Advice On Time Management For College

by lingojac

posted on 10/28/2009

College is most people's first introduction to an environment where there are consequences for poor time management. Let's face it: high school was the most free time you'll have for the rest of your life. Adjusting to a life of responsibility can be hard. Here are some tips to succeed in college via excellent time management.

1. Put effort into changing your habits.

If you were a tad irresponsible in high school, you aren't going to magically become a scholarly perfectionist the minute you set foot on college campus. There's a good chance that you've thought that it would happen. Simply recognize that your old habits aren't going to work in college.

2. Just don't procrastinate.

The vast majority of college students tend to procrastinate. It's a fact. Here's a tip: if you don't feel like doing your work now, you won't feel like doing it later. Starting prolonged work after its assignment or beginning to study early for that exam in the distant future will make you astonishingly more prepared for the class in general. Explaining why procrastination is bad is almost the epitome of beating a dead horse, yet most students still do it. Take procrastination out of your life.

3. One step at a time.

Multitasking is impossible. You may have had success with it at some time in the past, and you're likely to convince yourself that switching between your Calculus problems and your Facebook status doesn't hurt one bit. Accept the fact that multitasking is impossible. Putting all your concentration into the task at hand will immeasurably be more productive than doing two or three things at a time, regardless of how well you think you can juggle separate tasks. When studying or doing homework, stay in a distraction-free environment and do work in manageable blocks of time. You could do one assignment for 45 minutes and then move on to the next, or alternate two tasks half an hour at a time - experiment to see what gets the most done in a timely fashion. Just don't keep insisting that your background activity, be it instant messaging or phone conversations or anything similar, isn't slowing you down. It is.

4. The Triangle.

If there's one thing that can sum up time management in college, it's that you can't do everything you want. A great analogy is the triangle. On one corner is "school", another is "work", and the remaining corner is "social life". The idea is that you must choose a side, and you can't have all three . Excelling in school while having a job eliminates the possibility of having an extravagant social life; working hard on your job while partying with your friends is going to have an adverse effect on your performance in school. And so on.

With these tips and a good, working brain (which you obviously have if you're in college), wasting time shouldn't be a problem. Time management is one of your highest priorities, and learning the skill to map out when and where to do what will carry you through college and your career.

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