4.1 Time Management

Imagine you have a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400, but carries no balance from day to day. It allows you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening, it cancels 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.  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. What we can do is find more efficient and effective ways to spend our time, allowing us to accomplish our most important tasks and spend time doing the things that are most important to us.

The Value of Time

If someone were to negotiate with you for an hour of your time, how much would that time be worth? 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. How much would you pay for an additional hour in a day? What would you do with that time? Are some hours of your day more important or more valuable than others? Why? Answering these questions is an important first step in understanding your time management strategy and how to prioritize your time.

Allocating Time

It is helpful to acknowledge how much time we have available to us, particularly when we start to reflect on the difference between how we want to 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 work to do outside of class 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, working full-time and taking 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 hours per week. The amount of sleep decreases, stress increases, grades suffer, job performance decreases, and students are often unhappy.

Identifying, Organizing, and Prioritizing Goals

The universal challenge of time is that there are typically more things that we want to do than there is 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 takes them to reach them. Every semester, there are students who 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 having a variety of commitments or interests if they bring joy and fulfillment. But what happens when they get in the way of your educational goals? 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 your phone, 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.

Why is it important to prioritize? Let’s look at a sample list of average daily activities for a student:

• Social media
• Work
• Text friends
• Watch TV
• Exercise
• Go to the grocery store
• Eat lunch with a 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 a friend
• Go to the 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.

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

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.

The Eisenhower Matrix or Do the Most Important Things First

Spending the majority of your time on “C” tasks instead of “A” tasks won’t allow you to 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 you’re 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 the accomplishment of tasks that aren’t important. You could have a long list of things that you have completed, but if they are not important to you, it probably was not 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. Each task is prioritized based on its importance and its level of urgency. Read about each quadrant below and consider which of your daily priorities would fit into each category.

Quadrant I: Important and Urgent

Crisis events fall into this category, such as car trouble or your apartment flooding. If you would typically put things like studying for an exam or completing assignments in this category, you are probably not allowing yourself enough time to do high quality work before a deadline and are adding unnecessary stress. If you continue at this pace, you could burn out!

Quadrant II: 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 lifestyle will help you manage your time.

Quadrant III: Not Important but Urgent

Unexpected distractions tend to fall in this category. You may feel the need to respond immediately when you get a notification on one of your devices. You may also find it difficult to say no when a friend texts you that they are going to get coffee right now and asks if you want to come along.  Too much time spent on Quadrant III activities can seriously reduce valuable time. It may leave you feeling pulled in too many directions and keeping you from doing what’s most important.

Quadrant IV: Not Important and Not Urgent

Quadrants IV 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 that 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 allocating time to work towards accomplishing them. Next, we will discuss how to plan your time to best accomplish your goals.

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 with each hour accounted for.

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 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Often, the consequence of not making time for coursework reveals itself at a later date through poor performance on exams, projects, papers, and ultimately final course grades.

It is widely suggested that students need to study approximately two to three hours for every credit they are enrolled in order to be successful2. Thus, if you are taking a 3-credit course, you should plan for at least six hours out of class per week reading, completing assignments, and studying material. 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 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.

Some students study best in the morning and some at night. Some excel at a coffee shop, and others at the library. The place and time in which students often study is usually the most convenient for them, but that could be at a time when you are exhausted or a place full of distractions. Consider when and where you are most energized and focused, and distractions are limited.

Elements conducive to a more effective study experience include things such as good lighting, ample supplies, comfortable seating, adequate space, and personalizing the study area to add a touch of inspiration and motivation. If this is available in your home, that’s great! If not, consider where on campus or near your home you can find a good study space. An “ideal” study space will be based on your individual preferences and what is available to you given your location and schedule. At a minimum, it can be helpful to mute the notifications on your cell phone, turn off the TV and close social media pages.

Now that you have a plan, stick to it. Plan ahead for what you will be doing during your scheduled study time each day to ensure you are prepared (this is when having your syllabus handy is important). Treat your study times as fixed time where you are required to be present and focused on those tasks. This tactic helps limit procrastination and creates structure in your routine.

In addition to identifying all of your “fixed” time, identify time when you have no fixed obligation— “free time”.  Free time is time that does not have a predetermined activity scheduled for that time.  The best part and also the biggest challenge with free time is that this time can be used however you want. Studying, exercising, grocery shopping, cleaning, spending time with friends, or watching a movie can be done at varying times, but are best accomplished when planned for.

Take a look at a typical week for yourself. How much “fixed” time do you have? How much “free” time? How can you schedule your time to accomplish your goals and take care of yourself? Finding a balance will help decrease stress, maintain motivation, and allow yourself to enjoy other habits and activities that contribute to your overall well-being.

Long-Term Planning

Managing a full time course schedule, work, activities, and a social life can be overwhelming and lead to overlapping commitments that sneak up on us. After reviewing your course syllabi, place all of your assignments for all of your classes with their due dates in your calendar  at the beginning of the semester.  Successful students also engage in backwards planning– identifying when to start those assignments and having an idea of how long it will take to complete them. It’s also smart to add any upcoming life events on your calendar as well, such as a trip home for a weekend, a concert, or a friend’s birthday. By planning further in advance, you will be able to adjust your schedule with enough time to accomplish your goals and not have to sacrifice fun events for school (or vice versa).

Below is an example calendar you can use, the Semester at a Glance. This document is a 16-week calendar (the general length of a semester) that can be used to highlight the biggest or most time consuming assignments for the semester. You can then have a holistic view of your semester, determine weeks that will be the busiest, and plan accordingly.

Semester at a Glance

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 Higher Education, 2002, A35-A37, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Homework-What-Homework-/2496.