How to Manage Your Time in School

In many colleges and universities, more than 30% of their students fail to graduate in 4 years. This is most often due to poor time management. Many students have to balance their studies with work, clubs, sports, and a social life. It is completely possible to have it all, you just need to think about how you want to arrange your schedule.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Create a weekly schedule. Even though you want to be spontaneous, people without plans tend to fail out of school. On this weekly schedule block out time for classes, practices, and work-- any known obligation you can't miss. Then shade out at least 40 hours for school work. You may not need it all every week, but often you will. This give you an idea of how much time you have to sleep and have fun.

2. Create a semester long schedule with all of your assignments, social obligations, and anything special. This will allow you to see when you have extra work to do, and when you need to re-arrange your schedule for fun.

3. Make your studying count. No extremely successful student can be as productive as possible if he or she is watching tv or g-chatting. Find a location that you do not have fun in and go there to work. Turn your phone on silent and disable your wireless, and work in hour long stretches. Every hour you can take a break to look at your phone and email. Because you will be so much more productive single tasking, you will be able to spend more time having fun.

4. Manage your extra-curricular activities. If you find yourself crunched for time, figure out which extra curricular activity has the lowest return on investment. So if being on the yearbook takes a lot of time, but doesn't any of the skills you will need in the future, consider dropping it if you need more time.

5. Remember your priorities. List the order of your priorities in order to help you make good decisions about what you should do. If work and school are more important that a community service project, then you should never allow this activity to interfere with your school work.

Tips & Warnings

• In order to be successful, you need to sleep and you need to have fun. Schedule for both, otherwise you will burn out.
• When planning time to go out, also factor in any hangovers or exhaustion in the morning. It is highly unlikely that you'll be starting school work by 8am if you were out until 2 or 3.