How To Become A Highly Effective Time Manager

Your Planner Is Your Friend
When you are organized, that will help you achieve your goals in a timely manner. You need to
organize your tasks so you will know what needs to be accomplished and when they need to be
accomplished. No student should be without a daily planner.
You have probably used various kinds of planning tools before, including a daily or weekly
planner, a month-at-a-glance planner, and so on. It is important to keep in mind that the purpose
of scheduling is not to enslave you to your planner, but rather to record your decisions about
when certain things should happen.
Your planner should include your schedule for classes, study time, social events, club meetings,
exercise time, and any other time necessary to achieve your goals. Keep the planner with you
during class and note all assignments along with the due dates of those assignments. Check
them off as you complete them so you know where you are at all times with your projects.
Refer to your planner often - multiple times a day. Make this a regular part of your routine.
When you get up in the morning, look at your planner to see what needs to be done for that day.
If you have an appointment, be sure to include a phone number next to the notation in case you
have to cancel or change times.
Use a highlighter. Color-coding can help differentiate between appointments and assignments.
For example, highlight in blue your classes, yellow for assignments, and green for everything
else. The key here is easy recognition. When you open your planner, you can easily see what
needs to be done.
How To Become A Highly Effective Time Manager
© Wings Of Success Page 10 of 10
Time Management 101
The time you spend on task has some relationship to the quality of work you end up producing.
A good gauge to follow is to perform 2-3 hours of schoolwork outside class for every hour of
class time. Yes, this means for a full-time student with 15-hours of class per week load the
recommendation is to do between 30 and 45 hours of homework each week.
Sure, that's a big jump, especially if you breezed through high school or previous years of
college on less. This estimate simply reflects the time it actually takes to learn effectively. It's
not steadfast and set in stone. If you find yourself really grasping the concepts of a chapter
after a half-hour, feel free to stop. The key here is to set aside this time exclusively for studying.
If you get done earlier than expected - that's a bonus!
Now this number shouldn't mean that you completely forgo time for yourself. It is important to
have some personal time. Even though you may work a part-time job, and doing so isn't
necessarily counter-productive to success at school, you'll need to take some time for yourself
and for recreation each week.
A starting guideline might be something like 10% of your week, or 17 hours. What is more
important than these specific targets is that you spend enough time on school work to ensure
that you're successful and that you spend enough time outside of school to ensure that you
have a healthy balance.
Allow for unanticipated interruptions in your schedule. This means leaving some empty spaces
during the day or in some way being flexible enough to handle interruptions. If the unexpected
does not happen, time is available to do something we were saving until the next day.
Schedule homework early in the day so it is less likely to be crowded out by unexpected events
like meeting an old friend or having a roommate ask for help with one of his classes. Homework
should be a part of each day's schedule. Students who participated in a major study on stress,
reported doing homework as the most frequently used method for reducing stress in their lives.
How To Become A Highly Effective Time Manager
© Wings Of Success Page 11 of 11
I’ll Stop Procrastinating Tomorrow
Procrastination is a schedule buster. It's easy to put things off until later, especially when you
dread the task such as writing a term paper. But in college, this is a real problem. If you put off
your assignments or studying for tests, you are only hurting yourself. Procrastinating leads to
stress and anxiety not to mention poor performance. You CAN stop procrastination from
affecting your schoolwork.
It can be difficult to start working. Most of the time, however, not starting seems to be related to
fear of poor results or negative evaluations than it is to the actual difficulty of the work. Aim to
subdivide tasks into small steps and convince yourself that to get started all you need is 10 full
minutes working on a task. Often, the 10 minutes will elapse and you'll be right into the swing of
things, prepared to continue on productively.
Sometimes you just don't feel motivated