Every semester starts the same way. Five PDFs. A calendar app you will ignore by week three. A photo of a due date that lives in your camera roll forever.

Here is the only version that stuck for me.

Set a timer for 12 minutes. One class at a time.

Write the meeting days first, not the assignments. Once the week exists, due dates have somewhere to land. If you start with assignments, they float.

For each assignment, capture three things only:

• what it is called

• when it is actually due (date and time)

• what happens if it is late (nothing, percent off, or a hard cutoff)

That is the whole dump. Not the reading list. Not the office hours paragraph. Those can wait.

Then put study time on the calendar before the due date, not the night of. A quiz gets 10 focused minutes the evening before. An exam gets three short sessions, not one panic night.

If you do this for every class on day one, the rest of the semester is just checking a list instead of reconstructing it from memory.

I built Locked In around this exact dump. Classes first, syllabus second, study blocks last.