I. Learning effective time management is the first step toward becoming an effective student. Students who have problems with time management often have consequent problems with reading (not enough time to get through it all); studying for exams and memorizing information (no chance to engage in cumulative review); concentrating (nagging thoughts and worries about all the work to be done); and so on. In order to achieve effective time management, it's necessary to write everything down, toplan ahead and to work with a realistic schedule.

II. Write things down.

• Write everything down. Don't forget to account for the time needed to plan and organize group projects; the preparation time for such things as interviews; the time for making use of writing or math labs, and so on. Also, don't forget to make a note to yourself of times when activities in your personal life--visiting relatives, brief vacations, etc.--are going to infringe on your time for academic projects.

III. Plan ahead.

• Consulting your list of "things to do," work with a monthly schedule.
• Be sure to take into consideration how long it takes you to do certain specific projects (e.g., each major essay might take you two weeks: one week of researching and one week of writing).
• Figure out how much work you have to do within a specific period and divide the amount of work by the number of days. (Suppose, for instance, that you must review four chapters, or 146 pages, of a textbook for a particular course in one week. That means that if you cover around 21 pages a day, you'll be in good shape.)
• Use some kind of monthly planner to keep track of things.

IV. Work with a realistic schedule.

• It is scarcely surprising that many students find the schedules that they put together for themselves impossibly difficult to follow. This is because these schedules, often, are perfect for some "ideal" student--who frequently bears little, or no, resemblance to themselves. It is essential, therefore, that in making up weekly schedules, students pay particular attention to their own best, and worst, times for accomplishing certain tasks.
• Thus, it is important to monitor and analyze how you spend your time. Using a weekly schedule, keep track of how you spend your time for the next few days. Pay particular attention to such things as
  1. your best times for accomplishing certain tasks (e.g., you might find that you read 20 pages of your sociology text from ten to eleven o'clock in the morning and only 10 pages of the same text from three to four o'clock in the afternoon);
  2. your mean time for accomplishing certain tasks (e.g., you might expect to read 15 pages, on average, of that same sociology text in one hour);
  3. your sleep patterns (e.g., if you never get up before eleven o'clock in the morning, it makes no sense to put together a schedule that has you getting up at six!);
  4. your eating patterns (When do you get hungry? What happens to your concentration when you skip meals? Do you get tired after eating? etc.);
  5. your best times for exercise and other kinds of recreation (Does exercise wake you up--or put you to sleep? Do you consistently watch television on Thursday nights? etc.).
  NOTE: Look for patterns in the record that you've kept, and then try to put together a schedule for yourself that reflects your own most efficient times for doing certain tasks.
• Set priorities. 'Tis the times' plague that most of us have more to do each day than we can possibly accomplish. It's important, therefore, to set priorities.
  1. Each night before you go to bed, jot down on an index card the things that you feel you should accomplish the next day. Probably there will be a number of small items that come to mind (pick up a litre of milk, make an appointment with the learning skills counsellor, etc.), in addition to those included on your weekly schedule. Look your list over carefully and star (*) only those items which you feel that you absolutely have to get done on the following day.
  2. Alternatively, you might like to make use of a time management checklist or some other way to set priorities.
• Build flexibility into your schedule. Students may also find the schedules that they put together or themselves impossibly difficult to follow if they make them too rigid. It's essential to build flexibility into schedules. Event the halest of us is going to find times when he or she if feeling too miserable and out of sorts to get any work done. It's important to allow gaps in your schedule so that, for instance, if you're feeling crummy on a Monday night, you can move the essay outline that you had planned to work on then to the empty hours that you've left yourself on Tuesday morning.

V. Additional principles of scheduling:

• Find the study environment that 's best for you. Where you study can often be as important as when you study.
• Try to develop a study routine. Try to establish regular study times for each of your subjects.
• Break large assignments (e.g., writing essays) into small and very specific tasks (e.g., developing outlines, writing introductions, etc.).
• Material involving a great deal of memorization should be revisited throughout the week.
• Plan on leaving yourself reasonably large blocks of time for projects such as essays and lab reports.
• Build regular breaks into your study periods. Most people can concentrate on material for about 25 minutes at a time. Try taking a 5 minute--and no longer!--break after each 25 minutes of studying.
• Allow time for review. At the end of each study session, take a 5 minute break and then do an active 5 to 10 minute review of the material that you've already covered.
• Watch out for procrastination! Procrastination is a habit that, once formed, can be very difficult to break.
  

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