Staying organized during chaos

With the start of a new semester upon us and one behind, I got to thinking about how Lean can be implemented into finals week to not only help the stress of the student, but also their grades.

When finals week rolls in students can be found in just about every nook and cranny on campus. Whether they’re stressing over studying or stressing about not having enough time to study, students can be found with a frazzled look on their faces, myself included in this norm. This stress comes from the lack of organization of material, time, and areas to apply focus. Being in an environment of disorganization and structure simply adds to the stress and in turn takes a toll on both the student and sometimes their academics.

During the spring semester,  I began my own studying for finals about a week earlier then most. While studying I began noticing that I wasn’t getting very much done in my drawn out hours in the library. I had a textbook open in front of me and I was taking notes, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to learn let alone how to get there. I quickly realized that this wasn’t going to go very well especially because I wasn’t sure what it was that I was trying to achieve. I realized I was wasting my time and energy  and I also noticed that this waste likely wasn’t going to have a desirable product, my grades. Thankfully I am familiar now with Lean and Continuous Improvement and was able to resolve this in a timely manner by implementing lean and 5s into my studying habits to achieve as much value added as possible. By implementing Lean and remembering improvement tools, I became more productive, organized, and stress free.

Using the idea of 5s allowed me to discipline myself to SORT out what material I knew and didn’t and also what seemed like it’d be important or not. After sorting through the material I was then able to STRAIGHTEN up how I was studying, I made a study schedule and also marked where all of the material I needed to study was in my textbook and/or notes. SHINE was next where I was continuously modifying the study schedule I had made to be able to stay on track and accomplish a lot at an attainable level, this changed a handful of times and  continued to be modified up until the day before my exams. Finally, I STANDARDIZED the previous steps several times to make sure I was utilizing the most of my studying, and then I SUSTAINED. Through the previous steps, I was able to organize my studying to a simplistic schedule that provided a lot of depth for grasping the knowledge in a stress free environment.

As a result, my scores on my finals provided satisfactory results that triumphed well over what I had even hoped to achieve.