What is time management? It is a skill you can easily obtain through the course of simple training.
Completing your tasks one by one, concentrating on each of them entirely, and doing them until they are finished looks too simple, and for this reason, people don’t like this method.
They try to find something more fancy and extravagant.
They hope that there is a magical application that will help you to have all your high school homework done and all your accounting reports finished on time.
But the truth is hard: the more freedom you have (and college life is considered to be one of the most carefree periods of your life for a reason), the more self-discipline is required from you to be a successful student.
Fortunately, there are some simple techniques and easy-to-follow rules that will demand some minimalistic changes in your habits that will lead to a lifetime improvement in your focus and productivity.
Time Management Techniques for Students You Have to Try
One of the first answers you will get when asking “How to manage time effectively for students?” will be the “With the Pomodoro technique.”
And the reason for its popularity is simple: it works!
To follow it, you have to put a timer on 25 minutes and work during this period on whatever essay or research paper you have, and then you can take a 5-minutes break during which you can do whatever you want.
The Pomodoro Technique Works in Several Ways:
- It creates a sensation of urgency. This leads to the release of dopamine in your brain and a better focus on whatever task is in front of you.
- It rewards you. You can spend your 5-minute break having a cup of coffee, a quick match in your favorite online game, a snack, or even a nap. When you work hard before a reward, you feel no guilt, as you’ve deserved it, which makes your rest much sweeter than it would be if you replaced it with your working session.
- It creates a schedule for your work. You can write the introduction part during the first working period, the first and the middle body paragraph during the next one, and the conclusion to your assignment during the last 25 minutes of writing.
- It helps to achieve the specific condition of extreme focus and efficiency. This is also known as the flow.
Neurobiologists state that the flow starts after 20 to 30 minutes of working on some task, and it leads to the condition of being so focused on one assignment that the rest of the world simply vanishes.
During the flow, your productivity and creativity grow immensely. As a matter of fact, an hour of a flow equals four hours of less focused business with work.
You Can Help Yourself to Get Into This State With Several Simple Tricks:
- Create the sensation of novelty. Try to work in some new locations or change your environment in some other way.
- Do something risky or unpredictable. By the way, this explains why you feel like you can do much more and much faster when you postpone another important assignment until the night before the deadline. You are at risk of being late with your graduate paper. Of course, you’re scared, and your dopamine level hits the roof.
Both these methods will lead to the release of dopamine which will improve your cognitive abilities and make your reaction faster.
Effective Time Management Skills That Will Change Your Game
There are plenty of other solutions how to improve time management skills.
Try out these simple strategies that will help you if you’re not ready to apply our previous recommendation and catch the flow:
Batching
Have you ever noticed that you’re watering plants, cleaning your house, and washing your clothes in batches?
We mean that, as a rule, you don’t split activities that can be combined as similar. And why do you do this with other types of tasks?
Look at batching as the perfect assembly line for your academic papers and other assignments.
You do all the physics today, tomorrow you spend time reading history books, and the day after tomorrow you’re busy with some music practice.
In the end, every discipline benefits from this approach as you put more effort and dedication into learning each of them separately.
What is more, some activities need a specific focus and energy, and it’s easier to get into the flow and do them all in one set.
Checklists
If you have some repetitive tasks to do every day, week, or month, create checklists to perform them the best way.
Write down the precise steps you take every time you go on vacation or shopping, conduct research, or write an important paper. Put the checklist into your planner.
This strategy simplifies the working process and removes the cognitive pressure as your mind is released from the necessity to remember some small but crucial details.
Checklists help you to see where you make mistakes and eliminate them. They also guide you through repetitive things.
Checklists are extremely effective when it comes to tasks where fast execution is necessary, and the stakes are high, for example, for surgeons or astronauts.
Editing First
Those students who need to write many essays know how challenging the blank page can be.
To lessen the pressure when tackling this type of activity, start with editing something you’ve already written a day or two before (just imagine that you are a paper writer).
By doing so, you will eliminate the necessity to create a piece of text out of nothing, as you already have something in front of you.
Planning Your Work
If your goal is large and requires a lot of time, like planning a wedding, vacation, or another important event, writing a dissertation, or learning how to do something you don’t really want to do, make meetings on this occasion.
