“Working on time management was not a choice I had,
it was something I had to do to survive college.”
It is 9 p.m. on a Tuesday and I just got home. It was a long day of four, back-to-back, tedious, and complicated classes. There are two chapters and a lecture slide to review for developmental biology, an essay to write about psychoanalysis, a difficult reading from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography for American literature, an essay and notes to review for history, a lab to read over and prepare for, and another essay to write for my contemporary writers class. So what do I do first? I spend an hour showering and then another hour eating, and then waste some more time prepping to sit down and study.
I remember listening to my senior year AP Biology teacher stress us about time management, and the whole time I thought it would never be a problem I would have. During my freshmen year of college, my non-problem hit me like a truck, just like she said it would.
Time management is something I never had trouble with before college. In high school, and before that, I always kept myself on a cycle of getting home, doing my homework, and then doing whatever I wanted until bedtime. Coming into college, the workload amplifies, and suddenly the responsibility of life and just being older and having less energy, makes it more difficult to maintain a steady schedule. Even though I don’t procrastinate like some students around me do, I still do not get most things done as efficiently as I could.
Reflecting back to freshman year, I remember grabbing random assignments and getting them done, but, from time to time, forgetting an assignment or simply, missing a deadline which really put a dent in my grades. I had to get into the habit of writing down assignments and when they were due, and making sure to reference my list of to-dos from time to time, so I never left an assignment undone, even if it had to be finished in a rush.
One method that I have been using since last semester, which I believe helped me to get a stream of As, is to make a chart with the days of the week and filling out which assignment I should do on what day, corresponding with the amount of time I would have to do school work. When I first started doing this I remember filling out the first few days of the week with a ton of work and nothing for the rest of the week. The problems with this, was that I would either be overloading myself with work, even though I had ample amount of time to get stuff done, if I spaced them out. Also, if I did not get everything that I wanted to get done for the day, I would feel really discouraged and keep working until they were done, which resulted in minimal to no sleep on some nights. Although I do not have those issues every week anymore because I space out my work accordingly, on busier weeks, I find myself getting barely any sleep.
Working on time management was not a choice I had, it was something I had to do to survive college. Time management was not something I could make a resolution about because it had to be put into effect immediately, to try new methods week-by-week to find what fits me and my work habits the best. I am still perfecting my way of managing what to do and when to do it. Even though my way does not work out every week, I am better than I was before and I can work with that.
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