Every course of study will include several different tasks that you will have to perform while allowing you only a limited amount of time to do so. It is therefore vitally important that you develop the skill to use the available time in the most effective way. Proper time management can make your studies a less stressful experience by helping you to allocate enough time to every task as it becomes due. This will help prevent ‘last minute rush jobs’!
The following is a brief outline of a time management system:
- Identify the different tasks that needs to be complete.
- Rank these tasks in order of importance and/or urgency.
- Schedule the work needed to complete the tasks. Make sure that you ‘budget’ sufficient time for each activity.
- Work very hard to keep to your schedule.
- Be realistic. You cannot spend every waking hour studying, schedule time for your social and personal commitments.
- Include breaks in your schedule. Do not attempt to keep going without stopping and resting every once in a while (at least a few minutes an hour, with much longer rest breaks for extended study times).
- Identify and deal with the distractions that could make keeping to your schedule difficult. These can include watching too much television, surfing the net etc.
- Draw up long and short term plans. You should map out how you will approach both the academic period (term, quarter, semester etc.) and every week within it.
- Take the fact that you perhaps perform a bit better during certain times of the day (e.g. you are a ‘morning person’ who finds it difficult to study after 9 p.m.) into account into account when you design your time management schedule.
One thing to keep in mind when planning your schedule is that is natural for most of us to keep putting off things that we suspect will be hard to do (e.g. solving a very difficult equation), of which we might find unpleasant (e.g. studying for a subject that you have to take but do not have much of an interest in). You should make a conscious effort to include these things in your schedule at a time when you can give them proper attention and thereby getting them ‘out of the way’ as soon as possible.
There are probably a range of different answers to the question:
“When is the best time to study?” Of these answers
“3 o’clock on the morning before the exam” is the worst! One way to ensure that this is not your answer is to do some proper planning and to manage your time to the best of your abilities.