Time management is something that is very important to a working citizen or a student. This especially applies to students of Glendale Community College. But the question is: “how tough is it to manage time?”
Time isn’t something that everyone has an infinite amount of. Because of how limited it is, it needs to be effectively managed. It is important to control the amount of time spent on a certain task, whether it’s an important project or a school assignment. The best skills that can be used to help with time management are goal-setting, prioritization, organization, and managing your stress.
- Goal-Setting: Setting a goal is very crucial, because if you don’t know what you’re doing with your time, then you’re just wasting it.
- Prioritization: By assessing a timeframe, it can be easy to focus on tasks after sorting them
- Organization: Once everything is set up, it’s important that everything is organized in a way that will be easy for you to remember where it is. If everything is cluttered, then it will take forever just to find what you are looking for.
- Managing Your Stress: If there’s one thing that can gravely affect your working, it’s stress. You need a healthy way to clear your mind and relax so you can work better.
If these steps don’t work for you, then you’re welcome to try out other ideas such as keeping an agenda and taking breaks for something like lunch or a nap. It’s very important to always relax yourselves so you can better work in the future. However, it is possible for one to be over obsessive with time management, which can cause its own problems. Research on a 2017 BBC article notes that chasing better time management becomes a self-defeating strategy, in which people can initially complete more by using these tools, but forget the fact that productivity has limits.
Time management skills that improve student learning (acc.edu.au)
Why time management so often fails – BBC Worklife
As a college student who has had to take several semester long breaks due to other life influences creeping in, the ability to properly manage my time has always been elusive. These are some great featured points! I think I could learn from some of them as I near transitioning from community college to university.
Mitigating life influences is not even really just an issue with school. I struggle in many ways to find enough time to simply relax at the end of a busy work day. Either spending too much time on my phone, or getting caught up with a backlog of other things that I neglected due to mismanagement of priorities. I can easily reflect on times in my life where I had much more stress due to simply not having enough time to myself.
One of the points in the article that hit me the most was that of organization. This is something that seems really difficult on paper, but when implemented, it quickly becomes routine. I have found some kind of comfort with having a strong, organized layout of what I need to do for a week. Keeping my homework, and my job material organized, labeled and free of literal clutter, really helps me stay focused and on track.
Thanks for sharing this!
Hi Lee,
This article give some of the points of time management that are very helpful to students trying to manage school, work and even a family. Setting goals is definitely something to journal for yourself so that you can stay focused. Prioritization and organization are the ones that I try really hard to stay with as well. I do this by logging what is due for the week and which assignments I should work on first to get it done on time. Some assignments make take longer than others so I try to block out some time for those assignments but life events happen and we need to adjust the timing. Trying to make sure we are getting everything done on time and making sure the work is what we would want others to see. This in itself can be stressful. Your last point on there was on managing your stress levels. This is something that we all must learn. We are all different so what works for us might not work for others. I think students stay up late to get work done and that compromises your sleep and then the next thing you know you are exhausted and not able to do your best work. Sleeping well, managing the time by organizing and prioritizing should help with keeping those stress levels down. Making time to exercise even if it is just walking to get a clear head can sometimes help when we are feeling bogged down.
Hi Lee,
These are really good tips on time management. It’s important to manage your time well, not just for school but for life in general.
Back in High School, I had a really bad habit of procrastination. I would stay up late at night just to get my work done before the school day started. As a result, I would turn in assignments that didn’t have my best work. Some of my teachers could see that and as a consequence, it was reflected in my grades. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot better at time management. I started to break up my work instead of doing it all at once. This helped me immensely since I don’t feel as overwhelmed by the work I have to do.
Besides work, winding down is also important to time management. I tend to take breaks if I’m struggling to focus or before starting a new task so my brain can “reset”.
You bring up a good point that if you’re obsessed with time management you forget how much work is actually humanly possible. I find myself not completing all the things that I thought I would do in a day.
Thank you for sharing this post.