How students can improve their time management skills

Time management is a tool for optimizing time. With its help, you can do more, spending less effort, but at the same time getting a high-quality result. Knowledge of the rules of time management in student life will help to manage time correctly, plan your day as efficiently as possible, spare hours for personal affairs. Being a student I was able to have more free time for my hobbies thanks to time management, I also preferred to pay someone to write my paper online.

There are special practices and tools for this. This includes prioritization, making lists, monitoring, analyzing time spent, delegating cases, setting goals, allocating time, and planning.

How to manage your time competently?

Time management for students depends on the established schedule of classes and the issued curriculum. In September, when the schedule becomes known, you can start planning your study and personal time. 

 

Basic principles of time management

 

Analyze time. This will help determine how much time is needed to prepare for classes if you do not get distracted by extraneous actions. It is necessary to add time for secondary, but also necessary things (morning exercises, reading books), for sleep. As a result, you will find out how much free time you will have left, and you will be able to decide what to spend it on with the greatest benefit.

Prioritize. All tasks can be divided into four groups according to the level of importance and urgency. Important and urgent matters are urgent, they should be in the first place. By postponing unpleasant things, you create emotional stress for yourself, which will prevent you from enjoying other things. In second place are important matters, but not the most urgent. It can be reading, sports, hobbies, or socializing with friends. Urgent, but not the most important things can be delegated to someone (delegated) — this can include washing, cleaning, and cooking, grocery shopping. Non-urgent and unimportant cases often turn out to be useless (empty chatter on the phone, watching TV series and reality shows). It is better to get rid of them completely – as from the eaters of time resources.

Plan your day. Based on the time you have already spent, you can plan tomorrow and even a week ahead. Write it down so as not to miss anything important. Determine the hours that are most suitable for homework. Insert the meal and the time for its preparation into the schedule. Think about what you will spend the remaining time on. Make a list of personal chores (cleaning, laundry, shopping, playing sports, reading books, watching movies, chatting with friends, participating in interesting activities, hobbies, etc.) and distribute them evenly throughout the week.

Lead time. Important things that require long-term execution should be planned. It is even better to use a special scheduler program (for example, to build a Gantt chart in Google Tables). This applies to writing term papers, graduation projects, preparation for tests and exams.

Distribute the load according to your abilities. Do not overestimate your capabilities, treat them adequately. First of all, plan the amount of training load for the current day. Depending on its complexity and quantity, the remaining things should be distributed. For example, if you were preparing for the test, your physical and mental strength will be exhausted. In this case, it is more reasonable to leave more time for sleeping and waking in the fresh air than for active sports.

To cultivate self-discipline. It is important to follow the established daily routine, otherwise, you will not have time for anything. Try not to be distracted from classes by extraneous matters, not to succumb to temptations. Make it a rule for yourself to first complete a difficult task, and then, as an incentive, spend a break between classes on something pleasant. Make sure that breaks are strictly regulated. Are you able to get carried away and forget about time? Set a timer. In order not to be distracted by trifles, minimize all distractions. Turn off the phone and put it away. When working with a computer, close all unnecessary applications. Put things in order in the workspace area. 

Remove useless objects from the table. In case of distracting sounds, use earplugs or turn on special audio recordings for classes through headphones.

Motivate yourself. Come up with your system of rewards and rewards for completed tasks. When you know that something pleasant and exciting is waiting ahead, the tasks are accomplished much faster. Try to gradually raise the bar by overestimating the requirements for yourself. When you see that you are capable of more than you originally thought, you will receive a powerful incentive to conquer new heights in self-development.

Use the help and mutual assistance. If something is unclear in the assignment, it is doubtful, it is better to consult with the teacher and classmates than to waste time trying to figure everything out on your own. If you do not have ready answers to the questions for the test and exam, during the preparation period, you can distribute them among fellow students, and then exchange information.

Don’t forget about the rest. You can’t work and study until you’re exhausted. A full sleep helps to better assimilate the material, and a rational diet saturates the brain with useful trace elements. Be sure to allocate part of the day for your pleasure. Remember that the time spent on yourself is also an important contribution to self-development, along with studying.

Do several things at the same time. For example, you can listen to audiobooks or learn the pronunciation of foreign words while cooking dinner, on the way to school and back. If you get there by public transport, take the opportunity to view the notes of the lecture notes or read a good book.

Train your memory and concentration of attention – these are the necessary skills to reduce the time required for the qualitative assimilation of information.

 

Effective techniques for organizing study time

 

Timing

Often students do not understand where their time is going, why they do not have time for anything. In this case, timing will help. During the day, keep track of up to five minutes of how much time you spend on absolutely everything, including messaging on social media and watching videos on YouTube. The result may exceed all expectations. You will calculate your “chronophages” and will be able to consciously get rid of them.

Fresh or Fried method

Based on the fact that our brain is “fresh” in the morning. And it is for this time that the most important tasks and “unpleasant” things should be planned. In the afternoon, when the brain is “fried”, it is necessary to leave less urgent, not the most difficult, as well as more pleasant things.

The 2-minute rule

If there are things on your list that take no more than 2 minutes, do them right away so that they don’t load the brain. It can be a short phone call to find out some important information, to make inquiries. Or wash the dishes and take out the trash.

Method 10 minutes

Surely you have tasks that you constantly postpone because they seem too complicated or unpleasant to you. You don’t know how to start them, where to start. Convince yourself that you will devote only 10 minutes to thinking about this task, and then switch to a more pleasant task for you. 

There is a high probability that in 10 minutes you will get involved in the process, productive ideas will visit you, and you will no longer want to retreat from it.

 

Methods of dividing time into work and rest

 

Pomodoro method. Suitable for students who are easily distracted. The learning process is divided into 4 periods of half an hour. These 30 minutes are divided according to the principle of 25 + 5 (25 minutes are fully focused on work, and 5 minutes are rested). After the fourth period, take a half-hour timeout, and then you can start working again.

Method 90/30. Here the periods of work and rest alternate as follows: you work intensively for an hour and a half, then you rest for half an hour. At the same time, you first take on the most important thing. This method is based on the opinion of experts that 90 minutes are optimal for maximum concentration on the task, and 30 minutes allow you to completely reboot the brain.

Method 52/17. Suitable for those who do not have enough diligence to work for an hour and a half in a row. Allows you to maintain long-term productivity without overwork.

How to learn time management?

To teach the art of time management, there are special psychological tools in the form of business games for students.

“Making a time plan”

Participants are divided into teams of several people (you can work alone).

Each team is given a task to make a time plan for a certain event in the allotted time.

Participants discuss and concretize the plan, indicating the time for each item.

In the end, each team presents its plan.

Discussion and analysis of plans. Finding the unaccounted-for time and ways to reduce them.

Based on the discussion, a common time plan is developed.

Exercise on the distribution of tasks according to the Eisenhower matrix

Participants are divided into 4 teams, they are given a list of tasks that should be divided into 4 groups:

• Important and urgent (force majeure, requiring immediate execution).
• Important, but not urgent (pre-planned).
• Urgent, but not important (secondary).
• Not important and not urgent (time sinks).

The student’s task is to work out a common solution in 3 minutes. Each team presents the results for one of the four groups. There is a collective discussion of what unplanned situations could be avoided with the correct organization of time, the ability to anticipate events and rationally plan their affairs.

.