Time management is a huge issue for many students so the best solution is to devise some workable time management strategies that can help well.
Many students find themselves double-minded about managing their time efficiently due to the overburdening of their academic routines. Today, time is losing its significance because there is much left to be done and the ticking of clockwork at the speed of the wind.
Therefore, the necessity is to balance both the burden with the ticking of the pacing clock but before we begin with some useful time management strategies, let’s take a quick look at the agents of creating mess among the college students
Key Points
- Time management strategies help students to find the perfect time to beat their academic needs.
- Workload, peer, and familial pressure are major factors that hinder the growth of a student.
- It is important for students to develop routines after considering their personal habits and performance.
- Categorization of your problems is an essential part of routine development.
- Self-study is essential but combined study can help a lot in understanding a number of concepts.
- You can learn well from the experiences of your guardians and parents regarding management.
- Sticking to the routine is the most important factor to ensure success in terms of time management.
Contributing Factors To Create A Burdensome Routine
Though there are many reasons behind the burdensome routine of a college student. The workload and certain academic pressures are always there to haunt them and hurdle them at the same time, yet some of the reasons are very common and every single student is hit by them at least once or twice in their academic lives.
Some of the major reasons which are the cause of panic for a student and give them absolute nightmares are:
- Excessive Assignments
- Quizzes
- The Fear of Failure
- Peer pressure
- Poor management skills
- Familial pressure
Excessive Assignments
This is the most common reason that every single student finds it hard to keep up with time. The enormous piles of various assignments each and every single day is a reason big enough to make others aware that a student’s routine is totally distorted by the crushing assignments which are handed over every day.
This creates various problems for the youngsters because they have to schedule an ample amount of time especially for completing these tasks other than the activities of their ordinary lives.
Quizzes
Another reason to keep you awake till late at night and still not meeting up the criterion is the bunch of quizzes that come every single day. It happens a number of times in college that you don’t find yourself able to prepare for daily-based quizzes.
Often other academic plans are responsible and sometimes, your time is divided between going to and fro and sorting out a number of things on your own. Whatever the reason might be in the end, the result is absolute devastation which is quite disappointing of course!
The Fear of Failure
When we believe that fear is the biggest enemy of our self-confidence, we should rather take a practical example of this fear of failure as well. It is because this fear of failure is one reason that we don’t even want to take the first step in the competition.
Interestingly, a number of students are the victims of this fear and that’s why they are afraid of developing fairly efficient time management strategies on their own. Many of the students do not even try their luck because they are fearful of getting failed and in the end this makes them fail miserably at college.
Peer Pressure
You want to do good because you notice that your friends are doing great. This mentality has become the main reason for the failure of many strategies as well as students.
In peer groups, the success of one person influences the others to do it much better than the other and this is why people get into things that are not made for them. Individual uniqueness goes somewhere in the background and every other person wants to get success the way their friends have gained.
Poor Management Skills
Haha! Yes! You are reading it correctly. The management skills because of mishandling can turn out to be a headache for you. This is because when you are not sticking to your routine which was initially developed by yourself or you are becoming a bit careless in creating a routine for your impact handling in the first place, what else can you expect?
A number of students fail to realize their internal weakness and thus they don’t create a solution for themselves even in rare cases, if they attempt to do so, they often forget to follow it. This reason makes them a failure in their academic life.
Familial Pressure
Familial pressure is another factor that makes things worse for you in the end. This is a common norm in many households that parents or guardians tend to become hyperactive toward the progress of their children. That’s when they come across the success stories of others.
This is why they compel their own children to follow the path of the successful lot. The truth is that not everyone has the same mindset and skills. What may look effective can turn out lethal and hence students fail because they are working on the schedules of others without realizing what is their own credibility and how they can follow their own set routine.
So these are some of the factors which exist as the main hurdles and create problems for students to set their own path and find out the direction of their academic life.
15 Effective Time Management Strategies
College students think that there is just one purpose in their life and that is to make their academic life successful as much as they can. Now, here lies the real problem.
When you are working for success solely and not considering other aspects of your life, things can get pretty much hard for you. This is why it is important to manage time intelligently so that every aspect of life gets the same taste and nothing remains devoid of food of versatility in the end.
Here are some of the all-time finest time management strategies you can think of adopting in your life to find out the real meaning of both your academic and personal life.
