Time To Time Manage

Maybe you’re like me and you have 5 assignments due in one week. Or maybe you’re not, but you still have several deadlines coming up. Either way, time management is extremely important for dealing with these stressful periods, when essays are being assigned and exams are just around the corner. I know that managing your time is not always easy, there are so many aspects to it. But fear not, I have compiled some steps you can take to effectively manage your time. 

Set Goals!                                                   

Setting goals allows you to know where you are going and what actually needs to get done. Remember to always be specific when outlining your goal, this way you can measure how much progress you’ve made and exactly how much you have left to get done. This makes it easier to allocate the right amount of time to the task!

Check out our Goal Setting Tip Sheet for more information

Prioritize!

I know from my own experience, that when I do not manage my time well, I end up spending more time on lower priority work and then I find myself with very little time to finish those big assignments. Prioritizing is the best way to deal with this issue.  Determining which task is the most important makes it easier to determine which assignments to allocate more time to. This goes hand in hand then with your goal setting, because you’ll know which assignments need more time, and goal setting will tell you how much time. 

Manage Distractions…

I think we all know that social media is the biggest interruption, I constantly find myself checking my phone while I’m working on an assignment. Try experimenting with different ways of staying away from social media, and see which one works for you. One thing I do to mitigate the social media distraction, is put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and this way I don’t get notifications and do not feel the need to check my phone. 

Stop procrastinating

“I’ll get to it later!” – Too many of these and you’ll find yourself finishing an assignment the day before it’s due. Procrastination is something I know I myself struggle with regularly but from personal experience, the best place to start is to acknowledge that you are in fact procrastinating. From there you can look into ways to get out of the habit of procrastinating…

In fact we have a Tip Sheet for that!

Schedule your week… and your day!

Now that you’ve already figured out your goals, and you’ve prioritized these goals, you just need to put them into a schedule. This way you can see how much time you have allocated to each task and you can have something to help you make sure that you’re on track to complete these tasks! You can use an agenda or daily planner to do this, in fact SCSU (Scarborough Campus Student Union) gives out agendas for free at their office.

You can also use our Daily Task Planner to schedule your day

And finally, I have just one more Tip Sheet for you to check out. It’s our own time management tip sheet. It even has a self-assessment you can do to see where your time management skills are at now and what you need to improve on. 

Good luck will all of those assignments!

Alanna