When I first went to college, I was terrible at organization. Now I have my own little system and it works very well for me.
-Clean your room. You'd be surprised at how much your brain clears when your room doesn't look cluttered. I worked much more efficiently in my clean room than I ever worked in my dirty room. I cleaned my room especially well before major papers and exams were due.
-Carrying your syllabi is just a recipe for disaster. Instead, invest in a pegboard and peg them up somewhere in your room that you look at lot, like right over the foot of your bed, by your door, on your desk, etc. I spend a lot of time on the computer so I pegged them at eye-level with my computer, so I was always staring at them.
-Get a lot of calendars and just put them everywhere. I got a planner but I always tire of them mid-year, but I also had a wall calendar and I copied all the large dates from my syllabi onto my calendar. Whenever I got a new date, I wrote it on my calendar. I put one on my wall at the foot of my bed, so when I woke up I was staring straight at it. Next year (grad school) I'll also be getting a desk calendar for my desk, although that might be too much writing. But I find the more I write something, the better I remember it.
-Electronicize (lol) everything. I put alerts in my phone for big things. I put them in RIGHT THEN when I was hearing about them, sometimes even in the middle of conversations, just warning people that if I didn't put the alert in I would forget about them. Your phone should work just fine and you shouldn't have to get a separate PDA. I also downloaded the Post-It note Lite program (it's free from the Post-It website) and put Post-Its on my computer since I am a computer junkie (and they don't fall off like real Post-Its).
-I tried the 5 separate 1-subject notebooks thing. I was always picking up the wrong notebook. Then I got one 5-subject notebook. BEST IDEA EVER. You never pick up the wrong notebook and you just flip to the subject for that class. Same thing with folders -- I got a 19-space accordion folder. Put tabs on the top labeling the folders and then stick things in the appropriate folder. You never pick up the wrong folder again.
-If you carry your laptop around to places and type fast, have you thought about taking notes on your computer? Computer files are much more legible, easier to order chronologically or however else, and there are programs like Microsoft OneNote (which many schools give out for free) that help you take notes and organize them. You can download a free trial here ->
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx It's $79 if you can't get it free, but many schools have it free.
-If not, you have to label everything by date -- make the date the FIRST thing you always put on the page. Try taking notes in outline format rather than prose -- they're easier to keep track of and you're less likely to try to write down everything the professor is saying.
-I also kept my notes in my books. I simply folded the pages in half and slipped them in the relevant sections. This keeps everything in at least subject order if not chronological. In the books I knew I would keep, I just wrote in the margins. This is highly efficient, trust me. You can re-read the material and your notes at the same time (you just have to get over this idea that books are sacred and not to be written in, and then it's all fun and games).
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