Let me start off by being perfectly clear about something: by nature, I am a monumentally disorganized person. I was the type of student in college who had mountains of empty snacks wrappers and papers haphazardly strewn about my floor and desk. I could never find anything I needed. During my first year of graduate school, I called a friend of mine every week to find out if we had important meetings coming up. I have a history of losing phone numbers, missing deadlines, and sometimes forgetting where I parked my car.

I realized when I started my second year of graduate school that I needed to begin developing a tangible system for staying more organized – especially now that I was supervising a staff of college students in residence life. In addition to maintaining my own schedule and work priorities, I now had to keep track of my staff members’ schedules, meetings, conduct paperwork, administrative records, and all of the extracurriculars like publishing and work with professional organizations.

I’m generally not one to believe in the quick and easy fix, but my world changed when I started using the simplest technique I can think of: making lists.

I began my list-making journey during a staff meeting during my last year of graduate school. In an effort to remember everything I had to do, I made my first genuine “to do” list, complete with little hand-drawn boxes I could check off as I went along. The feeling of checking off those boxes was gratifying in a big way. As I continued making lists, I found out that doing so became routine and I was remembering details and events that would have otherwise been forgotten.

Within the past two years of professional work, list-making has kept me incredibly organized and has worked its way into my style of supervision. Off the top of my head, I can think of the following lists I utilize on a regular basis:

1. A personal “to do” list, which I keep updated at all times on my phone
2. A professional “to do” list, which I also update constantly
3. A year-long professional goals list, full of projects and big-picture ideas
4. A list of weekly tasks for each of my staff members to complete during office hours, which I store in a binder and make them initial during every shift
5. A list of semester goals for my staff members
6. A list of important dates and deadlines for my staff members

In addition to helping me stay organized, and helping my staff stay organized, I have found that using lists in everyday practice also helps hold people accountable – and my staff members like this. They have told me that they appreciate knowing exactly what tasks they need to complete as well as the feeling of being assured they are not forgetting anything. They also appreciate knowing that they can hold one another responsible by looking at our weekly binder.

I will not say that list-making alone has made me an organized person. I continue to put a lot of effort into updating my calendar and fighting the urge to procrastinate, but list-making has been a big source of help for me. As a residence life professional staff member, I often have so much in my head that there is no way I could possibly keep track of it all without maintaining lists. I still haven’t found a way to remember where I parked my car, but some day I will get there!

Adam J. Ortiz is a House Director at Hampshire College, Massachusetts

Yes, sometimes I wish I could ground my Resident Assistant staff and tell them that they lose their TV privileges for a week. But today, what I want to explore is how we as Student Affairs professionals are grounding our RAs, providing them with a stable foundation so that they remain in touch with reality and connected to the principles of the organization.  It’s easy enough for student leaders to taste a bit of their “power” and get carried away.  And it’s extremely easy for them– and us, too– to lose touch with the basics and forget all about our foundation.

I have an amazing group of RAs this year. They’re diverse, personable, dedicated students, skilled multitaskers, creative, etc.  But there’s one thing that I noticed last year that really needed to be addressed.  While most of them really like each other and view our staff as a team or family, they weren’t “nice” to each other.  They seemed to think they were above the community building efforts they were asked to employ with their residents.  They didn’t understand that they needed to get along and be respectful of each other.  Not only is this important to accomplish our goals as a Residence Life department and important to their interpersonal skill set, but it was also making our staff meetings extraordinarily inefficient.  They were too busy interrupting each other, talking over each other, or making snide comments to each other about another’s opinion.

By the middle of the semester, I decided that I needed to assess how everyone was feeling about the group, hoping that there were others who recognized what I did.  My plan was to use this assessment as a way to communicate a need for change.  The assessment provided just that.  But once I explained that we had to improve our relationships and our efficiency at meetings, we were left with the question of “What do we do now?”

In brainstorming the answer to that question, I discovered that I needed to ground them. I needed to take them back to the basics and teach them the skills that they’re meant to be teaching their residents, most importantly– respect.  At the start of the Spring semester, I pulled out a giant pad of paper and a big marker and asked the staff to brainstorm some ground rules for staff meetings.  I let them take the wheel, identifying areas where improvement and guidelines were needed.  The list they ended up with was pretty impressive. Not all of the ground rules were serious in nature, but they reflected the uniqueness of the staff and served as a good basis for a respectful meeting and appropriate communication with each other.

As we’ve moved forward with the semester with these ground rules in place, I have heard people remark about changes in other staff members. I’ve seen them take advantage of free time to bond with each other. And I’ve seen them keep each other on task and more respectful during meetings.  Having ground rules to fall back on and guidelines to lead them has proven successful so far.

Do any of you have ground rules?  What sort of rules make your list of top ten?

Devon Purington is a Residence Life Coordinator at Penn State University-Hazleton.