How I organize my study workflow
Since I have planned to go back to school, I have had to think about the answer to two simple questions: how do I plan my revision to achieve success (or at least to give it my best shot) and how do I stay motivated?
I am studying for a Bachelor degree in History via an online course provided by the University of Paris Nanterre, France.
A few weeks after the beginning of the school year here are the tools I'm using:
For each course I set a schedule of study with the trial exam as a deadline. The schedule is set per week if need, no micromanagement per day to allow some flexibility, but preferably two weeks. Then I register each chapter with due date in a digital calendar (I use DigiCal with a CalDav synchronization). Then each chapter is registered in a kanban board (I use framaboard for it's open source base). The structure of the kanban board is quite simple: 2 swimlanes: main and secondary subjects 4 columns: Semester, Month, Fortnight and Done. Each subjects is color coded and tagged with keywords. So it's quite fluid: the most work is done at the beginning of the semester, then I just drag and drop each chapter studied or scheduled.
So, that's it for the first question. Now, how do I stick to my schedule?
The plan was to use a simplified gamification system in addition to some dailies in habitica. I'm still trying to find when I'm the most productive, so it doesn't work very well right now. The pomodoro technique that I use can only do so much.
Thanks to one user on scholar.social, I stumbled upon the Zettelkasten method this morning. I decided almost right away to give it a shot to gather all my history knowledge stuff, especially for the book reports I plan to do. I decided to use the Joplin app which uses markdown, tags and cross-platform synchronization.
Conclusion:
Studying is still very new for me since after high school I went to a technical college where the organization was very close to high school. My organization isn't set in stone but seems pretty solid to me. I hope I find my pace soon.