The Collision Map

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The Collision Map

Every due date from every syllabus, onto one page, in about twenty five minutes. You finish holding your whole term at a glance, the collision weeks circled, and one decision already made.

Nothing here is generated. Nothing is saved, nothing is sent, and there is no account. Everything stays in this browser tab, so close it and it is gone. Copy your map out before you leave.

Every syllabus you were handed this week was written as if it were the only class you take. Four instructors picked four sets of dates and not one of them looked at the other three. The collisions are already sitting on the calendar. Nobody has looked, and the person with the most to lose by not looking is you.

Before you start

Open every syllabus you have, in tabs, right now. All of them, including the one for the class you are not worried about. That is usually the one that ruins the week.

You are not organising anything yet. You are copying dates. Write in fragments. Nobody reads this but you.

If a syllabus says “week 7” instead of a date, go to the academic calendar and turn it into a date. A week number you have to translate every time is a date you will never look at again.

SEED . What you are actually carrying

Name the courses. One line each. Course code, then what it really is to you, in your own words: the easy one, the one you need for your major, the one that meets at 8am.

Your courses this term

SPROUT . Every dated thing, one per line

One box per course. One dated item per line, in this shape:

Oct 14 | Midterm exam

A date, a vertical bar, then what it is. Dates like Oct 14, October 14 or 10/14 all work. Put in everything with a date on it: exams, quizzes, papers, drafts, labs, presentations, discussion posts, the group project checkpoint everyone forgets. Do not filter. Filtering is the next step and you are not ready to do it yet.

Course 1, every dated item

Course 2, every dated item

Course 3, every dated item

Course 4, every dated item

Course 5, or work shifts, or anything else with a date

GROW . Stack the weeks and look

Press the button. Every line you wrote gets sorted into the week it lands in, Monday to Sunday. Any week holding three or more items comes back marked as a collision. That week is not a prediction. It is already on your calendar and you just could not see it, because it was spread across four PDFs.

Almost nobody guesses their own collision week correctly. Guess first, then press it. Being wrong is the point of the exercise.

Build my collision map

0 dated items read

Your term, on one page

Copy my map

HARVEST . One decision, made today

Look at your worst week. Pick the single item in it that could have been started earlier, and write the date you are going to start it. Not “early.” A date. Then put that date somewhere you will actually see it, which is your phone calendar, not this page.

The one thing I am starting early, and the date I start

Add it to my map

That is your term. Now watch what happens to it.

In about three weeks an instructor will stand at the front of the room and say the paper is moving back a week. Everyone will write it in the margin of a notebook. You will too, because you will be in class and this page will not be open.

One moved date does not change one line of your map. It changes the week it left, the week it landed in, and whether either of those is a collision now. That is four things quietly wrong on a page you built by hand and will not rebuild, because rebuilding it takes another twenty five minutes and you will be in the middle of the term by then. This is where almost every hand made semester plan dies. Not from being wrong. From going stale.

Rebuilding it every time a date moves is the honest answer, and it is the answer people abandon in October.

The Semester Time Manager is the version that restacks itself. It plans your week at 80 percent capacity instead of 100, because the term never runs at 100, and when a date moves it carries the Catch Up Protocol so falling behind has a route out instead of a feeling. Same map you just built, except it stays true. Open the Semester Time Manager. Do the first map by hand anyway. You just did, and that is why you will know whether the tool is right.

If you only do one thing

Open all four syllabi in one window and find the week that has three things in it. You do not need this page to do that. You need about eleven minutes and the willingness to look. Everything else here is bookkeeping on top of that one look.