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Students are often short on time and can benefit greatly from time management tips for students. Here are 9 ideas on how to manage your time better.
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The importance of time management
Why is time management so important for students? First of all, time is your most important asset.
You can always get more money, connections, or skills, but you can never gain more time.
Once time is spent, there is no getting it back. And especially in the age of on-demand distractions, it is infuriatingly easy to have time run meaninglessly through your fingers.
Students can hardly afford all this wasted time. Instead, they constantly have deadlines; they need to organize their study schedule, social life, and hobbies while finding their place in the world.
The older they get, the more responsibilities pile up, which requires increasingly skilled time management.
If you don’t learn how to manage your time effectively while in school or college, you will struggle quite a bit once you have a job and a flat to manage.
Time Management Tips For Students
1. Use a planner
This is probably the most commonly used tip for time management, and with good reason!
Keeping a planner and visually drawing out your tasks and appointments for the day, week and month have many benefits.
Firstly, it makes it less likely that you will forget anything important. Of course, you might argue that you’ve never forgotten anything before because you have a great memory.
But frankly, life tends to be chaotic and unpredictable; one day, you will forget something. At least make an effort to decrease that likelihood as much as possible.
2. Anticipate delays and leave room for error
No matter how well you plan, it isn’t easy to anticipate how long something will take.
That’s why you should always leave room for a buffer between one scheduled task and the next.
3. Work smarter, not harder
Working harder is not the solution to everything. But, more often than not, far better results can be achieved by working smarter instead.
I recommend looking at the tasks you have to do most often and finding ways to do them quickly without sacrificing quality.
This change could mean switching to digital flashcards instead of physical ones, or maybe ditching this one lecture and reading the extensive script instead.
Play around with different options and see what works best.
You will never know how to manage your time better unless you try it out and compare the results.
4. Count your losses
Sometimes, managing your time better means ditching tasks altogether.
When taking up a new task as a student, you should not do it simply because everyone recommends it and because it seems beneficial.
You should only dedicate time to this task if the results are worth the costs.
In other words, reading this 600 pages of the textbook might provide you with all the relevant information for the exam. However, reading much more will give you the most important information while freeing up enough time to do practice tests.
Working smarter is about finding an alternative that is at least 1% better in its costs/rewards ratio than you did before.
5.Utilize task patching
Another great way to manage your time is by doing similar tasks in one go.
Of course, you can’t apply this principle to things like studying or working out. For example, one 5-hour study or workout session can’t substitute for five days of repetition.
But it makes much more sense to clean the house in one go instead of spreading the task out over days.
6. Take advantage of ‘mindless’ tasks
By now, you’ve probably heard that multitasking is supposedly not real. So when we multitask, we rapidly shift our attention from one task to the next.
This statement is much too generalized, though. It’s not so much multitasking that’s the problem and much more multi-focusing.
We simply can’t give two tasks an equal amount of focus at once. All we can do is switch back and forth.
However, multitasking is possible as long as one of the tasks is mindless and doesn’t require focus.
Most often, that’s the case with tasks that rely on muscle memory (e. g. brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, cooking your favorite meal, walking, etc.)
Combining these mindless tasks with another activity is a great way to manage your time better.
For example, you could listen to podcasts while cooking or driving a car. You could also watch your favorite series while you work out or eat.
Or you could listen to an online lecture while taking a walk.
If done right, multitasking can save you a lot of time. If done wrong, you will have to do these tasks twice because the first time wasn’t done well.
Of course, you should also remember that multitasking is the bane of mindfulness, so if you strive to be more mindful in everything you do, then multitasking might not be for you.
8. Work past the crowd
You can save an immense amount of time if you avoid rush hours.
Driving to school or university an hour earlier can reduce your driving time by 50%, and you can spend that additional time on campus studying what would have been left at the end of the day.
Similarly, it makes sense to avoid the library when it is especially busy, or you might not even get the books you need or a desk to work at.
That’s also why waking up early can be very beneficial. You have all this time for yourself to get work done without others interrupting you.
Make sure to take advantage of student life’s flexibility and manage your time accordingly.
9. Set yourself deadlines
The last time management tip for students is setting yourself deadlines.
I have often noticed that I get things done much quicker than before as soon as there is a bit of pressure because of an approaching deadline.
Often, we stretch out tasks for as long as we’re given time to accomplish them.
If you have to write that essay in two weeks, it will take you two weeks. If you had to write it in two days, you’d find a way to do so.
That’s the power of deadlines. So they get us moving and save us much time.
Of course, it’s hard to take self-imposed deadlines seriously. One trick that might help is declaring this deadline to an accountability buddy.
The fear of disappointing them or embarrassing yourself will light a small fire under your ass.
These were all of the time management tips for students.
What was your favorite time management tip, and how do you manage your time as a student?
We’d love to hear any advice you have to share with us.
Until next time, Felicity Seeker!
