How do you prioritize tasks? For many 1Ls I suspect you’re still working this out, particularly with respect to outlining and exam prep. At the risk of being too simplistic, here’s how I have prioritize tasks in law school.
I’ve found that the longer I let the issue of prioritizing my to do list, the less I actually get done. Since college, I’ve realized this is because if I don’t do that the idea of just doing it all is so overwhelming that I don’t do anything… or procrastinate to an embarrassing extent. We’re at the point in the semester (4-6 weeks in) where most law students are starting to feel up against it. Exams are starting appear on the distant horizon. Research and writing assignments are hanging out there. Class reading is relentless. Journal, Moot Court, Clinic, Internship, and Job responsibilities crowd the list too.
This order of priority has helped me keep things, if not manageable, at least largely doable. In order of priority at this point in the semester, I work on law school stuff in the following order:
- Class Reading
- Other class assignments
- Journal
- Other activities
- Review/Study/Outlining
- Career planning
I jealously guard class reading at the top of that list as that material is the reason I’m in law school, though it doesn’t always mean it’s the first thing I focus on.
This week, my tasks are broken down, in order of priority, like this:
- Crim Pro Reading (Monday)
- PR Reading (Monday)
- Corps Reading (Tues)
- Crim Pro Reading (Wed)
- PR Reading (Wed)
- Corps Reading (Thurs)
- Callback Prep (Wed)
- Thank You Notes (Thurs)
- Bluesheet review – complete by Friday
- Prep for Sat class – Friday
- Review article topics for Sat class
- Post-pull article review (author 1) – complete by Saturday
- Case law review for journal comment (up through Casey)
- Outline PR to date (Sunday)
- Post-pull article review (author 2) – first 5 pages
Reading for the week is typically done over the weekend prior while other tasks are saved for the week. Sometimes this means late nights during the week doing things unrelated to class the next day, but I think that’s the only way you can really do it if you’re working full-time during the day. It works similarly as it does to work, but
So, when you sit down and look at the volume of law school work before, how do you decide what to do and how to spend your time? Is the process different than how you have done task triage for work? How do you balance, if at all, family and other personal priorities against law school demands?
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I think it’s harder to know what’s ultimately important and what’s not in law school. For instance, I think the following are unavoidable compromises for most students:
- preparing for class v. preparing for the exam
- doing competent journal work v. keeping up with classes
- preparing to do well in law school v. preparing for one’s career
I suspect the true law student black belts are the ones who have figured out how to slack off efficiently.
This semester, I look at all the discrete tasks clogging my to-do list and just start picking them off by due date. This works pretty well for the most part for short-term, manageable tasks (read 25 pages for Crim Pro on Wednesday, do Law Review office hours on Thursday, etc.). But it works terribly for larger, long-term tasks (submit a first draft of your comment next Friday). If that is the only entry on my to-do list relating to that task, I am dead in the water because my method requires that completing more immediate deadlines supersede working on that long-range task.
The key to my approach, then, is to break all of those larger tasks (and all of law school, really) into bite-size portions with deadlines, and then attack. If I skip this step, then the big things become unmanageable and there’s hell to pay. But if I include this step, then things generally tend to work out okay.
I think Luke’s last sentence sums it up nicely. My to-do list this weekend consisted of taking my son to his soccer game, watching my two-year old daughter while my wife ran errands, preparing for my parents 40th Anniversary surprise party, convincing my wife she did not need a second husband while I am in law school, skipping my son’s soccer practice (different than the game), and fulfilling my office hours requirement for Law Review.
I do not really keep a to-do list. I keep a “what must I do right this second to keep my life from falling apart list.”
I tend to prioritize my things to do by which ones wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. That generally means they’re ready to be done, so I take care of them.
[...] Speaking of lists, prioritizing is the only way I’ve kept my life together this long (Fight the Hypo: Task Triage) [...]