Top Time Management Tips & Tricks for Students

Top Time Management Tips & Tricks for Students

16:00 15 July 2021

With deadlines bearing down on them, students need to make sure they’re learning good time management skills - as well as the content of their courses and qualifications. In fact, most degrees include these skills within their mark scheme, and it’s also implied by having grades capped if a submission is late.

 

As an essay writer, it is very important to make sure your affairs are in order when it comes to the end of each term. These points emerge when many modules all collide and require submissions. To make sure this process is smooth, consider the following tips and tricks.

 

Look after yourself

The best way to save time is to have more of it. Make sure you get enough sleep so you don’t spend several hours of your day all fogged over and confused. All-nighters are fine every so often, but you’ll get much more done if you pace yourself and commit to working a little every day, rather than in sporadic and manic bursts.

 

Learn to prioritize

Take care of your important tasks. Whenever I had to write my essay projects in college, I would break down the task into its component parts. When you know the process of essay writing, you can learn to prioritize the important stuff and, for instance, not spend forever deciding on a font.

 

Avoid procrastination like this by either picking a style for managing all your essays and sticking religiously to that, or do it when you, hopefully, have some spare time.

 

Keep a note on how you’re doing

Tracking your progress and projects is a great way of building a good time-management habit. Diaries are excellent at this, but so are calendars. You can develop a nice habit of logging everything you do, and this can spur you on to do more and more. It is just like the old saying goes: the more you do, the more you do.

 

Keep being active, and you’ll find how this state becomes a default one. Activity breeds activity. In an educational context, this could mean that you’re spending time doing your reading, then figuring out a problem that you want to pursue further, finding inspiration from that, and deciding to allocate more time to it. It’s much easier to find these passions if you’re maintaining a level of self-awareness, while journaling and logging make this a lot more likely.

 

Avoid burnout

Taking a break is crucial to success. But it has to be the right sort of break. In order to really revitalise yourself you need to do more than flicking to another tab and scrolling through social media. Get up, get away from the screen or the desk, and look at something far away. You need to make sure your eyes are focusing on different depths and distances, or you’ll end up with ‘square eyes’.

 

Make yourself a nice cup of herbal tea - remember that caffeine isn’t always the answer. You may enjoy the addiction, but it’s unlikely to help too much after a certain point (usually two cups is plenty). Experiment with what teas satisfy you: for me, it’s the sharp kick of lemon and ginger.

 

Do something that’s sufficiently different from whatever task you were working on: go and have a chat with your roommate or take a quick walk. Fifteen minutes of walking almost seems pointless before you do it. You can wonder how far you’ll actually get and whether it’s worth it, but just try it out. If you really can’t enjoy the walk and are overthinking it, try this method: set a timer for 7.5 minutes and walk, then when it goes off, walk back. A little walk can go a long way.

 

In summation, students need to learn time management in order to get the most out of college. Time management really means looking after yourself. All courses require dedication from their participants, but they’re unlikely to be impossible to complete. If you learn how to pace yourself, you’ll make it look like a breeze and have a great time too.

 

Remember: taking a break is good time management as long as you do it properly. Planning prevents poor performance, and you don’t get many chances at college, so give it your best shot.