Organizing the Life of a Student Athlete

Being a student athlete in college is one of the greatest privileges that someone can have. For myself, I am able to continue playing the game that I love along with getting a top-notch education. However, keeping everything organized while playing sports and going to school can be challenging. At the Division III level, I think athletes are expected to do more, not only to prepare for their sport, but also to prepare for their school work. Being organized is absolutely essential to being productive.

As a Division III student athlete, I know all too well how demanding it is to balance school work and athletics. My daily schedule is always planned out to the T.

My daily schedule right now looks a little like this:

    - Wake up at 7:30 a.m.

    - Workout from 8:00 a.m. until 9:00 a.m.

    - Class from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.

    - Homework from 3:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m.

    - Workout and Baseball Training from 7:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m.

This is just an offseason daily schedule right now. During the baseball season I will add practice from 3:00 p.m. until 5:30 p.m. on normal days. Meaning that I will need to push back all of my school work until after. Not to mention all of the extracurricular activities that I am involved in.

Right now we are in fall baseball mode which means that we practice 4 days a week and play all day on Saturday and Sunday. For example this past weekend I was at the baseball field from 9:00 a.m. getting extra work in before practice until 5:00 p.m. when we stopped playing games.

As you can imagine being organized and planning out every second of the day is the only way to make sure I am getting everything I need to get done, done.

One thing I do to make everything work is schedule blocking. Schedule blocking is when you piece out an hour or two of your schedule to focus on only one thing. Whether it be school work or athletic training each block only gets that one task. This helps me keep all of my work organized and keeps me on task while working. Below I have put a screenshot of my personal schedule for reference on how to schedule block.

Life can be stressful as a student athlete, especially when dealing with the high academic demands of a Division III program. If you are a student athlete and need help keeping organized, ask your academic advisor for help. I found it helpful as well to ask your coach for help, they want you to succeed in the classroom as much as they want you to succeed on the field.

How to Be Organized When Blogging

Being organized, a concept that some people don’t seem to understand all of the time. I can not count the times I have been looking at blogs or post on lesser known media outlets where the post completely lacks organization. Sometimes down right messy.

In their book "The Art of Social Media," Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick give their readers a small but powerful lesson in Organization.

Kawasaki's key to organization is simple, he says that all you need to do to clean your post up is to shorten the selection using bullet points. Longer posts are less likely to be read due to a readers tendency to skip over vast quantities of text.

Kawasaki and Fitzpatrick are right. Reading large amounts of text in a post on a blog or online news source can turn off a reader. I much rather read something short and to the point. Bullet points are equally as strong in posts because it is easy to follow and looks clean.

Kawasaki says, "If I want to read a novel, I'll buy an e-book." I think everyone can agree with this statement. If we are going to invest in a long work of literature we rather it not be our daily news or post about how to gain muscle in just two short weeks.