How I Stay Organized in Law School

This post was written in conjunction with another post, How I Manage My Time in Law School, which can be found here.

Coming to law school, I was anxious to see what studying and managing my time would be like. I thought I would be up until 2AM every night with barely any free time for myself. After getting some tips and tricks from 2Ls during orientation week, I felt more relaxed and confident that law school would not be as bad as I had originally thought. I tried out some of their advice, and found what personally worked for me. Everyone studies and organizes differently. Everyone takes notes differently, has different schedules, and prefers certain methods over others. So do your research on how others manage law school, talk to your fellow students, try their methods, and find what works best for you.

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Google Calendar and Planner. I use Google Calendar to block off my classes, my internship, and my study time in different colors. I put appointments, deadlines for things, planned hangouts with friends, etc. EVERYTHING goes on the Google calendar. Seeing my week on the calendar helps me to plan when to squeeze in time for reading and to know which days will be busy.

I also have a physical planner that I use. I don’t use this for scheduling so much, because its hard to remember to bring it around with me (thats what my Google Calendar is for). I mainly use it to make checklists of what I need to accomplish for each day and reminders for things to attend or turn in larger writing/marker. Being able to check boxes as I accomplish things on my list makes me feel productive and motivated to actually complete the tasks. Examples of both my digital calendar and my planner are pictured.

Reminder notifications. If I have an event to attend or something due, I will make sure the Google calendar event has a reminder set for ten minutes before. I also set reminders on my phone’s “reminders” app to notify me in advance of the due date/time, in order to make sure I have enough time to prepare or do whatever needs to be done. Maybe i’m overdoing it, but I don’t want to ever miss an event I was supposed to attend or an assignment/application I needed to turn in. It definitely has happened to all of us!

Sticky notes. I am a firm believer in sticky notes (“the sticky note technique”). I put sticky notes on the wall above my desk, and they serve a multitude of purposes. I have some sticky notes indicating the dates I will be on-call for class in the future (so I can adequately prepare prior to class). Some sticky notes are miscellaneous to-do tasks, that take more than a day to do or I am gradually working on (e.g., help my mom sort three years of photos into her scrapbooks). I also do sticky notes in red marker for the super super SUPER important stuff.

Handwritten notes. This is less of an “organization” thing, more of a law-school-logistics thing. I hand-write my notes. One, it helps me retain the information and keeps me from being distracted by my laptop. Two, some classes at my law school ban technology from lecture altogether. In the era of COVID remote learning, its also easier to handwrite notes just because I hate toggling back and forth between Zoom and my Google doc notes on my laptop screen.

Separate notebooks for each class. Usually I make the notebooks separate colors too, but my mom bought all blue notebooks for me so it’s what i’ve got at the moment. If you’re more of a digital notes person, I suggest making folders for your notes by class on your desktop/Google drive and labeling each file with the date and/or number of lecture (for example, Con Law, Lecture 3, 9/1/20)

A note on scheduling class readings. It’s important to know what your weekly schedule looks like and plan out your readings. Law School involves many, many hours of reading for class. I personally read for each class the day before each lecture. This helps me keep the information fresh in my mind before lecture and space out the bulky readings (trust, they are indeed bulky). However, on Fri/Sat/Sun, I sometimes skip ahead and read for a couple days’ worth of class. I also read ahead if I have something big going on during the week (for ex., this week I powered through a large writing assignment for my internship, so I read through Tuesday’s readings on the weekend in order to use Monday solely to write). I also advise that you stay ON CAMPUS to get your reading done after class or in between classes. I do this in order to motivate myself to get it done quickly and efficiently and then be able to go home and not take the work back with me.

Update to class readings schedule, January 2021: I now tend to skip ahead on readings by a couple days in order to block off my weekends for completely unplugged relaxation time! As long as you get the reading done, when and how does not matter as much.

Meal Prep, queen. Not really organization, but more of a time management tip. Meal prepping has SAVED me in law school, when I have no time to make lunch or go out and buy something. Find easy ideas on Pinterest and stock up on meals in the fridge during the weekend so that you aren’t ever running on empty mid-day.

If you’ve enjoyed my post, follow me on pinterest/IG @earthtojul for more! 🙂