4.1  Time Management¹

If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,400, but carried no balance from day to day and allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening cancelled whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day, what would you do? Draw out every cent, of course! Well, you have such a bank, and its name is Time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as lost whatever you have failed to invest with purpose. It carries no balance; it allows no overdrafts. Each day it opens a new account with you. Each night it burns the record of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposit, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no borrowing from tomorrow. It is critical to use the time you have to our advantage to reach your goals and live the life you desire.

Technically, time cannot be managed, but we label it time management when we talk about how people use their time. We often bring up efficiency and effectiveness when discussing how people spend their time, but we cannot literally manage time. What we can do is find better ways to spend our time, allowing us to accomplish our most important tasks and spend time with the people most important to us.

What is your relationship with time? Are you usually early, right on time or late? Do you find yourself often saying, “I wish I had more time?” Are you satisfied with your relationship with time or would you like to change it?

The Value of Time

If someone were to negotiate for an hour of your time, how much would that be worth to you? We often equate time with money. Many of us work in positions where we are paid by the hour; this gives us some gauge of what we are worth to our employers. Some items we purchase because we think they are of good value for their price. Others we pass on. Are some hours of your day more important or more valuable than others? Why? Are you more productive in the morning or in the evening? Once people realize how valuable time is, they often go to great lengths to protect it because they understand its importance. How much would you pay for an additional hour in a day? What would you do with that time? Why? Identifying your answers to these questions is an important first step if understanding your time management strategy and how to prioritize your time.

Allocating Time

There are 168 hours in a week. It is helpful to acknowledge how much time we have available to us in any given week, particularly when we start to reflect on the difference between how we want to spend our time versus how we actually spend our time.

One challenge for many students is the transition from the structure of high school to the freedom of college. In high school, students spend a large portion of their time in class, approximately 30 hours in class per week, while full-time college students may spend only one-third of that time in class, approximately 12 hours in class per week. Further, college students are assigned much more out of class work than high school students. Think about how many times one of your high school teachers gave you something to read during class. In college, students are given more material to read with the expectation that it is done outside of class.

This can create challenges for students who are unable to set aside proper study time for each of their courses. Keep in mind, for full-time students: your college day should not be shorter than your high school day.

Hourly Recommendations (per Week)

The above table illustrates a recommended balance between work and school hours.  Generally speaking, if you are working full-time, a part-time credit load may allow a student to better manage their time and corresponding coursework. The Total is also a very important category. Students often start to see difficulty when their total number of hours between work and school exceeds 60 per week. The amount of sleep decreases, stress increases, grades suffer, job performance decreases and students are often unhappy.

Weekly Planning

We always suggest that you spend time at the start of each week laying out an ideal schedule for the next seven days. This schedule should, ideally, be VERY specific–each hour should be accounted for. Block out time for sleeping, eating, grocery shopping, work, childcare, household chores, socializing and, of course, school work.

Work and in-class time are easy to place on a weekly schedule because they are predetermined. We often call this “fixed time”. But study time is one area that is consistently more difficult to prioritize on a calendar. It takes initiative to include it in a student’s busy week and self-discipline to stick to it.

Here’s a tip: Write your study time into your schedule or calendar. It’s important to do this because it’s easy to skip a study session or say to yourself, “I’ll do it later.” While there would likely be an immediate consequence if you do not show up for work, there is not one if you fail to study on Tuesday from 3pm-4pm. Often the consequence of not making time for coursework reveals itself at a later date, by poor performance on exams, projects, papers and ultimately final course grades.

It is widely suggested that students need to study approximately two hours for every hour that they spend in class in order to be successful². Thus, if you are taking a class that meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4pm-5:30pm (three hours per week), you should plan for six hours of out of class study time per week. You might need to spend more time than what is recommended if you are taking a subject you find challenging, have fallen behind in or if you are taking short-term classes. Conversely, you might need to spend less time if the subject comes easily to you or if there is not a lot of assigned homework. Regardless, it is important to budget this time and include it in your weekly calendar in order to keep up on assignments and course material.

In addition to identifying all of your “fixed” time, identify time when you have no fixed obligation—”free time”.  This time can be used however you want; it’s time you have available for activities you enjoy. Take a look at a typical week for yourself. How much fixed time do you have? How much free time? How much fixed and free time would you like to have?  Finding a balance between fixed and free time will help decrease stress, maintain motivation and allow yourself to enjoy other habits and activities that contribute to your overall well being.

Identifying, Organizing and Prioritizing Goals

The universal challenge of time is that there are more things that we want to do and not enough time to do them.

