How to Manage Your Time for Learning

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Introduction

Good time management can improve students' learning, allows them to complete course assignments in a timely manner, and ultimately leads to their higher academic performance. In general, students who manage their time effectively perform better than their colleagues with poor time management skills. Time management skills are not skills the person is born with. They needs to be practiced from the early academic life, as it is a form of self-management on how to do activities efficiently and at the correct time. Decreasing procrastination, pre-planning the studies, and improvement in quality sleep are all part of time management skills.

According to Adams and Blair , students reports difficulties with finding a balance between their studies and their day-to-day lives. It increases their anxiety leading to academic underachievement and stress.

This article tries to explain why time management matters and offers ideas how best structure the person's schedule.

Time Management Benefits

Time management has an impact on academic performance. It can be measured through the following activities:

1. Proactive approach to managing daily schedule facilitates achieving person's learning goals. Without this approach, an individual tends to react to whatever comes up in the moment and ends up feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and stressed out
2. Flexibility and autonomy with time allow to use it more effectively and follow through on important tasks. It protects against burnout. Examples include managing time outside of lectures and allocating time for study, rather than on social media.
3. Blocking out the time for completing assessment tasks in advance prevents high-pressure situation, procrastination, and minimise the need for cramming before exams.
4. Allocating time slots for specific tasks allows to focus attention on what matters most.

Time Management Practical Strategies

Time management is about taking a *proactive* approach to managing your day.

Strategies for proactive approach are as follow:

Time-blocking

Time-blocking is a form of scheduling where different tasks and activities are allocated to specific blocks of time within person's schedule. The following are the principles and benefits of time-blocking:

• It encourages to make intentional choices about what to spend the time on.
• It encourages to focus the attention on each activity for a discrete period of time.
• It reduces cognitive fatigue and improves overall performance.
• It includes scheduling time every day for different things like classes, work, and social media check-ins.
• It requires keeping a flexible mindset, adapting daily plans in the moment, and avoiding rigid daily schedule.

Task-batching

Task-batching is the process of grouping together similar tasks, and doing them all at once in order to avoid context switching. It is characterised by the following:

• It groups together short, less cognitively demanding tasks, like checking email, making phone calls, or posting to social media.
• It allows to use this time to plan other parts of the schedule, based on the new information found in the checked email
• It reduces the cognitive overload of regularly switching between different tasks.
• It helps avoid becoming distracted.

Day theming

Day theming is focused on dedicating every day of the week to a specific area of focus or responsibility through the following:

• Allocating significant portions of an entire day to a collection of tasks that are all related to one project or study theme.
• Assessing the progress in a range of different areas of learning

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