Your responsibilities as a college student are countless. Therefore, managing your time effectively and efficiently becomes paramount to your academic success and longevity.
Time management is an important skill to acquire for the busy college students because without it, one would need to sacrifice many things vital to human flourishing (such as relationships, health, and hobbies).
In this guide, we will explore two dimensions of time management: effectiveness and efficiency.
Effective time management increases the quality of your work, while efficient time management increases your work capacity.
Essentially, being able to manage your time in those two ways will allow you to invest more mental power into your tasks, as well as be able to take on more mentally-engaging tasks. (If this isn’t the secret every college student is looking for, then I don’t know what is!)
It’s quite normal to struggle with time management at the start of your undergraduate journey. There is so much that you are exposed to all at once and the demands are not light in the slightest. However, with certain strategies (below), you can reverse your losses and increase your work quality and capacity.
1. Capture & Release
The amount of information that one has to process and store for later use is quite abnormal in the modern university scene. From assignment deadlines to extracurricular event dates, small pieces of information are tossed at you all day.
The content of the information bits is not the problem, but the fact that they present a constant source of distraction. Additionally, as you go throughout the day and more and more information is presented to you (from all categories and urgency levels), you can easily get overwhelmed .
The way to remedy this problem is to create a handy system where you can efficiently store this information on-the-go and reference it later.
You can use any method you wish, as long as it is something that you will be consistent in using. Personally, I use the Notes App on my iphone, as I always have it with me wherever I am and it is easy to pull it out and start writing.
Having a personal mechanism to capture all the bits of information that you must later remember, including things that pop up in your mind to do later, will free up your mind to engage more thoroughly in the task at hand.
This strategy is derived from the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, and he calls it “having a second brain.” Just imagine how amazing it would be to live confident that you will take care of everything later because it is safely recorded, and you can simply focus on what you are doing now!
2. Deep Work
This strategy is all about effectiveness: doing what matters most. It is perhaps the most fundamental and intuitive, yet it is the least practiced. I think as a society, we have lost touch with what it means to focus intently for long periods of time. Unfortunately for us, this is truly the only way to make notable strides in any endeavor. If you want more insight on this, I recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport or reading the summarized version here.
While you will find a strong emphasis on consistency over intensity in terms of studying and completing class work on this blog, it is also crucial to note that real learning happens in short, intense, and focused bursts of time.
Consistency and intensity are not diametrically opposed ideas. You can very well be consistent in having intense, focused sessions! The goal is to prioritize the high cognitive intensity for the type of work that needs it, while being consistent in doing so.
Those high-energy time periods should be designated to study sessions or big, creative projects that are important but not necessarily urgent.
To practically develop the habit of deep work, you can use the Pomodoro technique, which essentially requires you to set a timer and work solely on a given task for that allocated time period. You can read more about the logistics of this technique in the book Learn Like a Pro by Barbara Oakley and Olaf Schewe, or you can check out this post.
The best way I have found to practice the habit of deep work, is to attach rewards and consequences to your focused sessions. Author of Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal, writes a lot about this idea and calls it “gamification.” Similar to how video games are designed to create dopamine withdrawals or deposits after a set of actions, you can also design your study sessions in that way to incentivize your implementation and consistency with the habit.
3. Block & Batch
Taking a turn to efficiency, there is no greater waste of time than being vague or lacking intention about what is it exactly that you want to get done. Equally, trying to get many unrelated things done simultaneously or progressively wastes a lot of time.
The best rule of thumb for this strategy is to only focus on one thing at a time. Time blocking does precisely that: it allows you to dedicate a specific allotment of time to a single task, without distraction or task-switching.
It has been established that the human brain cannot multi-task in the strict sense of the word. We can only switch back and forth between tasks rapidly, which gives the illusion of multi-tasking with the additional consequence of burning a lot of mental energy and time.
This allows you to engage the same parts of your brain for many tasks so that you do not waste mental energy task-switching. It also allows you to save time by completing related activities in one setting or sitting, which eliminates wasted time related to task-switching.
Together, batching your tasks or activities and blocking them in the corresponding time blocks is a winning strategy for efficiency. This is an advanced and refined form of scheduling. It is more intentional and focused, so that you can maximize the time and not simply get random things done with no end.
Conclusion
Time management is a skill that you can acquire at any point in your life. For previously mentioned reasons, it is of utmost importance to learn it as a young adult in school so that you can decrease your stress and work smarter towards achieving your goals.
By implementing the strategies of capturing, deep work, and time blocking, you can live confidently, diligently, and intently even as a busy college student. More than that, you can rededicate the saved time into activities that fuel your soul and contribute to other domains of life besides academics.
Lastly, for any of these strategies to truly work for your personal lifestyle, you must reflect daily, even hourly, on what is working and what isn’t. Then, you must take initiative to make promising adjustments.