How to Manage Your Time for Learning

Original Editor - Michael Rowe

Top Contributors - Ewa Jaraczewska and Jess Bell  

Introduction

Good time management can improve students' learning, allow them to complete course assignments on time, and ultimately lead to higher academic performance. Generally, 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 need to be practised from early academic life, as it is a form of self-management to do activities efficiently and at the correct time. Decreasing procrastination, pre-planning the studies, and improving sleep quality are all part of time management skills.

According to Adams and Blair , students report difficulty balancing their studies and daily lives. It increases their anxiety, leading to academic underachievement and stress.

This article explains why time management matters and offers ideas on structuring a 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 us to use it more effectively and follow through on important tasks. It protects against burnout. Examples include managing time outside 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 situations and procrastination. It minimises 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 a person's schedule. The following are the principles and benefits of time-blocking:

• It encourages one to make intentional choices about what to spend the time on.
• It encourages focusing the attention on each activity for a discrete time.
• It reduces cognitive fatigue and improves overall performance.
• It includes scheduling time daily for classes, work, and social media check-ins.
• It requires keeping a flexible mindset, adapting daily plans at the moment, and avoiding rigid daily schedules.

Task-batching

Task-batching is the process of grouping together similar tasks and doing them all at once 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 related to one project or study theme.
• Assessing the progress in a range of different areas of learning.
• Provide structure and be intentional about what to focus on.
• Link seemingly unrelated concepts across the curriculum, provide the focus to prevent distraction, and offer direction.

Reviews

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

Daily Review

• It 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 session is allocated to review daily activities, wrap up any last-minute tasks, and plan for the next day.
• It allows to focus the attention on what is immediately relevant.
• It helps start the next day with a plan.
• It is a brief time that separates studies from the other parts of a student's life.
• It 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

• It helps to adopt a longer time horizon by wrapping up outstanding tasks for the week and preparing for the following.
• It can take up to three hours.
• It should provide answers to questions if tasks on the list need to be completed soon.
• It is a protected time to reflect on how well or poorly the past week's time was used and for making adjustments to the schedule for the coming week.
• In summary, the aims of the 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

• It identifies the high-level goals for the year and ensures progress on each.
• It is a short process with two or three goals to review
• It provides a high-level plan for next month
• It is an opportunity to build in study time for a few months before the assessments are due
• It evaluates the time spent during the last three to four weeks and how well this past time was used.

Annual Review

• It is an assessment of the progress made on the things established as important at the beginning of the year.
• It is a look at personal and work-related objectives
• It analysis the high-impact, important projects which become next year's focus
• It contains 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

Taking time off from work is crucial for avoiding stress and depression, and their potential consequences.

Mixing personal time and the time spent on the studies can cause distraction. It usually happens when one activity can distract from the other. Diversion and distraction from work is key to fighting burn-out, which often leads to depression. Emphasis on the importance of managing person's well-being and incorporating self-care helps to improve mental health by reseting the mind and the body.

There are significant benefits of finding work and life balance, and they include:

• Planning the schedule and allocating time for activities reduce the cognitive load of competing tasks that are vying for attention
• It can help to focus on the assignment or to relax and enjoy the weekend

The following strategies can help with the transition from work mode to personal mode and reversed:

• Having a routine that signals the start of a cognitively demanding period (work or study). Examples: making a cup of tea, turning off the computer, turning off the lights that may be on around the house, or sitting in a special chair. It can also include a quick workout, showering, or checking email on the phone.
• Using time-blocking to create a plan for the day, including time for personal activities. When everything has a time on the schedule, it helps with the feeling that you have to do work during personal time or vice versa.
• Using task-batching to group personal activities into set periods. Examples: checking social media, emails or phone calls ONLY when a significant task is completed.
• Create a wrap-up routine. Examples include a final check of emails or a task list to know that you have completed all essential activities.

Summary

1. Strong time management skills are a key contributor to academic success
2. Scheduling your time is a practical skill that you can improve
3. Time blocking, task batching, day-theming, and reviews are all practical strategies that help you focus on your learning objectives
4. You need to plan the steps you need to take to achieve your goals
5. Managing your schedule is managing how and where you focus your attention

Resources

• Hardy, B. (2020, September 22). There’s More Than Enough Time, When You Use The Time You Have. Medium. https://medium.com/thrive-global/theres-more-than-enough-time-when-you-use-the-time-you-have-3ffa7adaa5d3
• Pinsker, J. (2021, August 11). The Best Time-Management Advice Is Depressing But Liberating. The Atlantic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-best-time-management-advice-is-depressing-but-liberating/ar-AANcLkF
• The Complete Guide to Time Blocking (n.d.). Todoist. Retrieved 16 September 2020 from https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/time-blocking
• Young, S. (2021, May 15). The Key to Find Time for Learning. Scott H Young. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2021/05/15/time-to-learn/