Time Management

INTRODUCTION

Good time management is essential to success at university.

Planning your time allows you to spread your work over a session,

avoid a ‘traffic jam’ of work, and cope with study stress.

Studying at uni often involves meeting conflicting deadlines, and

unless you plan ahead, you’ll find it impossible to manage. To meet

the demands of study you need to spread your workload over a

session. Work out what needs to be done and when. Work out how

to use your available time as efficiently as possible.

TIME MANAGEMENT FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS

Have you ever found yourself bleary-eyed and strung out from too much coffee and too little sleep after pulling an "all nighter" right before the big biology test? Or did you ever want to kick yourself for putting off that history project your instructor told you about at the beginning of the semester so that you ended up throwing together 15 pages of "garbage" just to get the report in on time? Or how about the time your computer crashed when you were word-processing your English paper the night before it was due, and your teacher said that your reason was simply a new version of "the dog ate my paper" excuse and gave you an "F"?

If you have done any of the things mentioned on the previous page, you are like most people. We all have the ability to put off until tomorrow the things that we know we should be working on today. It's human nature. Unfortunately, ineffective time management doesn't help us much, in college or outside of college.

In "Time Management for College Students," we will give you some guidelines to help you better manage your time. On the assumption that people who want help managing their time probably don't HAVE a lot of it, the guidelines will be short and to the point. They aren't "magic pills" that will suddenly make you super efficient and well organized, but if you use them gradually to improve the way you organize you time, you will probably find that your life is a little less stressful and, with any luck, you will have time to do more of the things that you enjoy outside of your college work.

If you are a full-time student, you have a full-time job. You may not think of school as a job but consider this. You typically have 12-15 or more hours of class per week. In addition, you are expected to put in about 2 hours of preparation and production outside of class for each hour in class. This means that your work week is at least 36 to 45 hours long. This is a full-time occupation. If you have a job outside of school and/or family responsibilities, you may feel that there aren't enough hours in the day.

When lack of time is a problem your first consideration should be the "big picture." Everyone should try to have a balanced life. To update a popular saying, "all work and no play makes Jack and Jill dull people." If you don't think that your life is balanced, you may need to make some serious decisions. Should you become a part-time student because you need the money from your full-time job? Could you cut back on your job hours since you want to get your degree now? Whatever your decision, you should also try to allow time for family and friends to keep that important balance.

Now that you have considered the "big picture," it is time to improve your ability to manage your time. This really means managing yourself. Read the series of mini-lessons for information that may help you.

• Have you ever told yourself that if you ignore an assignment that's due, maybe it will go away?

• Have you ever told yourself, "I'll just watch TV (or do something else enjoyable) for just 5 minutes and then get back to my homework?"

• Have you ever underestimated the amount of work or time an assignment was going to take?

• Have you ever done something else "very important" to avoid working on an assignment?

• Have you ever done part of an assignment, the part you were good at, and not done the part you had problems with?

• Have you ever spent so much time deciding what to do (e.g., which topic to write about) for an assignment that you didn't get anything done?

Answering "yes" to any or all of these questions is a good sign that you know how to procrastinate. Procrastination means putting things off until a future time, postponing or deferring something. Most people have procrastinated at some time in their lives. There are many reasons for procrastinating. How many of these describe you?

• You are overwhelmed by too many things to do, and we know that we can't get them all done.

• You don't think that you have the skills or knowledge to handle the task.

• You are not clear about what is expected.

• The task seems irrelevant; it has no meaning for you.

• You are not interested the task.

• You are afraid of getting a low grade or of failing.

• You give yourself unreachable goals -- you are a perfectionist.

• You are not clear about what is expected.

• You have problems outside of school that you are having trouble dealing with. The list seems to go on and on.