down a quick reminder on your list, in the Things to Remember column, as soon as they occur. This takes only a few seconds, and then you can forget about them. The actual scheduling of these tasks will take place the next morning; all you have to do for now is scribble a few words on a piece of scrap paper.
Remember, to-dos and deadlines that exist only in your mind drain your energy, distract your attention, create stress, and are more likely to be forgotten. When you're working, you should be able to concentrate on working, and when you're relaxing, you should be able to enjoy relaxing. But you can't devote 100 percent of your energy to any activity when you have important reminders bouncing around in your head.
Few students have the energy to schedule every new piece of information that comes along during the day. Think about this for a moment: If it's the middle of the afternoon, and you are hungry, and everyone is just getting up to leave at the end of a long class, when suddenly the professor yells out a notice that a paper topic is due the following week...you're probably not going to have the energy to stop packing up, take out a calendar, think about what steps are involved in coming up with a paper topic, and then schedule each step on the appropriate days. It would be nice if you did, because then you could purge the deadline from your
mind and be confident that it's safely recorded in your
