Time Management Tips for Students 101

The beginning of every academic session is an alarm for every student, students literally set more and more alarms. The aim is to either wake up early or late –  late at night to either read or attend to an assignment or early to catch a class.

How do you manage time beyond alarms that repeatedly gets snoozed and snoozed?
For every functional individual –including students, time management is a factor.
Even if you don’t have a lot of tasks to do, how do you ensure you watch Netflix and still remember to catch that important date with your friend Tobi at the cinema without going really late or complaining that you have books to read?

This article selects a couple of common practices you can use to properly manage your time; most of which I practise myself.

1. Prioritise sleeping at night

Yes, it may sound awkward that I’m starting with sleep. Good enough rest is good for productive day energy and motivation-wise. Effective time management requires good motivation all day long and a bad night doesn’t guarantee that. To start your day effectively, you’ll need that good night rest.

2. Plan ahead

Start every day with a proper idea of what you would do THAT DAY, including casual things like seeing a friend.
Write a list of every possible thing you would be doing. You could decide to write this list the day before for students because 8 AM classes are a bane, or if you wake up really early, you could start your day with this.

3. Prioritise tasks

The next step is to prioritise and that about settles half the discipline needed for time management. Because you can’t have the whole time in the world, you want to be sure your final list has only the important things like reading 2hrs in the evening or going to the church/mosque for religious people.

One method to achieve this is to categorise the activities on your list into:

1. Important and urgent: let these tasks come first on your list. Do them just after resting from class.
2. Important but not urgent: let these tasks come last on your list.
3. Urgent but not important: this scenario hardly occurs for students. In case it does, delegate, ask Bisi to help you with it or Paul if they can.
4. Not urgent and not important: these are weekend tasks. Maybe a friend has been asking to see you or something, just ‘weekend‘ it.

I’ll like to advise that as a student you shouldn’t consider the time spent in class daily as part of your available time. You can’t control that time; you kind of have to be in class so it’s not your time. Your time is anytime your lecturers don’t try to take away from you. For departments like Vet Medicine, Pharmacy, Clinical Sciences, etc, it’s every time after 6 PM most days. You want to really plan how you’ll spend that little time beforehand.

This article covers how you can ensure your day is productive because you firstly allocate your time properly. The next article “Time Management for Students 202” will introduce tools and techniques you can use to ensure that you spend each allocated time effectively and efficiently.

I guess this has helped someone somehow. Join our lovely and fun community on WhatsApp to catch the next part of this article when it drops here 😊