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.
• Providing structure and being intentional about what to focus on.
• Linking seemingly unrelated concepts across the curriculum and providing the focus that can prevent distraction and offers direction.

Reviews

Reviews are types of activities that allow the user to stay on top of your schedule. Daily, weekly, monthly, or annual reviews is a practical system that helps focus attention on what is important.

Daily Review

• Helps to make time spent on activities more concrete.
• It is a good way to plan for the future.
• 10–15 minutes at the end of each working is allocated to review daily activities, wrap up any last-minute tasks, and plans for the next day.
• Allows to focus the attention on what is immediately relevant.
• Helps start the next day with a plan.
• It is a brief period of time that separates studies from the other parts of student's life.
• Helps to pay attention to the other meaningful parts of an individual's life (that of a family member or a friend)
  • provides boundaries for work/life balance.

Weekly Review

• Helps to adopt a longer time-horizon through wrapping up outstanding tasks for the week, and in preparation for the following one.
• Can take up to three hours.
• Should answer question if there are tasks on the list that need to be completed soon.
• It is a protected time to reflect on how well, or poorly the past week time was used, and for making adjustments to the schedule for the coming week.
• In summary the aims of weekly review are the following:
  • Getting thoughts out of the head and into the notes.
  • Clearing digital and physical workspaces.
  • Updating to-do lists:
    • assign them time on the schedule to make them realistic
    • schedule your free time
  • Reflecting on the week that was just finished.
  • Identifying priorities for the following week.

Monthly Review

• Identifies the high-level goals for the year, and ensuring that there is a progress on each of them.
• A short process with two or three goals to review
• A high-level plans for next month
• An opportunity to build in study time for a few months before the assessments are due
• Evaluation of how well was the time spent during the last three to four weeks and how well was this psst time used.

Annual Review

• Assessment of the progress made on the things established as important to at the beginning of the year.
• A look at personal and work-related objectives
• Analysis of the high-impact, important projects, which become next year focus
• Adding reminders to weekly and monthly reviews, which focuses attention on what is important
• It is a set of concrete steps that need to be implemented.

Work and Life Balance

Mixing personal time and the time spent on the studies can cause distraction, when one can distract from the other.

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