Time Management Tips To Help You Through College

Attending college or university is not an easy task, especially if you’ve just finished high school. There is always the temptation to view your newfound freedom as something to be enjoyed to the hilt, even though you’re at this particular institution to further your education! How do you manage to study but still enjoy your college years?

Most successful people do it by setting study goals that are realistic but at the same time challenging. If the goals are too easy to achieve, you’ll likely fall behind because you’re not achieving enough. If they’re too hard, you’ll simply get frustrated when you fail to achieve them. You need to find the sweet spot in between too easy and too hard and that may take some trial and error when first starting out. Here are a few pointers that may help you do that.

Make sure you don’t set yourself an unachievable number of goals. Having too many will set you up for failure because you’ll feel overwhelmed and frustrated at your inability to meet them. Conversely, having too few increases your chances of falling behind in your course because you’re simply not doing enough work.

Write down every goal you need to achieve, including your assignments and exams (be realistic with this list though) and prioritize them according to importance. Find out when your assignments are due and make a note of the dates. Once you’ve done this, assemble your goals and dates for assignments and tests into a timetable. Design the timetable in such a way that it will let you complete the work in a realistic and achievable way. Then break this timetable down into manageable chunks – daily, weekly, monthly. Ensure you leave time for other important things, like getting enough sleep, relaxation, and fun. It’s also wise to leave enough room to reorganize if you have to. Life does have a habit of throwing curveballs at you!

You may also find once you start that you’ve set yourself some impossible timeframes, or that curveball significantly interferes with your well laid plans. If this happens, take a deep breath, drag out your schedule, and re organize it.

Ultimately, this timetable isn’t set in concrete. If you find that an assignment or other task is taking longer to complete than you’d planned for, adjust your timetable accordingly. Likewise, if you find you’ve completed something faster than you thought you would, consider using that extra time to get some other tasks done. It may put you ahead of schedule in achieving that particular goal and buy you time against future delays.

Along with including time to sleep, you should also schedule in regular breaks throughout the day. Taking a breather for 10 minutes here and there throughout the day will allow you to unwind, refresh, regroup and de-stress. If you do find yourself getting too stressed, stop what you’re doing and do something else. You can always catch up later. Don’t forget to reward yourself for reaching each goal by doing something you enjoy doing either.

Organizing your time effectively isn’t only applicable for an on campus university or college education either. In fact, if you opt to study online, you may find it’s even more important to come up with an effective study timetable! Distractions at home are many, making it very easy to put off studying.

Even shorter courses, like some of the certifications for fire service professionals, still require planning. In fact, because many of these online fire courses are self-paced, effective time management becomes even more important. Otherwise, that 40 hour Fire Inspector 1 course for example that shouldn’t take very long to complete, could end up taking many months.