September is here, and with it a new academic year. You may be a newcomer, or a seasoned veteran in the art of university – but it can be a long, hard road to graduation when you’re not properly prepared.
To kickoff the year right, get a headstart on one of the most important skills surrounding university with these 5 tips on how to manage your time efficiently throughout the term.
1. Break it down
Once you have your class list and weekly schedule, work out what you have to prepare for each subject separately. This is best done before the start of the week – I personally chose Sunday evenings. Sparing about an hour out of your week to organise your class schedule is a sure step towards good time management. Get a fresh page, and list out your classes – underneath each class, work out which chapters you have to read, or maybe what assignments are due. Listing each and every goal is vital to the first step of preparation.
2. Estimate your time
You should now have a list of everything that needs to be done for the upcoming week. The next stage to proper time management is actually calculating how much time you will need to spend working on these tasks. In the beginning, this will be a rough guess – and that’s okay! The more you start to use this system, the more familiar you will get with how long a certain task will take you.
3. Making new friends
A standard weekly planning for my own studies
This step is all about making new friends… with technology! Your phone is a great device for messaging, social media and wasting away the hours. What if I told you that it could also be your secret to becoming a time-management fiend?!
Thankfully, there are tons of apps for this. You can even filter out ‘productivity’ as a category on the Play Store. Try it out! What you want is a calendar/agenda app that appeals to you – whether that means cutesy colours, ultimate customisability or total minimalism. In this step, we translate what we have on the page to an actual timetable to give a good overview of your upcoming week.
Each time I schedule a task in my calendar, I mark it off in my notebook. This is a good sanity check to make sure that I have actually blocked off time for everything I need to do.
4. Be flexible
As much as we may plan for things to go our way, sometimes they just don’t work out. Maybe a new commitment springs up, or you end up spending more time on a particular chapter. Either way – being able to adjust to your responsibilities is a vital skill for time management.
This is one of the reasons why I love tech calendars – they allow you to move everything around easily. Say a dinner crops up Wednesday evening when you scheduled to read a chapter for Lit class – drag and drop, and now it’s on a Saturday morning. Clean, easy and hassle free. Relentlessly sticking to a schedule that you know just won’t work will only cause unnecessary stress. So instead, as Bruce Lee says “Be like water.”
5. Reward yourself
It can be easy to slip into the dredge of agendas, schedules and alarms. However, becoming consumed with structuring your life will be detrimental in the long run. Instead, remember that getting to the end of a hard-working week is always reason to celebrate. As long as you put in the effort to take a step closer to a successful university career, you are doing just fine.
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