Master Your Schedule: The Ultimate Guide to Time Management for College Students
Time Management for College Students: 7 Strategies to Help You Take Back Control of Your Schedule
Introduction
This is usually what happens: you have the goal of completing a history paper that is ten pages long. You sit down at your desk and suddenly you notice that you have no control over your time. You end up stressing about the deadline as you watch videos that you have no interest in watching whatsoever.
Many college freshmen can relate to this. You see, the main difference between college and high school is that college gives you more control over your time. Unfortunately, this can come as a shock because in high school, there was always an authority figure who reminded you of your assignments.
Of course, time management for college students is more complex than just squeezing in extra tasks. You need to be able to structure your time so that you can fit in your classes, assignments, work, and yoga class, and still feel like you are on top of everything. Most people will say that poor time management is a result of laziness. In reality, there are many contributing factors such as poor planning, procrastination, and distractions. Once you pinpoint the reason, creating a system that works for you is a lot easier.
What Is Time Management for College Students?
Time management is essentially organizing your schedule so that you have the ability to decide which activities you will be participating in at a given time as opposed to allowing your schedule to be completely unmanageable and chaotic. You need to be able to plan your classes, work, and social activities in a way that is feasible.
Realism is important when making a schedule. A schedule that shows eight hours of studying on a Saturday looks good but is no good if you can’t study for more than two hours. You have to take into account the facts about your ability to focus when making a schedule.
Think about your schedule as a finite budget. You have 168 hours in a week but have to account for things like sleeping, eating, and other responsibilities. After all that, you have to plan how you spend the limited hours for studying. A student who has class from 9-1 on M/W can plan to do all their class work from 2-4 and not rely on the negatively working “assumption of diffusion.” That planning can not only protect you from procrastinating but also from getting a 5 hour assignment that you do at the last minute.
Common Causes of Poor Time Management
Poor Time Management is often caused by:
The Illusion of Free Time
Scheduling in college seems less demanding than in high school, so many students believe they have more free time. To some students’ surprise, the 6 hour gap in between their 3 scheduled classes for the day quickly fills up with things like eating, commuting, errands, social media, and other small tasks. By the time an assignment is due, students often find themselves scrambling to complete it because they didn’t leave yourself time to do it. To avoid this, you have to purposefully schedule your free time.
Distractions from Physical Phone Use
A break from studying can quickly turn into several hours of unproductive behavior thanks to your phone. Notifications, texts, and other distractions steal your time, and even if you don’t completely lose 3 hours of studying time, you likely won’t be as productive as you would be if you studied for 90 minutes straight. You have to be able to effectively manage your time and reduce the amount of distractions you have in order to be as productive as possible.
Fear of Missing Out
There are so many opportunities to socialize in college with all the different club meetings, sports, parties, dinners, study groups, and spontaneous plans, of which there seem to be so many. It’s easy to think that saying no will result in missing out on something essential, but saying yes to everything results in the loss of time to fulfill your responsibilities. The key is to schedule time for social activities. If there is a designated time for school work, an evening with friends can be scheduled and won’t have to be done at the expense of an overdue assignment.
Underestimating How Long Work Takes
A lot of students make school related plans based on how long they wish a task would take as opposed to how long it actually takes. A basic example is believing that a five page essay would take no longer than two hours to complete. This belief takes into account neither the research nor the time it takes to outline, draft, citate, and check the essay for mistakes. This is the planning fallacy, which is a persistent failure to realistically evaluate how long a task will take. Making a schedule based on unrealistic assumptions results in a plan that is impossible to accomplish. A solution to this is to accurately judge how long a given task actually takes. After a few essays or problem sets, you will have data to realistically plan how long you can take to complete work in the future.
7 Best Ways to Master Your Schedule
1. Reverse-Engineer Your Syllabus
Things can get hectic during the semester. Your syllabus is a tool to help you before you need to intuition the steps to success. Each time you start a new class, take your calendar and identify the major projects, assignments, and exams for that class and add them to your calendar. Once you have done this, you can work backwards to determine when you need to accomplish smaller tasks to help you accomplish the larger project or assignment. For example, if you know you have to submit a research paper on November 15th, you can determine that you need to choose a topic by October 20th, do the research by October 30th, create an outline on November 3rd, and do a draft by November 8th. Breaking down large tasks into smaller more manageable tasks helps you to not procrastinate and to determine when your large projects can potentially conflict with other projects you have.
2. Use Time Blocking Instead of a Giant To-Do List
A giant to do list can help you determine what tasks you need to accomplish, but it doesn’t help you determine when you need to accomplish them. Time blocking helps fill in that gap. With time blocking, you assign specific tasks to specific time periods. A time blocking example would be doing a psychology reading from 2pm to 3:30pm and doing a stats problem set from 10am to 11:30am. Time blocking can help you account for all the tasks you need to accomplish, but you need to leave some time unaccounted for so your schedule can be flexible.
