“Oh no, it’s Time Management”

Your friendly neighborhood time management handout!

Welcome to the exciting world of time management! If used properly, this handout can help you find time you never thought you had, give you a renewed purpose in life, provide you with exciting planning schedules to fill out, and will give you plenty of paper you can use to pass notes to your neighbor. It will cover how you can set priorities, avoid procrastination, and ways to manage your time.

Why manage my time?

1. Managing time well encourages students to review notes regularly and reduces test anxiety.

2. Good time management often opens up more free time than you would otherwise have.

Setting priorities

1. Think about why you’re in school. There’s no point in managing your time if you don’t think school is important. Find a reason why school matters to you and keep it in mind. It may be that goal that keeps you on task when all else fails.
2. Think about your daily activities and then put them in order of importance.
3. Try to put the things that will help meet your long term goal first instead of things that seem more fun from moment to moment.
4. Most of all, be willing to live with the consequences of your priorities. If you make your social life more important, don’t complain if you don’t get the grade you want.

beat procrastination!

1. Keep your mind on the benefits of getting right to work.
2. Do the hard stuff first. I always feel better after I body-slam the work I hate!
3. Allow yourself rewards for finishing tasks. If you do something small, give your self a small reward, if you do something big, give yourself a big reward.

ways to manage your time

1. Maintain a "to do" list. Put together a list every morning of all the things you need to do for the day. If you don’t have time in the morning, do it the night before.
2. Try to set aside three hours for every hour spent in class. That means that if you’re taking a three hour class, you should spend nine hours a week studying.
3. Not all assignments take the same amount of time to complete. Estimate how much time one will take and being early.
4. Break large assignments into smaller, more manageable, bits.
5. Restrict distracting tasks to certain times. Do not allow yourself to spend study time looking at e-mail.
6. Build extra time into your schedule so your not caught off guard when something goes wrong.
7. Don’t over extend yourself. Take only as many classes as you think you can handle.

This handout built on ideas found in John Gardner and A. Jerome Jewler’s You’re College Experience: Strategies for Success.