My Time Management Strategies
Although the class schedule that we have has given me an idea of how much time I need to dedicate to this class, I don't think that I will stick to it very strongly because of the fact that I can't predict what the weekly schedule of my semester will look like, let alone what I will be doing in a couple of days as a result of commitments to campus organizations, work, and other classes. I tried to stick to a strict study schedule for the past couple of semesters and it just did not work for me because of the fact that studying for some classes was more urgent due to an upcoming exam or paper that needed to be finished and having to balance work and school. Although I can't promise that I will study the daily amount of hours that my schedule recommends, I will most definitely do the study time of the overall 6+ hours over the week. This may not work for everybody, but for classes like this, I like to sit down and do the week's work in 1-2 long study sessions. I do not do well at retaining information when my study sessions are short and broken up and I do much better giving 100% to a class for a long period.
Time is my biggest enemy as a college student and I know many of you can relate. Here are some of my tips to making sure I am productive throughout the day:
1) Eat well! It's important to fuel your body to have enough energy throughout the day. I have to find the balance of eating enough so my hunger doesn't distract me throughout the day and not eating so much that I just want to go pass out on my couch. Also, make sure to stay hydrated!! Even mild hydration can cause fatigue.
2) Yes, I know coffee is great, but we, including myself, need to stop being so dependent on it to get through the day. Energy crashes are not fun.
3) I like to allocate 90 mins to myself a day to do whatever I want. I set the timer at the beginning of the day and start it every time I start doing something that's not beneficial to my goal of reaching my objectives for the day. I usually turn it on when I'm doing things like watching Netflix or Youtube videos, browsing social media, putting on a face mask, etc.
4) Even if you don't have time, make time for yourself. If you're not taking care of yourself and your health, you will not perform optimally and you will bring more stress upon yourself, especially if you are somebody that burns out very easily. Also, GET ENOUGH SLEEP!! I can't stress this enough. We, as university students, glamorize working until we're walking zombies and getting 3 hours of sleep a week and we sometimes forget to realize that that is not normal or good for us!
5) Identify the things that you waste your time on. Mine is definitely Youtube because there is no way that you can watch just one video. It's impossible. Check out this article to learn about some apps and methods of blocking distractions on your computer.
6) Make a weekly school, work, internship, etc. schedule using something like https://freecollegeschedulemaker.com/ so you have a visual guide to when you can fit things into your day.
7) Make a checklist at the beginning of a day or the night before of what objectives you aim to achieve. If you need to incentivize yourself, promise yourself a reward of some kind every time you cross everything off of your list. For example, I have a cup that I put a marble in for every day that I cross everything off of my to-do list and when I fill it up, I treat myself with a decadent brunch, my favorite meal!
8) Identify your self-destructive tendencies when it comes to accomplishing the things that you want. I find myself procrastinating even though I know that it will hurt me and I do not know why but I can never break that habit. I will seriously try to not procrastinate this semester though. (I say that every semester😃)
9) Identify what makes you the most productive. If you're like me, you have peak productivity hours in your day, a place that you're the most productive and the least distracted, and circumstances that make you want to and not want to do your work. For me, I am the most productive during the morning and afternoon because I get sleepy and fall asleep when I try to work later in the day so I wake up pretty early. I love waking up at the crack of dawn because there is nobody or nothing to bother or distract me.
10) Learn to know when you're lying to yourself and don't let yourself do it. Don't tell yourself that you'll do it later or that you're just going to watch one episode or that you'll wake up early and do it if you know you're not going to. Getting things done and out of the way as soon as you can causes the least stress and a lesser chance of something going wrong and you regretting your procrastination.
11) If you're like me, you have the worst attention span and have many wandering thoughts and things you want to learn about at every minute of your day. This can be extremely distracting when you're trying to do an assignment or studying for a test. What has helped me has been having a notebook that I write down all of my random thoughts and curiosities that I want to follow up on and research later so I'm not googling the taxonomy of bananas in the middle of writing a paper on Arab nationalism (things like that happen to me more than I would like to admit).
