done just going on instagram or facebook to waste time because it's only a few taps away by having a productivity system separate from your phone i found it easy to focus on the task at hand also it means you can turn off your phone and still know what to be doing because it's paper based number three on my phone i ended up spending way too much time using the fancy tools that were built into the apps to organize my tasks rather than actually getting them done number four once i got home i could just pin the piece of paper to my wall and always be able to see it the problem with to-do apps for me was that once i closed the app i just forgot about the tasks i had to do and forgot to reopen the app until much later in the day meanwhile sticking a piece of paper to my wall i always knew that i either had to finish the tasks for that day or move them to another day if i wasn't in the mood to do any more work that day and the best part is that at the end of the week you can see all the tasks you've done that day crossed off and feel some sense of satisfaction then the following week i would just print out another copy and transfer any homeworks left onto the new piece of paper and throw the old one into the bin as

for my daily folder this was just a cheap three pound ring binder that i bought from amazon which i always kept in my bag i then bought some cheap subject dividers from amazon but because these were made out of plastic i couldn't write my subject names on them so i stuck some masking tape onto them and then wrote the names but there are also paper subjective ideas you can buy as well and i would have one section devoted to each of my four subjects because i had two teachers for each subject i would have two plastic wallets one for each of my teachers which i put in any relevant sheets i had for that teacher as well as any unfinished homework meanwhile some teachers gave us class books whereas for others we had to use refill pads for the latter i would rip out sheets from the pad work on them during the lesson and then put them in the relevant teachers plastic wallet this meant that everything for each teacher was well organized and by the way i bought 50 of these plastic wallets for around eight pounds from ryman they saw fake ones and thinner ones and i prefer the fake ones because they don't rip so easily i'd say they're definitely worth the money because i still haven't used them all after about three years of buying them as for my refill pads i used to just buy cheap 70 gsm 300 page refill pads from ryman you can get six of these for about 10 pounds online giving you 1 800 sheets and i bought more expensive 90 gsm ones uh which were the oxford campus ones i preferred using the 70 gsm for any rough working out and doing homework and then the 90 gsm for making any class notes and finally these two subject dividers at the end i would use one of them for storing any challenge or olympiad papers that i would practice throughout the year to improve my maths and physics skills beyond the classroom and i would use the other one to store any completed homework so during class i could just open up the end of my folder take out the relevant piece of homework and give it to a teacher

teacher so now to stop papers piling up in this daily folder after my teacher would finish covering a topic i would make flashcards on that topic and then stick the papers into a large leave arch folder at home i had one levatch folder for each subject and roughly kept in order of the specification this would then pile up with anything i could use for reference later but i really had to come back to it because i used to make flashcards in everything over the weekends and because i went for my flash cards almost every day i did not have to look at the notes i made in class anymore because they were already condensed into my flashcards if you want to know more about the process i have videos in my playlist about how i got eight stars in my relevant subjects so that's purely served as an archival system which i would refer back to for example a tricky maths question we did during class or some handwritten notes i made on a hot topic i would just come back to it every now and then and finally with all this it's

quite easy to lose track of the big picture of the whole a level course so i would use a kanban board on an app called trello so i have two types of colors i have a purple color for the topics from the specification and i have a green color for any questions i want to get done so now if i go to the unit 6 further mechanics and thermal physics you can see that i now have a checklist and if you've seen any of my how i got any star videos you know that i like to make flashcards on as much as possible and i tried to source information from the flashcards from all these different areas so i could weld the flashcard well and make sure i include all the detail that i need to so this is just the process i went for you for making flashcards for all those topics and you can see if i go to another topic like unit for materials it has a slightly different checklist and now if i go to unit a nuclear physics then you can see it has this checklist as well and i'd slowly work through here changing my flashcards and making them based on this and i would have a slightly different checklist for my other subjects so for my chemistry board i would have a similar layout in which i have the units from the specification and i would have past papers and any other tasks that i wanted to do such as watch science shorts pack videos and now you can see that my cards and openings have dates next to them and those are the dates that i want to do that paper so because i had a separate trello board for all my subjects so i had a different chemistry board and a different maps board to visualize all the papers that i wanted to do in one calendar i would use an app called calendar for trello and over here you can see the cards all the cards which have dates on so i could just easily drag and move them around and kind of balance out which papers i want to do on which days

now finally as past papers are one of the most important things when it comes to revising i used a spreadsheet to track which past papers i wanted to do and which ones i did i used a raw mod percentage to see which ones i didn't do well so i could repeat the metallic today so here you can see my chemistry papers and you can see which ones i did well on and which ones i didn't and you can see that i repeated certain ones over here and i made little comments next to them and i was quite harsh in marking these papers because i thought it was better to be harsh than have the examiner be harsh when they're marking my actual paper you can find a template of the spreadsheet in the description down below and that's basically it i hope you found

that useful if you did then leave a like if not leave a dislike and let me know why if you have any questions leave a comment down below and i'll try to get back to you otherwise thanks for watching and i'll see you next time