With a potent mix of friends, and fun activities on one hand and schoolwork on the other, optimal time management can prove tricky. However, success in your schoolwork calls for a balance between your personal life and study.
By achieving this balance, you ensure your personal development while maintaining a quality engagement with your academics. As stated on USEssayWriters, effective time management helps transition in your professional life and also boosts the quality of the study.
This article tackles organizational tips for college students to improve their productivity. According to writemyessays, a lot of students claim to go through more than average stress while studying. Some of them report health-related issues and only a small part of students in the US sleep well.
1. Time planning apps
Late assignments and missed deadlines are among the common issues for campus students. While the assignments are always small and easy to handle with some research, campus students fail to meet set deadlines owing to the variety of activities they engage in.
As a result of this, students submit low quality work which impacts their performance negatively. A time planner comes in handy for managing your activities, thus helping you assign enough time for assignments.
Record your classes, assignment deadlines, and test dates on your time planner thus easily determining a schedule for handling each task. Also, remain loyal to your routine and avoid any activity from encroaching on time scheduled for another task.
2. Know the time you are most active for study
We all have different capabilities. Among our differences is our activity periods. While some students gain the most benefit from reading in the morning, others are better suited to grasp studied material in the evening.
By mastering your schedule, you organize activities in the order that favors you most thus realizing maximum benefit.
To find your peak time, select a day for gauging your capabilities and refrain from consuming stimulants. Next, handle various activities and gauge the results at the end of the day. The results may be gauged using tests focused on areas you have tackled.
After receiving the insight, reschedule the activities that recorded a low performance until you determine the best time for maximum retention of the studied material. When going about this exercise, schedule unimportant tasks to less productive sessions.
3. Get enough sleep
The major pitfall for students is pushing for “maximum” use of the time they should be sleeping. Although you can cover more material with this time extension, your ability to retain studied material is lower.
According to MySlumberYard, some of the top side-effects of sleep deprivation include depression, memory issues, increased chances of having an accident of any kind, weight gain, risk of heart disease, and balance problems.
Also, sleep deprivation limits your performance during the day and results in lesser productivity. Also, adopt to a consistent sleep schedule thus ensuring optimal productivity on a daily basis.
4. Reading small bits of information per session
In a bid to tackle cumbersome topics, students often allocate more importance to the quality of material covered over the amount of information they understand. As a result, students make poor connections between ideas thus yielding poor recall.
To avoid this, schedule your sessions for small sections of material and test your understanding of the topic. Also, begin each session by testing information that you covered in previous ones thus ensuring proper understanding of the covered materials.
5. Chunking your goals into manageable units
Although many students set goals, they often set huge goals whose progress cannot be measured. For better performance, you should break down your goals into components whose progress you can gauge.
Also, set goals should be adjustable so as to accommodate activities that arise within the time you have allocated for their completion. When possible, schedule activities to a period where they do not interfere with prioritized goals.
Also, have a system for testing your progress and note the areas that need improvement. Weekends can serve as a great period for testing your progress and setting the goals of the forthcoming week.
6. Preplanning
We all know the embarrassment associated with borrowing pens and pages in order to jot down notes since we forgot our notebooks. Even worse, these plucked papers tend to disappear before they can be copied to their specific notebooks.
A great way to avoid this is packing for the next day’s classes on the night before the class. When doing this, you should check for the assignments due and relevant study material and place them in your bag.
Also, consult your timetable and record the periods and venues for each session. Doing this saves you the morning stress of tracing study materials with few minutes remaining for your class to begin.
Additionally, prepare your clothes and buff your shoes before retiring to bed. This reduces the length of your morning routine and helps you to start off your day without wasting any minute.
7. Adopt an efficient note-taking system
We have all witnessed a student who writes notes as they were encoding state secrets for a government agency. Besides being hard to follow, these notes barely make connections among ideas and make it hard to find sections you need to revise on.
For easy retrieval of notes, write relevant points while including keywords that you can associate with other sections. Also, formulate questions for each section and include them on the margins of your page thus making for easy revision.
Finally, start each topic on a fresh page leaving enough space to add information to the previous topic and making it easy to track a topic you want to study on.
8. Color coding
With a huge number of books for various classes, retrieving a specific book may take a substantial amount of time and result in disorganization. For this, find a memorable way to color your books thus making for fast, organized retrieval.
For instance, you could associate red with calculus, green with plant ecology, and white for basic mathematics. By saving this time, you ensure maximum productivity in each session and realize a good overall performance.
Final Verdict
Time is of the essence for good performance in college. By following these tips for organization, you can ensure efficiency in class and improve your performance without missing out on fun activities.
