I just realized my son has been tracking his college application deadlines in four different places. Four. Different. Places.
Google Calendar, the college websites, a spreadsheet I made, and apparently just… his head?
And he’s a relatively organized kid. How is anyone supposed to keep track of all this? Different deadlines for different schools, some rolling, some regular, some with extra essays, some without…
Am I missing something obvious? How do you all manage this?
We used a single Google sheet that both my D26 and I have access to. That seemed to work well. It’s the ONLY place we kept track of it, so we knew to refer to that.
Thanks for sharing! I think we’re trying to consolidate everything in one location to avoid the headache of jumping between tools / platforms. It’s between a google sheet and notion (son brought this one up), but I’m not super techy so will probably default to google sheets.
We used one sheet as well. But all kids multi-task differently.
But obviously if things are in four places, there’s a better chance of error.
I’d also sort by deadlines - and we rated the importance of apps from a 1-5 so she would do the higher priority first to ensure it got done whereas a nice to have could wait (yet they all got done anyway).
We also noted schools that had similar essays - that she could pop out quicker - we color coded those schools as similar.
Good luck.
Bingo!! Same.
Thinking about the sort by deadlines, but with a priority, one thing we did that’s slightly different is that we actually sorted based on our own priority as primary and app deadline as secondary. So a school might have an earlier deadline, but if it got missed because the deadline was too early, so be it. The prioritization was to keep things in based on how much D26 was interested. So she wouldn’t spend a ton of time and effort on an early application just because it was early. So it’s vaguely complex. She did skip at least one school because it was low priority but with an early deadline.
Don’t forget to account for surprise essays.
High school teacher here. I have seniors, and I know for a fact that some of them keep track of deadlines for multiple friends 
I also give extra points for meeting deadlines - application, FAFSA, scholarship, extra essay, etc. It’s whatever works.
I’m not necessarily proud of this, but I had a spreadsheet and I made sure my S24 did things on time. In an ideal world I think you leave it up to the kid, but they can be so busy and things can slip, and at least our kid found it a relief to just be told what to do.
If only my google sheet could send me automated reminders lol. Thanks for sharing, this was super helpful!