Time Management

Jessica McMullin

Taking a College Learning Strategy has been extremely helpful for me this semester. For me, stress occurs from being unorganized, procrastinating, and leaving my work to the last minute. A course to teach students about time management should be a requirement for any major. Too many college students struggle with managing their time and getting their work done while balancing everything else in their life.

Time management is something I greatly struggled with throughout my freshman year. I could get distracted by just about any television show or computer game. When I was coming back to school as a sophomore, I knew I needed to improve my time management strategies. The text book, It’s All About Choices, has been especially useful to me this semester. I have been using a planner that I’ve been keeping extremely organized (I am usually a messy person so this is very hard for me). I have a weekly planner for all of my classes, where I write down all my upcoming assignments and meetings on the dates that they are due. I color coordinate the planner, writing assignments for specific classes in the same color every week, and I use a highlighter to highlight important upcoming assignments.

My HST 308 class has about eight books I’m required to read throughout the semester, plus nightly readings from the text book. To avoid falling behind in my reading, I made a monthly calendar with the pages I have to read every night, each book in a different color. Its a calendar devoted only to my HST readings, and nothing else. This could be most helpful to a visual learner, so they can focus on the one subject, instead of being overwhelmed by any work for another class. I also find that for a class like HST 308, where there is a lot of notes and a lot of information in each class, that using the 20-Minute Test Prep can be very helpful to keep from falling behind in your work or getting stressed when a big test comes up. I review my notes for 20 minutes after every class, writing potential test questions in the margins and highlighting key points. Its a great way to organize everything you just heard in class. This makes it easier to create weekly questions that could be on the test or potential essay questions.