Time is the most precious resource – and also the one we’re most likely to waste. This is especially typical for the youth, as they don’t fully understand that time – at least, their own personal time – is finite.
Thus, many students tend to have problems with time-management. Subsequently, they find themselves way behind the schedule, missing deadlines, and opportunities.
Structure Your Time and Be Better at School
What’s more, time-management issues continue to haunt them further on, into their career and personal life. But at work, there’s no convenient essay reviews service to help them out and turn their assignments in on the dot! In fact, students with poor time-management skills might even not graduate at all!
But there is a way to avoid this miserable fate: you need to learn how to structure your schedule early on. In this article, you’ll find some of the best ways to do it.
1. Clean Up the Mess
Before you start doing anything with your schedule, it’s essential to do some cleaning. So, write down all of your responsibilities and activities. What do you do on a regular basis? What is it that you need to fit into your schedule?
When you make a full list, it may turn out there’s not as much to do as you thought there was. And even at this stage, you’ll instantly feel better just by helping yourself understand that you can cope.
But if there are too many activities on your list, you might need to reconsider your schedule. Maybe, you’ll even have to leave something out in order to effectively do the rest.
2. Prioritize
If you lack prioritizing skills, you may have serious problems figuring what to leave out. If you’re familiar with the daunting feeling of having too much to do and not knowing where to start, it also means you need to learn to prioritize. You must learn to focus your attention on the more important tasks!
For example, if you have exams to take, be sure to put everything aside and start preparing. With writing essays, https://paperwriter.com/blog will help you, you can always find interesting examples here!
There are several ways to do that, but the basic idea is that you have to structure your activities in order of their urgency and importance. Thus, all that you need to do should fall into one of these categories:
- very important and urgent;
- very important, but not urgent;
- rather important and urgent;
- rather important, but not urgent;
- not important but urgent;
- not important and not urgent.
After you range your activities using this principle, you’ll get a clear picture of what you need to do first, what can wait, and what can be left out. By the way, this principle is utilized in the Eisenhower Matrix – one of the most popular time-management techniques out there.
3. Set Goals
Even if you become a guru of prioritization, you may still feel that something’s not right. And the problem might be your goals.
Remember how you became a student? You needed to get accepted because you needed to get a diploma to… to do what? Here’s the most serious question.
And if you really start thinking about it, you may come to very interesting conclusions. Like you should delegate certain assignments and thus spare some time, or change a major, or get an internship, for instance.
But even on a smaller scale, setting goals is super-important because how can you do anything well if you don’t know what you’re doing this for? But when you realize that you’re writing that essay to improve your writing skills and learn to do your homework faster, it really makes sense.
What also makes sense is a popular SMART formula for setting goals properly. In case you haven’t yet heard of it, here it is. Your goals have to be:
- Specific;
- Measurable;
- Attainable;
- Realistic;
- Timely.
This formula works for both big and small goals alike, so you can print it and hang it on the wall if you have problems with goal-setting!
4. Utilize Time-Management Techniques
All this goal setting and prioritizing takes lots of reflection – and, ironically, lots of time. On the contrary, these special techniques are “magic pills” that work here and now, without too much philosophy. Very often, this is exactly what a student needs.
One of the most popular techniques is the Pomodoro method. It implies working for set periods of time (usually 25 minutes) and taking 5-minute breaks after each session. After four 25-minute sessions, you can take one long break.
This method is proven to be very efficient, but if it doesn’t work for you, there are plenty of other popular techniques – like the abovementioned Eisenhower Matrix also known as the Important-Urgent Matrix, Getting Things Done Method (GTD), Time Blocking Method (successfully used by Elon Musk), and many others.
5. Turn to Technology
Do all these methods look too complicated? Well, they might. Luckily, we live in the age of technology, and there’s an app for practically every task just a tap away.
Time-management, anti-procrastination, and scheduling apps make up a big chunk of the market, so the choice is extremely wide. For example, you don’t need to count your Pomodoro sessions manually, as there are numerous apps designed for any device that can handle this task.
You can also use your smartphone to help you focus, plan your schedule, set reminders, make notes, and do many other things that would have been daunting otherwise. Just remember that your phone is a tool, not an entertainment hub!
Conclusion
Time-management is one of the essential skills of the 21st century. With so many things on our to-do lists, we just can’t afford to waste precious minutes! So, it’s important to learn how to structure it early on – not only to be a successful student but also to be a prosperous person later in life.
However, learning time-management is not easy. It requires a lot of effort, persistence, and, well, time. So, don’t give up if you think you’re not coping, don’t get back to your old unproductive ways. Learning to structure your schedule might take a while, but eventually, you’ll find it was all worth it!