For example, every Wednesday at 10 a.m., you and your fiance sit down to plan your wedding, and you’re busy discussing your ideas for the day for one hour.
Or, every Saturday morning, you try to clean up your garage and transform it into a place for your car, not a graveyard.
Or, you’re working on your novel every Sunday afternoon and don’t stop your efforts for at least one hour.
When you’re dealing with something you don’t want to do, it is important to stay true to yourself. You’ve promised that you’ll clean up for only one hour.
If you do this for two hours, your brain will have an explanation of why it doesn’t believe you anymore the next week and won’t buy you “let’s do this for one hour only” anymore.
This method will help you to make progress and what is more important, stay consistent in your endeavors.
Set Additional Deadlines
At university, as well as in life, things you don’t feel like always take more time than it was planned.
To study effectively and make sure that your large education projects will be a success, make a development plan, and indicate their crucial points on the path to your final goals.
This will help you to keep track of your progress and amend your calendar if you get behind your schedule.
Best Time Management Strategies for Procrastinators
Procrastination is too easy to rationalize, and this is why we need some time management strategies that always work to battle it.
All the pressure and anxiety that appears in front of the task you have to complete leaves you when you say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
We convince ourselves that tomorrow will be better, as you will be more inspired to learn, create a new site, go to the gym, or finish your 2-pages essay.
But as a true procrastinator, you start working only when you feel that the consequence of your postponing will be too dramatic.
The first rule to have your tasks done is to develop a daily routine. Kickstart your day with any of the tools you find more efficient:
- Get a cup of coffee
- Take a shower
- Make a to-do list
- Walk your dog
Create a daily ritual that will lead to something like a Pavlov response with you. You grab your coffee, and your brain understands that you got into work.
You make a series of push-ups, and this is a signal to your body that things are waiting for your attention.
On the contrary, you start your day with mobile games lying in your bed, and your brain decides that you’re still sleeping and there is no need to accumulate the energy and face the challenges of the new day.
Time Management Tools That Are Always Near You
The best tools to become more productive are free and closer than you think.
When you’re wondering how to organize your time, remember that there is nothing more efficient than hand-written to-do lists.
By using them, you will always have your tasks in front of you and will be able to keep track of your progress.
What is more, there is nothing more comforting than crossing the task you’ve completed out from your list.
This is the moment of pure content: try this out, and you will never go back to the applications.
Put on good headphones. They will eliminate all the distracting sounds of the outer world and will keep you safe from the information you don’t want to know.
If you’re working or studying from home or in another place where you’re not alone, the headphones can become a great “do not disturb” sign.
Opt for instrumental music or jazz beats instead of vocals, as lyrics might disturb you from your work, especially if you’re busy writing an essay.
Delete distracting applications from your phone.
To understand how distracting TikTok, Instagram, and all the games you have on your phone really are, start tracking the time you spend there.
Some people even do 30-day digital fasting to boost their efficiency and remind themselves that they are in charge of applications and their social media profiles and not vice versa.
Try it if you dare.
If you feel like your life won’t be as coherent and happy without games or posting photos of your cat, reward yourself with these activities for doing something you don’t want to.
In this case, you will feel no guilt for procrastinating, as you deserved these moments of instant gratification in the form of likes and comments.
The Bestsellers on How to Manage Time for Study and Other Activities
You may find an immense quantity of how to improve time management for students’ books online, but not all of them are really worth your attention and time for reading.
Here are three books that we used to prepare this article:
- “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield (2002)
- “Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield (2011)
- “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande (2009)
If videos and podcasts are more convenient for you than reading books, check out the YouTube channels of these two masters of productivity, efficiency, and biohacking: Matt d’Avella and Thomas Frank.
Both bloggers have almost 2 million subscribers and deliver new videos every week.
Conclusion
There are multiple ways to increase your productivity level and become a better student. The most challenging part of each of them is to make the first step.
To succeed in it, answer yourself with one question: “Why do I need this?”
You can’t compare time-management skills and self-discipline to motivation, but without the latter, all the techniques we’ve described will be pointless.