Students have aspirations, dreams, and goals they want to accomplish, and they often are discouraged by the length of time it is taking them to complete a goal.  Every semester there are students that drop classes because they have taken on too much or they are unable to keep up with their class work because they have other commitments and interests. There is nothing wrong with other commitments or interests. On the contrary, they may bring joy and fulfillment, but do they get in the way of your educational goal(s)? For instance, if you were to drop a class because you required surgery, needed to take care of a sick family member or your boss increased your work hours, those may be important and valid reasons to do so. If you were to drop a class because you wanted to binge watch Grey’s Anatomy, play more Minecraft, or spend more time on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you may have more difficulty justifying that decision, but it is still your decision to make. Sometimes students do not realize the power they have over the decisions they make and how those decisions can affect their ability to accomplish the goals they set for themselves.

Prioritizing Goals

Why is it important to prioritize? Let’s look back at a sample list.

• Social media
• Work
• Text friends
• Watch TV
• Exercise
• Go to grocery store
• Eat lunch with friend
• Study
• Pay bills
• Go to class

If I spent all my time completing the first seven things on the list, but the last three were the most important, then I would not have prioritized very well.

It would have been better to prioritize the list after creating it and then work on the items that are most important first. You might be surprised at how many students fail to prioritize.

After prioritizing, the sample list now looks like this:

• Go to class
• Work
• Study
• Pay bills
• Exercise
• Eat lunch with friend
• Go to grocery store
• Text friends
• Social media
• Watch TV

One way to prioritize is to give each task a value. A = Task related to goals; B = Important—Have to do; C = Could postpone. Then, map out your day so that with the time available to you you are focused on your “A” value items first. You’ll now see below our list has the ABC labels. You will also notice a few items have changed positions based on their label. Keep in mind that we all have different goals and different things that are important to us. There is no right or wrong here, but it is paramount to know what is important to you, and to know how you will spend the majority of your time with the things that are the most important to you.

A: Go to class, Study, Exercise

B: Work, Pay bills, Go to grocery store

C: Eat lunch with friend, Text friends, Social media, Watch TV

Do the Most Important Things First

Spending the majority of your time on “C” tasks instead of “A” tasks won’t allow you make much progress towards your goals. The easiest things to do and the ones that take the least amount of time are often what people do first. Checking Facebook or texting might only take a few minutes but doing it prior to studying means your spending time with a “C” activity before an “A” activity.

People like to check things off that they have done. It feels good. But don’t confuse productivity with accomplishment of tasks that aren’t important. You could have a long list of things that you completed, but if they aren’t important to you, it probably wasn’t the best use of your time.

The image you see above is the Eisenhower Matrix, named after former President Dwight D. Eisenhower who used it to prioritize his to do list. The matrix shows how to categorize your tasks and will help prioritize your goals, tasks, and assignments. Take a look at the matrix and quadrants and identify which quadrant your activities fall into.

Quadrant I (The quadrant of necessity): Important and Urgent

Only crisis activities should be here. If you have included exams and papers here, you are probably not allowing yourself enough time to fully prepare. If you continue at this pace you could burn out!

Quadrant II (The quadrant of quality and personal leadership): Important but Not Urgent

This is where you define your priorities. What’s important in your life? What will keep you balanced? For example, you may know that good nutrition, sleep, recreation and maintaining healthy social relationships are important but do you consciously make time for them in your daily or weekly routine? Quadrant II includes your “A” goals. Managing your life and the lifestyle will help you manage your time.

Quadrant III (The quadrant of deception): Not Important but Urgent

While you may feel that activities, such as texting, need your attention right away, too much time spent on Quadrant III activities can seriously reduce valuable study time. This may leave you feeling pulled in too many directions at once.

Quadrant IV (The quadrant of waste): Not Important and Not Urgent

Quadrants three and four include your “C” goals. If you’re spending many hours on Quadrant IV activities, you’re either having a great deal of fun or spending a lot of time procrastinating! Remember, the objective is balance. You may notice social media and texting are placed into this category. You could make a case that social media, texting, Netflix, and Youtube are important, but how often are they urgent? Ultimately, it is up to you to decide what is important and urgent for yourself, but for the context of this textbook, your classes, assignments, preparation, and studying should almost universally be more urgent and important than social media and texting.

Managing time well comes down to two things. One is identifying (and then prioritizing) goals and the other is having the discipline to be able to work towards accomplishing them. We all have the same amount of time in a day, week, month and year, yet some people are able to accomplish more than others. Why is this? Often, it is because they are able to set goals, prioritize them and then work on them relentlessly and effectively until they are complete.

Citations

1. Dillon, Dave. Blueprint for Success in College and Career. OER Commons. https://press.rebus.community/blueprint2/. CC BY 4.0.
2. Jeffery Young, “Homework? What Homework?,” Chronicle of High Education, 2002, A35-A37, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Homework-What-Homework-/2496.