3. Start With the Most Difficult Task
You and I both know that important tasks become even more daunting when you put them off. Ever so slightly productive feelings from replying to emails can make you think you’re making progress, when in reality you’re just putting off the big task. You can do so much in a focused hour as opposed to three unproductive hours. Determine when you work best and cultivate that.
4. Try the Pomodoro Technique
This technique breaks down your work into 25 minute intervals, with 5 minute breaks in between and longer breaks after every few intervals. “Studying for four hours” becomes a lot less daunting when you break it down into 25 minute intervals. You’re probably just as unmotivated to start the four hour study session as you are to start the 25 minute interval, but at least the interval is more manageable. Use this technique for reading, or practice problems and flashcards, and make sure you get up to remove distractions for the 25 minutes of work, and take a real break and stretch.
5. Establish Consistent Academic Hours
Treating college like a structured work day can be helpful. This doesn’t mean you can’t study outside the designated window, but you can plan to do the majority of your academic work during certain hours. If you decide that your main work window is from 9 AM to 3 PM on weekdays, the two hour break between your classes can be productively spent at the library, as opposed to going back to your dorm. R resorting to those activities only happens if you decide to set your academic hours for the day. This also allows you to separate your academic work from your personal time, so you can relax without guilt at the end of the day.
6. Schedule Important Tasks With Extra Time
It’s likely that something will happen to disrupt your plans. A lecture will go over the time allotted. Your computer will update at the worst possible moment. That “quick” piece of research will turn into an hour of reading. You should plan to to overestimate how long a task will take. If you think a task will take two hours, you should plan to take extra time and buffer it at 2:30. It’s better to plan to have extra time than to run over and throw off your complete plan for the day.
You won’t become the person who gets invited nowhere if you know how to plan a college-student schedule that includes enjoyable activities. You just have to know how to prioritize your commitments. You need to be strategic about how you spend your time when you have an important exam on Friday morning. You shouldn’t go out at all on Thursday and take away valuable time from your friends who want to take you to dinner and then take part in activities that you have planned for the weekend. You need to be able to plan around your restrictions in a reasonable manner.
Break Large Assignments Into Smaller Actions
Break large assignments into smaller actions. The to-do item “write my term paper” results in students spending unnecessary time staring at a blank screen and results in little to no progress being made. Write your term paper” can be broken down into finding sources, reading and highlighting source one, drafting a thesis statement, creating an outline, writing an introduction, adding citations, and proofreading. Breaking tasks down into smaller actions makes the task at hand less daunting and provides a greater sense of progress. Staring at a blank screen with no idea where to start happens less often when you break tasks down into smaller actionable items. An additional benefit of breaking tasks down into smaller actionable items is that it reveals the specific task that is causing a block, as opposed to assuming you are simply bad at time management.
Perform a Weekly Reset
Flexibility is key to navigating college, and a rigid schedule doesn’t improve when a quote is used to predict the future. A quick reset can be done at the end of each week. This reset should include checking what is due, looking at your class and work schedule, moving unfinished tasks to the forecast, and identifying the most dangerous tasks you can ignore. It is also important to reflect on the week and identify what tasks took longer than expected and what tasks were a complete waste of time. Scheduling system things is only useful if it improves and adapts to what you’ve learned.
Maintain Sleep in Your Schedule
Sleep is usually the first thing to go when you have a lot of work to do, but constantly cutting sleep will impact your concentration and your ability to function, let alone do work, over the long term. You should view sleep as something that is integral to the functioning of the system as a whole, not something that gets in the way of your studying. If you have a lot of work to do that is due the next day and it is already past midnight, you need to look at what you did during the week to get to this point. A schedule that makes you exhausted is no good, even if you manage to turn in all your work.
Expert Tips for Better Time Management
Create a Minimum Viable Day
It is a good idea to have a “minimum viable day” planned out for when things get really tough. This should be decided ahead of time and should consist of the absolute bare minimum you would need to do to function as an academic, for example attending necessary classes and doing one absolutely crucial task. This will help prevent a single really bad day from turning into a really bad week.
Pay Attention to Transition Points
It is also important to pay attention to transition points. A lot of time gets eaten between that final class of the day and the library. Planning to do something between class and the library is a lot better than arriving at the library and not knowing what to do. This can also help eliminate time wasted by mindless phone use.
Set Deadlines for Large Tasks
Set a deadline for large tasks so you can stop working on them. If you tell yourself you’ll stop working on a task when you’ve finished it, you might find yourself working on it for hours. Setting an end of the day deadline, for example, stopping work at 7 PM, can help you plan your day so you can fit in other activities like eating and exercising.
Common Time Management Mistakes to Avoid
Using Someone Else’s Productive System
A system that helps your roommate plan their day might be overwhelming for you. Start with the simplest system that you think you can stick to.