I read the articles "The Importance of Just Starting" and "The Psychology of Checklists" and they were both great articles which I will take techniques from, but in order for me and the readers to implement the things that the authors suggest. it all boils down to us asking ourselves "How bad do I want ____?", "What can I gain if I succeed in accomplishing this?", and "How will this hurt me if I do not manage my time wisely?". Everybody will have different answers, but something we will all have to do to succeed is find our inner motivation to do so.
Time is my biggest enemy as a college student and I know many of you can relate. Here are some of my tips to making sure I am productive throughout the day:
1) Eat well! It's important to fuel your body to have enough energy throughout the day. I have to find the balance of eating enough so my hunger doesn't distract me throughout the day and not eating so much that I just want to go pass out on my couch. Also, make sure to stay hydrated!! Even mild hydration can cause fatigue.
2) Yes, I know coffee is great, but we, including myself, need to stop being so dependent on it to get through the day. Energy crashes are not fun.
3) I like to allocate 90 mins to myself a day to do whatever I want. I set the timer at the beginning of the day and start it every time I start doing something that's not beneficial to my goal of reaching my objectives for the day. I usually turn it on when I'm doing things like watching Netflix or Youtube videos, browsing social media, putting on a face mask, etc.
4) Even if you don't have time, make time for yourself. If you're not taking care of yourself and your health, you will not perform optimally and you will bring more stress upon yourself, especially if you are somebody that burns out very easily. Also, GET ENOUGH SLEEP!! I can't stress this enough. We, as university students, glamorize working until we're walking zombies and getting 3 hours of sleep a week and we sometimes forget to realize that that is not normal or good for us!
5) Identify the things that you waste your time on. Mine is definitely Youtube because there is no way that you can watch just one video. It's impossible. Check out this article to learn about some apps and methods of blocking distractions on your computer.
6) Make a weekly school, work, internship, etc. schedule using something like https://freecollegeschedulemaker.com/ so you have a visual guide to when you can fit things into your day.
7) Make a checklist at the beginning of a day or the night before of what objectives you aim to achieve. If you need to incentivize yourself, promise yourself a reward of some kind every time you cross everything off of your list. For example, I have a cup that I put a marble in for every day that I cross everything off of my to-do list and when I fill it up, I treat myself with a decadent brunch, my favorite meal!
8) Identify your self-destructive tendencies when it comes to accomplishing the things that you want. I find myself procrastinating even though I know that it will hurt me and I do not know why but I can never break that habit. I will seriously try to not procrastinate this semester though. (I say that every semester😃)
9) Identify what makes you the most productive. If you're like me, you have peak productivity hours in your day, a place that you're the most productive and the least distracted, and circumstances that make you want to and not want to do your work. For me, I am the most productive during the morning and afternoon because I get sleepy and fall asleep when I try to work later in the day so I wake up pretty early. I love waking up at the crack of dawn because there is nobody or nothing to bother or distract me.
10) Learn to know when you're lying to yourself and don't let yourself do it. Don't tell yourself that you'll do it later or that you're just going to watch one episode or that you'll wake up early and do it if you know you're not going to. Getting things done and out of the way as soon as you can causes the least stress and a lesser chance of something going wrong and you regretting your procrastination.
11) If you're like me, you have the worst attention span and have many wandering thoughts and things you want to learn about at every minute of your day. This can be extremely distracting when you're trying to do an assignment or studying for a test. What has helped me has been having a notebook that I write down all of my random thoughts and curiosities that I want to follow up on and research later so I'm not googling the taxonomy of bananas in the middle of writing a paper on Arab nationalism (things like that happen to me more than I would like to admit).
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| I LOVE Google Keep as a way of making checklists, daily to-do lists, making notes and creating reminders for myself, as it syncs to all of my devices and other parts of my Google Drive. Image Source: I took this screenshot on my laptop January 2018 |
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