Summary
In this tutorial, you learned about the four steps which can help develop time management skills:
- Determine your goals
- Develop a strategy to achieve your goals
- Lay out timetables for the term or semester
- Avoid pitfalls
On average you need to spend two to three hours outside of class for every hour in class. This means you would spend forty-five hours per week on your classes if you had a fifteen-credit semester. In addition, you will have other demands for your time, such as a part-time job, family responsibilities, extra-curricular activities, and so on.
Hopefully you can answer positively to all, or at least almost all, of the following questions. When managing time, the overall goal is personal effectiveness rather than the time management strategy you have chosen as your own. If you have a style for managing time that is different from anyone else's, then more power to you for being original. Hopefully, the ideas presented in this tutorial, have supplemented or greatly improved your time management skills. Here are some things to think about to help you evaluate your time management strategies:
- Am I happy with my time management style?
- Do I need to plan with more structure or less structure?
- What are the problems with my time management style?
- Can I incorporate the planning tips to improve my time management strategies?
- Do I need more help in making a schedule that will work for me?
A few words of wisdom as you leave this section on managing time:
- If you are already very busy and your time is extremely constrained, you will probably need to change your behavior, or alter your priorities, to "create" more time.
- Don't forget to include regular, reoccurring tasks, duties, and activities in your timetable, and don't neglect them when you prioritize your activities.
- Time is a resource you can't produce, grow, augment, or stretch.
- You are the one who makes the choice about how your time is used.
And so,
- Prioritize.
- Make schedules for the month, semester, week, and especially the day.
- Review the schedules and timetables you made and figure out how you actually spend your time.
- Build time into your schedule to plan, reflect, and think.
- Establish criteria to determine when you are finished studying or a project is completed.
- Take for granted that there is NEVER enough time.
- Cultivate an appreciation for time. Time is a finite, non-renewable resource, and you must view it that way.
- Define your long-term and short-term goals, and keep them in mind.
- Connect your personal goals with how you choose to spend your time.
- Prioritize your goals and tasks. For example, 1=Critical/Of Major Importance; 2 = Important; 3 = Useful; 4 = Minor
- Break down large tasks into smaller tasks.
- Determine whether the tasks on your list are really necessary.
- If you have lots of small tasks, do them together. Completing a lot of tasks makes you feel like you have made amazing progress.
- Review your personal procrastination and time-wasting tricks and find ways you can change, attack, or subvert them.
- Don't forget that things like your own attitudes, values, experiences, family traditions, health, habits, understandings, and apprehensions play a major role in how you use (or abuse) time.