- Set proper goals
- Create a checklist
- Spare some time for individual creativity
- Divide your problems into major and minor
- Create a timetable influenced by the division
- Minimize your screen time near exams
- Develop a personal routine of reading
- Take intermittent breaks amid preparation
- Give time to your personal needs
- Analyze your routine every week
- Create fun academic plans on weekends
- Wake up early
- Discuss with your counselors
- Develop a routine of sharing problems
- Track your progress continuously
Set Proper Goals
The foremost of all the influential time management strategies is to find out about your overall ambitions and goals. If you have not already set goals for yourself, then it’s impossible for you to get the kinds of results you want in the end.
Without setting some end goals, you are lost. It is ridiculous to find out that you are working hours and hours and still not know what you want in the end. So, always keep on asking yourself that:
- What is it that I actually want to accomplish?
- What are my goals overall?
- How can I achieve them in a short time by managing my routine?
Once you have found the answers to these questions, you know well that there is a certain direction in which you are heading forward. It is important for you that you locate your destination before it gets too late.
Fixed goals help students in building up routines that work entirely for the achievement of those set forth aims. It also helps you to find out the overall time and methodology which you would possibly be adopting during your journey. So, don’t forget, goal setting is the main mission. Once you have accomplished this, half of your task is done.
Create a Checklist
A checklist is an important member of your mission. You cannot forget it at any cost. This is because a checklist will help you find out all the necessary efforts and methods that will make you meet your aims sooner than later. A good checklist always consists of:
- The goals
- The strategies
- The routine
- The entire methodology
- The necessary requirements
- Time period
- Problems
Once you have listed all this in your checklist, there you go on the path of hard work. This is because every factor of the checklist will be checked if and only if you have completed all your tasks on a regular basis.
It is important that you mention every single thing from your preparation bucked into your checklist because this will give you an idea of the extent of your journey too. You will find out things which you have already done and measures which still need to be adopted.
Spare Time for Individual Creativity
This portion among all of your time management strategies is unique and important at the same time. This is because it helps you find out your inner talent and also refreshes your mind after a hard day in college.
There can be various things you can do to promote creativity within you. If you are a good artist, you can draw just the way you want. Otherwise, you can easily cook, bake, and write. You can do anything which speaks of your own creativity.
This will enhance your confidence in a number of ways. It will tell you that if you are good enough to sort out your potential power, then you can be equally good to sort out your academic strength.
You can also feel relaxed amid your curricular activities because of a little sigh of relief your creativity brings to you. So, be creative and see if it’s magic.
Divide Your Problems
You know that you cannot solve all problems at once in a go. You have to divide them according to your own interpretation. Whenever you are working to do well in an exam, there are two kinds of problems that are staring at you straight out of the pages of books. These are:
- The most complex problems/ The major problems
These kinds of problems are the ones which you find most hard to solve. These are the problems that take most of your time, therefore you need to give them the due attention from the beginning so that things don’t turn out bad for you in the end.
- Immediate problems/ The minor problems
These are the kinds of problems that emerge usually throughout your preparation journey. These are easier to solve and get their solution in no time. So, there is not a lot of time needed for them.
When you have divided your problems into two categories, the corresponding time management gets easy for you. You find it easy to manage your time according to your issues, making things super-easy for you.
Create a Timetable
Timetables are very important for an individual who wants to ace academic life. It is because of the timetable that you manage everything exactly on time. Once you have divided the problems into categories, the next thing is to develop a timetable that can easily observe these categories and then decide the time duration.
You not only include the academic parts of your life in an ideal timetable but you distribute them into different slices. Each slice is unique and tells you a tale of its own ranging from the personal to your academic life. When you have divided your routine into different patterns, a sense of punctuality automatically develops in your mind. After some time, you become habitual and complete every task in its due time sphere.
Minimize Your Screen Time
The biggest issue today is that most of us are not able to divert attention from our phones to any other thing. However, this can become very problematic if you are going to prepare for your exams. So, the best thing is that when you have a difficult exam coming up in a few weeks, learn to minimize your screen time.
This will help you learn a lot in the duration which is otherwise dedicated to electronic devices. Though it seems hard it isn’t as hard as it seems because after two or three days, you eventually get to this new habit and all your attention, as well as time, is directed at academic accomplishment.
Create a Personal Reading Routine
Reading is very beneficial to keep the mind fresh and intact. Many of the students are unfortunately not good readers. This is why, when they come across huge piles of books, they find it hard to read them all at once and ingest as well as digest the concepts present on the pages.
