Time Management

Image Courtesy of Self Learning

We always hear time management being thrown around as something important to have as we progress through life and higher education, but how exactly do we "manage our time" well to have enough time to do everything we want or have to do? We must first understand what time management is at its core to answer this question. According to Wikipedia, time management is "the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities." In simpler terms, managing/planning our time and being aware of our time on something. It can seem easy to plan our time, but it isn't easy to find a system that works for you in the long term and follow through with the activity needed.

Although there are 24 hours in a day, it never feels like enough time. Time does fly. Without time management, you can feel overwhelmed, scattered, unproductive, constantly scrambling to catch up, and unprepared.

There are a few main reasons people struggle with time management, the first being overcommitted. It's important to remember that there are only so many hours in the day and energy you have. Being overcommitted can mean that you may run out of energy to even follow through with your self-paced activities despite managing your time. This can leave you feeling unproductive when you just used up all your resources, resulting in a lack of energy (which is normal). An article on Forge outlines another reason you may struggle with time management: It may be that you are doing too much and not applying the idea of working smart, not hard. Let's say you set aside 5 hours to study for your math test; while that may help you, studying with the Pomodoro method for 3 hours can also be as effective if you use proper study techniques. It's not about the quantity in which you study; it's about the quality of studying you can do in that time. The third reason could be because you are not specific enough about what you want to do in a time you manage. Giving vague instructions to yourself can result in feeling overwhelmed and wanting to procrastinate because it's unclear where to start. Now I'm not saying write out everything you need to do in that time as that is tedious and not a good use of your time, but finding where to start and a basic outline helps. The fourth reason is that you could be overplanning; as we said early we as humans have limited energy, overplanning might feel productive at the moment, but you need to remember to follow through with your plan. You might not have enough energy actually to complete the necessary activities. When you get distracted or fall behind on your schedule, it can lead to you being even more stressed because you feel unproductive. The fifth and final reason some people may struggle with time management is that they haven't found a system that works for them yet. Managing your time with a system that doesn't work for you won't be effective or easy to plan out. We hope you will find some base ideas to personalize after reading this article!

Benefits

Time management can seem tedious now, so what benefits are there to put in the work to have a good time management system that works for you?

1. Less stress - managing your time can directly reduce your stress from feeling overwhelmed about work or falling behind. Since you manage your time and due dates, you won't have to worry about last-minute rushing your work or exhausting yourself jumping from one task to the next.

2. Check off tasks on your to-do list - we don't have to feel productive 24/7 but being productive is one of the main goals of time management. When you know what you need to do in a specific amount of time, you can get more done in less time and manage your workload for the day.

3. Decrease the need to redo work - when we don't manage our time, we often feel the need to rush to finish everything before the deadline. This could lead to missed work or lower quality work you may need to redo. Managing your time also means being more organized with less rushed mistakes and the need to restart your tasks.

4. Avoiding self-created problems - an example of a self-created problem is trying to finish a project that was supposed to be completed over a span of a week in a few hours before the due date. Without time management, we can fall behind, forget about important dates, and quickly procrastinate without realizing how fast time is going by.

5. More free time - We can't create more time, but completing what work you need to do before the due date creates more free time, whether to review an assignment or sleep rather than rushing it last minute and jumping to another assignment.

6. Decrease wasted time - knowing what you need to do at a specific time of the day reduces the time you spend staring at your long to-do list, wondering when to start. When something feels overwhelming, or you don't know where to start, some people procrastinate because the task at hand seems too daunting to start. We can prevent this by writing out precisely what we plan to do in a set period of time.

7. Reach your goals and objectives faster - time management allows you to be aware of time, and it helps you put in the time to reach your goals.

Time Management Strategies

Here are some strategies in which you can create a system with a combination of them or take one and alter it, so it works for you! There is no right way to manage your time, but these are just some ideas to get you started!

Time blocking

According to Todoist, Time blocking is a "method that asks you to divide your day into blocks of time. Each block is dedicated to accomplishing a specific task, or group of tasks, and only those specific tasks." Time blocking is like a rough sketch of how you plan to use your day. I would recommend using an electronic calendar for this, like google calendar, because it's easy to adjust times when something takes longer than needed. It allows you to custom repeat an event (i.e. you have the same time blocking schedule every weekend).

Image credits to Todoist

Objectives/To do list

To start managing your time, you must understand what you need to do. The easiest way to do this is to set objectives/tasks for the day. If you want to plan on a calendar or document, or journal, write upcoming tasks for the month or week ahead. This way, you can plan ahead of time around meetings or important due dates when you know you need to dedicate that night to study.

Scheduling

Everyone is different, so if time blocking doesn't work for you, you can estimate how long you will spend on an activity and schedule that specific time in your calendar. Again, I recommend a journal with a calendar or electronic calendars for scheduling because you can look/plan.

Prioritize and be realistic

To manage your time well, it is crucial to prioritize which work needs to be done that day or week, because realistically, there isn't enough time to finish everything. You also have to be realistic about how you feel that day, if you are tired or energized, and how productive you can be that day.

Master schedule

A master schedule can be a template you use each week to manage your time and schedule your listed tasks. If you have the time and motivation, you might want to try Notion, an application with various functions linked to each other, which makes it easy to make a master schedule. But it does take some time to make it look aesthetically pleasing and into a system that works for you. There are a lot of templates on the internet so modify others' templates to work for you!

Take breaks

We're all human, and we can't work 24/7 or be productive the entire day. So don't beat yourself up because you were unproductive one day or felt like you accomplished nothing. We all need to take breaks and recharge, so try switching up the way you manage your time, and remember to add in breaks too!

Thank you for reading this article, and I hope you find inspiration and new ideas to begin to create an effective way of managing your time. Time does indeed fly, but it's what we can do with the time we have that matters!

Article Author: Kelley Liang

Article Editor: Edie Whittington