Hello, potential new member!

You may have heard that sorority membership will help you improve your skills in time management and organization. But has anyone shown you their colour-coded agendas, walls filled with sticky notes, and multiple phone alarms to ensure you can’t Snooze your responsibilities away?

I am the kind of person who puts sticky notes with the same reminders on different walls, to ensure I don’t forget something. This is not because I’m forgetful either; one reminder will often do the trick, but I’ve been putting this strategy into practice since I was a (fairly stressed) college student. At 18 years old, I was living in a small dorm room with minimal decor but plenty of wall space. The most effective way to make use of that space was to visually organize my ideas, my to-do’s, my long mental list of stuff… and sticky notes worked really well because they were small, colourful, and easy to categorize.

Home errands (dishes, laundry, meal prep) in pink…

School-related tasks in yellow…

Work schedule and work reminders (Polish your work shoes!) in blue…

Social events/invites in green…

The list could absolutely go on. I didn’t have a particularly extensive variety of things to occupy my time, so breaking them into these groups was manageable. When I first joined my organization, I was told that sorority life would make me more organized. I was more than a little enthusiastic about the idea of suddenly becoming an expert in time management, and assumed the group of women were all skilled experts in the methods I use to manage my time. Admittedly, I was disappointed at first because there was no one-size-fits-all technique for time management. I thought I had made all of the “right” choices based on these strategies I created for myself, but no one else was doing the same thing!

At this point, I realized that being skilled in this way actually looked and felt like everyone having different tools and tricks and ideas. I learned that my sticky notes, a friend’s online schedule in iCal, and a classmate’s agenda stuffed with individual notes on slips of paper were all part of the same package. Sorority life doesn’t give you one way to do things, but it will teach you that there are plenty of ways you may not have ever considered.

Time management is one skill that fills many people with nervous energy, and that’s because we’re often led to assume someone else’s way is better. It’s about ensuring you have time for all of the necessary and urgent things, time for the fun things, and time to rest in between. “Balance” doesn’t need to look like 24 hours meticulously mapped out, but it should look like a day that you know you can manage.

Yours in sisterhood,

Maya

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Let’s chat! What are some of the challenges you’ve experienced in creating, or sticking to, a daily or weekly schedule?

Stay tuned for next week, I’ll be exploring how what parts of our time is managed as we grow through sorority, and how different that is from time “management” at 18 years old.