6 Time Management Tips! How do you manage to study and still find time to enjoy the best aspects of college life? If you are a college student, you’ve probably started valuing the skill of time management. You’ve just entered adult life and you are startled with all the opportunities life brings, but you feel bummed because there is no way to catch up with everything.
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Even if you do not identify yourself as an early bird, you can still become one. Setting the alarm clock an hour earlier than usual (and not pressing the snooze button!) will give you an extra hour to complete important tasks, finish assignments, exercise, cook healthy meals, or even catch up on books or social media.
Mike Tyson mentioned more than once that the early rise helped him achieve such success in professional sports.
Several studies link early awakening with productivity and success. Early birds have an advantage – they have extra time to complete tasks, and overall, they are more optimistic.
Also, according to researches, our brain works better in the morning, so concentration and cognitive functions are higher during this time than in the evening or at lunch.
The most important and painful reason for the missed assignments and failed deadlines is quite a trivial fact: the tasks were not recorded anywhere.
You have so much going on and it is almost impossible to keep everything in your head. Also, if you write down a task on a paper, you have to make a conscious effort to look into that notebook, which makes it only harder to remember.
In this case, apps with calendar functions, reminders, or push-notifications will be the best choice. Pay attention to the likes of Todoist, Habitica, Google Calendar, and Trello. Everything that may require some action from you in the future like a conversation, a phone call, a home task, an essay, or an email you need to respond to should be turned into a task immediately.
How exactly you want to track the tasks is up to you. You can mark tasks on your wrist, you can put stickers to a coffee cup and you wouldn’t be able to drink coffee until you’ve done the task and removed the sticker.
You can write everything down in Evernote on the smartphone, and then move it to Google Calendar.
With Google Calendar you can schedule the day by hours, specifying the time of the task. It also feels good to drag and drop an unfulfilled task to the next day. But the most satisfying and rewarding thing is to delete the completed task afterward.
You can load yourself with tasks and then find out that nothing works out and you cannot handle all the number of tasks planned for the day.
Try not to get into the robotic mode. It is crucial for a student to have a proper rest because they are often overloaded. Schedule yourself some time to rest, play games, listen to music, watch Netflix, and read. Have this time allotted on your calendar.
Also, it is a good idea to analyze the way you spend your free time or periods between the lectures or waiting time. You will see your main time killers and decide if you can optimize this time to do something else and rest more later.
There is a system that states that if you do hard or complicated or less pleasant things first in the day, you have all the rest of the day comprised of things that are simple and/or nice to do and your overall impression from the day will be way better.
The most important tip here is to start without overthinking. Starting is the hardest part, so if you have the rule to begin working on complicated things without questions asked, you will succeed way faster.
Our focus is a finite resource, and every distraction throws you a few steps back. Make a rule for yourself that when you are reading, studying, or preparing for an upcoming seminar – you avoid any distractions. Keep your smartphone hidden in the drawer, so you do not even see it.
Mute all the notifications and turn off vibration and sound. When working with a PC or laptop, use an extension similar to WasteNoTime that can be set to block distracting websites (like Facebook, Reddit, or Youtube) for a customized period of time. This is one of the most effective ways to get things done.
You will be surprised how fast you can study or write when nothing distracts you. Working in a flow or being focused decreases time spent on a task up to almost 50%, so try for yourself.
There is no universal time-management system that will suit any college student or person. You should be flexible and self-aware of your individual features. Maybe you don’t like using apps to plan stuff or there are too many activities and you are too lazy to keep track of all of them. Find the one that is suitable for you and stick to it.
If you have a deadline for your essay, don’t be afraid to delegate it. Our proficient scholarship essay writing service will write an excellent paper in a timely manner, giving you more precious time to spend doing what you like or simply resting.