All students have been there: it’s 10 pm the night before your big midterm paper is due, and you’ve only written a few sentences of the introduction.
You planned to show a draft to your professor a week before the due date, but with all of your other classes and extracurricular activities (and your social life) vying for your attention, you just never had a chance to get started. Now you’re just hoping to get the paper done before morning and scrape by with an OK grade.
With all that college students have to manage, completing assignments at the last minute is certainly understandable and sometimes hard to avoid.
Often, though, improved time management is all that you need to stay on schedule and produce your best work for the long term.
This article will discuss some simple strategies you can use to improve your time management this semester and show you how to implement them using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud Work OS.
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Plan ahead
The first step of effective time management is making a plan: what needs to be done, and when will you work on it?
Planning ahead has several benefits. Most obviously, it ensures that you’ll never have to scramble to meet a surprise deadline, which can derail your routine and result in subpar work.
It also helps prevent procrastination. It’s easy to spend hours on YouTube if you don’t know where to start with your work. Once you’ve created an action plan for each week, you’ll find it much easier to start checking tasks off your to-do list and make sure no time is wasted.
To start, use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud as your college planner. When your professors give you their course syllabi at the beginning of the semester, enter all of your assignments and due dates into staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud to make a schedule for each class.
Then, use the calendar and timeline views to visualize all of your work on a calendar, so it’s easy to get an overview of the weeks ahead.
Prioritize important tasks
When creating your work plan, you’ll want to make sure that you allocate enough time to assignments that require extra attention.
One way to do this is to rate the priority of each of your assignments. Your priority rating can account for deadlines, difficulty, importance for your grade, or any other factor relevant to your work.
Organizing tasks by priority in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is incredibly simple. First, set priorities for all of your tasks using the status or rating columns. Then, simply sort the items in your board by priority so that the most important tasks appear first in your list.
Split large assignments into manageable chunks
Students often prioritize tasks due soon and repeatedly postpone working on larger assignments. Why spend 1 hour now on the 15-hour coding assignment due next week when you have so much other work to deal with?
While logical in some ways, this strategy will likely result in you not having enough time to complete your most challenging assignments to the best of your abilities.
That’s why when you’re working on a large assignment or studying for a final exam, it’s crucial to split the work up into manageable chunks.
Instead of seeing a 15-hour coding assignment, you might instead see five 3-hour assignments in which you’ll code one piece of the larger program. Since it’s much easier to find three hours in your schedule than it is to find fifteen, even on your busiest days you’ll be able to make progress on your highest priority work.
In staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, the best way to break down large assignments is by using subitems. With subitems, you can easily set deadlines and track your progress for each component of your larger projects. No more all-nighters for you this semester 🙂
Build breaks into your schedule
If you think you’re only productive when you’re working, you’re wrong: research shows that taking breaks can increase your energy and make you more efficient.
For that reason, be sure to set time for breaks even on your busiest days. Some researchers recommend taking a break for every 1.5 hours of work, while others suggest working in even shorter spurts. Choose the strategy that works best for you and stick to it.
That said, not all breaks are created equal: you’re not as likely to feel energized and ready to take on that math problem set if you spent your 30 minute break scrolling through your favorite social media platform.
Instead, try being more intentional about using your break time wisely. Exercising, grabbing a meal with friends, or carving out time for one of your hobbies are all great ways to clear your mind and prepare yourself for a few hours of studying.
Understand your “why”
Maintaining a clear sense of why you’re doing something is one of the best ways to keep yourself motivated to stay on schedule.
Nobody wants to spend time on pointless busy-work. In contrast, if you understand what you’ll gain from working on something, staying productive becomes that much easier.
Oftentimes this is easier said than done: it’s easy to understand your “why” when working on a passion project, but what about assignments for classes that you just don’t enjoy?
In those situations, try to look for ways in which the assignment will help you learn or develop new skills. For example, maybe you didn’t love Hamlet, but you know that writing a paper on it will still help you improve your writing. Adopting that kind of mindset will help keep you motivated to write an A+ paper.
In staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can keep track of your “why” by creating a “Goals” column in your assignments board and jotting down 1-2 bullet points on what you hope to gain from each class or assignment.
Enjoying the college experience
There’s so much more to college than your assignments and tasks. Consciously working on your time management skills can help you maximize your years at school, giving you more free time for learning, building relationships, and pursuing your passions.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud will help you take control of your time as a student effectively, 100% for free. It is the online schedule maker, student planner, and time management solution that helps college students keep track of the tasks at hand and never miss a deadline.
Check out our staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud for education website for more information about our student plan. Read more about balancing the fun of college with time management in “How to have a life and a GPA“.
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