Thinking That Doing Something Means That You’ve Made Progress
Just because you spent a long time highlighting a textbook doesn’t mean you’ve learned the material. You need to do practice problems or other tasks to measure your progress.
Cutting Sleep
While it’s ok to stay up late sometimes, if if you do it often, you’ll stop being productive. You should set an end of the day deadline for larger tasks so you can plan to stop working at a certain time.
Storing Your Deadlines in Your Head
When you have multiple classes, you can’t rely on your memory to know when deadlines are. You should write them down somewhere so you can see them.
Creating a Schedule That Has No Flexibility
You can’t plan to study for 12 hours straight. You need to take breaks and account for other things that you can’t plan for.
Never Changing Your Plan
A schedule is more of a guideline. If you stick to a plan that doesn’t work for you, you’ll eventually stop following it. You should be for realistic and change your plan if needed.
A 5 minute break that turns into 30 needs to be replaced with something more productive like moving around, taking a water break, or talking to a coworker.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Time Management
Benefits
Managing time can reduce stress. When you know what you need to do and when you are able to plan around it and eliminate the panic of last minute rushing. It can also improve your academic performance as it moves you away from last minute cramming and gives you more consistent free time. Managing time can give you more real personal free time and can help you become more aware of your time management habits.
Drawbacks
There is a start up cost to managing your time. You won’t see the benefits immediately and it can be frustrating the first few times you try to stick to a plan. There are things outside of your control that can throw off your plans. You can become so obsessed with planning that you don’t leave time to do your school work.
Frequently Asked Questions About College Time Management
How Many Hours Should College Students Study Each Week?
There is no set number of hours that applies to all students and all classes. Some classes will require more time and some will take less. The best way to figure out how many hours you should be studying is to look at how long your assignments take and plan around that.
Is Time Management Something You Are Born With, or Can It Be Developed?
It can definitely be developed. While some people are more naturally organized, improving your skills with task duration estimation, deadline prioritization, and reviewing your week is possible through practice. Your first attempt at a task management system will probably not be perfect, but the important thing is continuously refining your system by identifying the chronic mistakes.
What Is the Most Effective Time Management App for College Students?
What works best is subjective. A simple calendar might work best for someone who just needs to be reminded of deadlines, but someone else might prefer a different app for task management or digital planners. The most effective tool is the one you use the most.
How Can I Balance My College Courses and My Part-Time Job?
Treat your work shifts and your classes as commitments first, and then determine which (if any) of the remaining time is available for course work. Meals, transportation, and recovery time should also be factored in, along with the assumption that you cannot utilize all of your free time for course work. If your time management skills are being tested, you should talk to your employer and/or your academic adviser.
Is It Better to Study in the Morning or at Night?
Whichever time of day allows you to be the most productive and concentrated. People are not created equally. Some people are morning people, and some people are night people. Experiment with different time periods and determine which ones are most productive and concentrate the most. Then save those times for your most important work.
How Can I Stop Procrastinating on College Assignments?
Instead of trying to complete a large task like “Finish the Economics Paper,” try breaking it up into smaller tasks like “Find two sources.” Smaller tasks are also easier to get started on. A good starting point is to work for a short period of time, for example 15 minutes. Once you get started on a task, the dread of working on it decreases and you are more likely to continue.
You can plan both to prevent one from taking over the other. Knowing that you have a major exam on Friday means that you should plan to study on the days leading up to it and leave Friday evening free to socialize.
What Should I Do When Several Assignments Are Due on the Same Day?
Prioritize your assignments based on their deadline, how much they are worth, how difficult they are, and how long they will take to complete. If both of your assigned papers are due on Friday, you could aim to complete the first one by Wednesday and the second one by Thursday. If you cannot get all of your assignments done in time, you should contact your professors to explain the situation.
Can Poor Time Management Affect Academic Performance?
Time management plays a huge role in your academic performance. Poor time management often results in a lot of assignments being turned in late, and being tired because you didn’t get enough sleep. This can all happen without directly realizing how you are impacting your performance, and it will usually happen every week. A better time management system will help to prevent this from happening and catch conflicts before they become issues.
Final Thoughts
This is the main point where I wrap up my time management system. It shows college students that the goal of time management is not to fill every single second of your day with things to do. It is about prioritizing, giving certain tasks the time they deserve, and creating limits so you can study and not cause your personal life to suffer.
To begin, put your large project deadline and your smaller task deadline on a calendar. Break your large assignments down into smaller actionable tasks. Set up specific study time and protect your sleep. Leave some time in your schedule for the unexpected. Protect your sleep and be sure to schedule time for your studies. Look over your schedule and make changes as needed.
There will be week where things will go sideways. An assignment will take longer than expected, or a friend will invite you to do something at a time that is inconvenient. An entire afternoon can be lost to unproductive time. This does not mean your time management system has failed. Choose one time management strategy, and use it for a week. Once it has been proven effective, continue to build upon it.
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