4.6 Creating Your Work Schedule
Questions to consider:
- How can I use small periods of time that are usually wasted?
- How can setting time limits on activities help me capture bits of time?
Analyzing Your Schedule and Creating Time to Work
Of all the strategies covered in this chapter, this one may require the most discipline, but it can also be the most beneficial in time management. The fact is most of us waste time throughout the day. Some of it is due to a lack of awareness, but it can also be caused by the constraints of our current schedules. An example of this is when we have 15 to 20 minutes before we must leave to go somewhere. We do not utilize that time because we are focused on leaving or where we are going, and we might not be organized enough to accomplish something in that short of a time. A good deal of our 24- hour days are spent a few minutes at a time waiting for the next thing scheduled to occur. These small units of time add up to a fair amount each day.
The intent of this strategy is to take advantage of the many lost minutes throughout our day. This may take careful observation and consideration on your part, but the results of using this as a method of time management are more than worth it.
The first step is to look for those periods of time that are wasted or that can be repurposed. To identify them, you will need to pay attention to what you do throughout the day and how much time you spend doing it. The example of waiting for the next thing in your schedule has already been given, but there are many others. How much time do you spend in activities after you have finished doing them but are still lingering because you have not begun to do something else (e.g., letting the next episode play while binge-watching, reading social media posts or waiting for someone to reply, surfing the Internet, etc.)? You might be surprised to learn how much time you use up each day by just adding a few unproductive minutes here and there.
If you set a limit on how much time you spend on each activity, you might find that you can recapture time to do other things. An example of this would be limiting yourself to reading news for 30 minutes. Instead of reading the main things that interest you and then spending an additional amount of time just looking at things that you are only casually interested in because that is what you are doing now, you could stop after a certain allotted period and use the extra time you have gained on something else.
After you identify periods of lost time, the next step will be to envision how you might restructure your activities to bring those extra minutes together into useful blocks of time.
Quick Quiz 4.6
- What are ways to schedule your class work along with other responsibilities in order to be successful?
Summary
This chapter pointed out the dangers of poor time management, both in cost and even the potential risk to graduation. Sections of the text covered how time management for college can be different from what students may have experienced before. The chapter also contained several suggestions on how to effectively manage time (including predicting time on tasks), how to use technology to your advantage, and how to prioritize tasks. Other topics included goal setting and motivation, some specific strategies for time and task management, and avoiding procrastination.
Works Cited
- (Spending a Few Extra Years in College May Cost You More Than You Think, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, June 21, 2016)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/06/21/spending-a-few-extra-years-in-college-may-cost-you-more-than-you-think/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f06be365e5d6 - Credit: Washington Post. Note the numbers in the table above have been averaged between the two scenarios described.
- (Marco Verch /Flickr / Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
- (Credit: Mads Bodker / Flickr / Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2)