Remember! This cannot be done in a single day. You need to be consistently active to learn. This is why make your reading habit permanent. Try to read airtime every night, just before sleeping so that you can become an avid reader when the time calls for it. Once you will fully delve into reading, you will find no difficulty in excelling in every exam. You will definitely pass in laughing colors and that is a guarantee.
Take Intermittent Breaks
It is said that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Well, we can’t say anything about Jack but yes, working all the time for good academic results is not part of the game. You need to take breaks at specific intervals so that you can relax yourself a bit.
This will also help your stressed mind to be at ease. Once you are on a break, you can immerse yourself in different activities which you think can make you feel happy. If you want to read some book, go and read otherwise, binge-watching a marvel or any other interesting season can be a great option.
Give Time To Personal Needs
You know that despite being an active member of the academic club, you still need to be the perfect teenager who is there for your peers and spends time with friends and family. So, don’t hesitate about that. Spare some of your time from your daily routine and do all the fun things with your family.
Bake that cake or mow the garden. You can even go to karaoke with your friends. This is because your personal needs are also important. It is also important for you that you find your social and familial circle charming other than the textbooks only.
Analyze Your Routine Every Week
It is necessary for you to check which parts of your routine are working and which ones still need an amendment. Once you are done doing that. Fix up things that you think are not in order. An analysis is a good way to determine the right direction.
When you are overviewing your routine, you are able to find out the strengths and weaknesses all at the same time. This helps you in improving your strategies for the academic environment and helps you become a master of managing your academics together with your personal life.
Create Fun Academics Plans on Weekends
Weekends are always special and what’s more special than creating some fun-bearing academic activities? You can organize some peer group-based competitions. These competitions will help you learn in a fun environment.
At the same time, you will be able to cooperate with your mates to win the academic race. You can also plan self-study for that purpose. It is also efficient to get help from your peers regarding academic matters. However, it is important that you make that self-study obvious by “studying” together and not “partying”.
Wake Up Early
Rising up early with the sun is not just a good habit from a health perspective but it can do wonders to increase your academic strength as well. Try to wake up early with the first ray of the sun. Right after doing all your essential morning exercises, you can open up your books, and find some fresh air and a serene environment to learn.
Many students have shared their experiences and they have described this habit as the best one. According to them, it didn’t only help them in finding a much-needed peaceful environment but their minds were also more active to consider and learn new concepts. So, the success of your success is hidden in rising and shining brightly with the beaming rays of the golden sun.
Discuss With Your Counselors
Though most of the students do not pay any heed to this, this can be an effective strategy to find out the best routines according to your credibility and performance.
You can discuss everything with your academic counselor and in return can get some strong routines that can be highly impactful for you, boosting your performance. This is because academic counselors analyze your previous performance with your routine and then give you an action plan which can be the best thing for you in terms of exam preparation.
Develop a Routine for Sharing Your Problems
Many grownups find it hard to talk to their parents and guardians about their academic life. This is because they believe that it will make them weak. So, their academic struggles remain hidden from the family members even if they are suffering greatly and failing again and again.
This is not the right kind of behavior. It makes things difficult for you especially when your parents can assist you with a lot of academic problems. Develop the habit of sharing your academic issues with your parents. You can seek out their guidance in terms of impactful time management. You can also learn from their experiences about the same tests and their time management strategies can be an effective source for you to learn and manage your own academic life.
Track Your Progress Continuously
It is equally important for you to track your progress throughout your journey. You need to evaluate the extent of your learning. If there are some things that remained mismanaged in your academic plan, then come up with a more feasible one.
Check how far you have been able to make progress. If you find that there is still time left to get near your goals, increase your efforts. This will help you get better and more professional in terms of developing workable time management strategies.
Conclusion
Time management strategies are not hard to develop. The most important thing is that you consider your routine workable enough to bring you some benefit in the end.
Once you have set up a proper routine, stick to it because your punctuality toward the routine is something that will actually bring the desired results.
The author is an M.Phil scholar conducting her thesis in Literature. As a sucker for literature, she swoons over Greek and South Asian fiction while reviewing books in her spare time. Her love for writing has made her expand her subject matter and now she pens her opinions frequently on business, finance, entrepreneurship, lifestyle, history, and literature. For a special connection with entrepreneurship, she opens up the details occasionally about it.