Tips for Managing Your Time During the Semester
As college students and professionals, our days are insanely busy. Between classes, homework, work, clubs, extracurriculars, and an attempt at a social life, it seems like we never have a minute in the day to relax. In fact, if we do find a minute in the day where we aren’t doing something or thinking about the next assignment, we spend that whole minute freaking out that we are forgetting about something we were supposed to do. It may seem impossible to manage your time during the semester, but I am going to give you a few tips that will hopefully help you relieve a little bit of stress and guide your day-to-day schedule.
Make a Schedule
The first step in organizing your hectic life is to create a schedule. Not a metaphorical one, but a physical, written out schedule. Go to Meijer and buy yourself a monthly calendar, then create a schedule with the days of the week on it (I printed one off of Google). On the calendar, write out all of the events that you have in that month. Make sure to only focus on one month at a time, unless it is a huge project or event that you need to prepare for months in advance. By concentrating on one at a time, it helps to keep you motivated on short-term goals, rather than stressing about ALL of the upcoming things you have to do. On the weekly schedule, write out your normal schedule for every week. This includes your classes, work schedule, club meetings, sports practices, or anything else that you have every single week. This will help you later in planning out when you have time to complete each task.
Invest in a Planner
The next step is to buy a planner that you will carry with you almost everywhere you go. Throughout your day, write down every assignment that you get and things you have to complete. This can include anything from homework, exams to study for, or even a scholarship you want to apply for. Sometimes it’s easy to forget assignments that aren’t due the next day even if you wrote it down in your planner. Therefore, something that I do when I get an assignment is to not only write it down the day I received it, but to also write it down on the day that it’s due. That helps me to remember the due date, and then when I get to the week or day that it’s due, I will see it and remember that it has to get done.
Make Yourself Due Dates
Do not only rely on the due dates that you are assigned from a superior for an assignment. If you only write down those due dates, you will most likely procrastinate doing the work until the day before, or for most college students, hours before. To avoid this, make yourself progressive due dates. If you have a paper that you need to submit in one month, maybe make a due date for the end of each week to have a different section of the paper done. This will help you to relieve so much stress and will make the assignments much less overwhelming in the long run.
Do Not Procrastinate
This may seem like an obvious tip, but how many of us know not to procrastinate and yet always do? The key to avoiding this is to plan ahead. By making a schedule, using a planner, and making yourself due dates you should be fully able to plan ahead and keep track of everything you must do. Another way to avert procrastination is to start an assignment or task the day or following day after you received it, regardless of its due date. Even if it’s simply writing down a couple sentences, looking up some resources, or making a rough outline, it will help you to finish the assignment ahead of schedule. Often times, the hardest part of any assignment is getting started and figuring out how you are going to approach it. Doing something small right away makes it easier to continue working on it day by day until it’s complete.
I hope that these tips will help you to put your chaotic lives into some kind of order, and will relieve that overwhelming stress of trying to schedule every responsibility that you must carry out. Just remember, schedules and planners are the KEY to good time management.
About Brooklyn
Brooklyn Wilson is currently a sophomore at Grand Valley State University studying advertising and public relations. She currently serves as the event and coordinating director for GrandPR and is an active member of the GVSU PRSSA chapter. Her passion for communication and relationship building, in addition to writing, led her to the PR field where she hopes to apply her skills within the health field. In her free time, you can find Brooklyn watching Netflix and going for long walks.