By: Guy Noah
Edited by: Peter Milobar
You’ve still got a week, you tell yourself. It’s Friday night- you need a break. You can start studying later. Before you know it, the weekend’s gone by, you’re struggling to get through your Monday morning classes, and to top it off that Thursday test is now only a couple of sleeps away. While this scenario may not sound familiar to you, it has undoubtedly happened to a great many of us.
When I was in first year, time management was the last thing on my list of priorities. Unfortunately, because I was so unconcerned with having a structured schedule, I found myself in a recurrent cycle of stress, similar to my scenario. My academic life was punctuated by slow build-ups of procrastination-based stress that would result in intense cramming sessions.
You may think, that’s just a part of being a university student but the good news is it doesn’t have to be. Time management, which sounds like a lofty, abstract concept, is really just a term for being on top of your schedule, rather than being crushed under wave after wave of deadlines and due dates. By integrating time management as a regular part of your life, you are empowered not only to ease your stress, but also to realise that you may have more time in your day, week, or month than you thought, allowing you to do the things you want.
So this sounds well and good, but how can you put it into practice? Well, the consensus is clear. Long-term knowledge retention is supported better by short, infrequent engagements with material than long, last-minute cram sessions. If you take fifteen minutes out of your day to go over what you’ve covered in class, you’re setting yourself up better than if you don’t revisit any of your lectures until the weekend before the midterm. Not only is this a much easier and more manageable time commitment, it also will help you digest the information, and it might even help you sleep better at night knowing you’re on track.
Laying out your time in a visual medium is also beneficial. Printing out a calendar, picking up an agenda that you visit every morning or night, or even having a to-do list on your phone, a whiteboard, even sticky notes on your wall – these are all effective strategies for you to remind yourself of the tasks you need to complete and when you need to have them completed.
Set aside reflection time. At the end of the day, take a couple minutes to sit down and ask, have I done everything I wanted to get done today? And if not, how can I integrate that into my schedule moving forward so that I take it in stride, rather than letting it drag me down?
University life is hectic. Finding a way to navigate it that works best for you is important. Don’t neglect your time: in many ways, it’s all we have!
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