TIME MANAGEMENT PART II
Introduction
You need to manage time effectively if you're going to be successful. All other things being held constant, better time management skills can improve your grades, help you keep stress in check, and help you be competitive in the career you undertake following your college education (Gardner, Lathers, and Zulu, 2000; Macon et. al., 1990; ISR, 1995). The purpose of this document is to teach you how to manage your time to improve your academic and personal performance. It refers to research on academic self-regulation research and discusses time management strategies to help you adjust how you think about time, improve your awareness of how you use time, and make change for peak performance.
The Time Management Cycle
Time management "systems" often fail because they are born of perfectionism and unrealistic expectations. For instance, some people don't initiate a time management approach until they're already falling behind in their work; they undertake time management as a means of catching up. Their initial plans tend to cram in everything they have to do without appropriate regard for the time required. The unrealistic plans that emerge from "catch-up time management" amount to little more than an expression of renewed motivation for change but without the structure to support it. Those trying to follow crammed schedules often fall seriously behind their intended pace and abandon the plan altogether, resulting in continued time trouble. Some conclude somehow that these strategies of planning don't work for them. But, what is important isn't being perfect, it is making and using a plan that helps you accomplish your goals.
One of your best options for time management systems is to begin using a cyclical system early in the academic year. Usually the system begins with the process of goal setting to establish a context for managing time. The next phase of the system involves tracking time and developing an awareness for where you spend your time. The third phase of the cycle is plan making, and this could include making to-do lists, weekly plans, monthly plans and longer-range plans. The fourth phase of the system is self-monitoring your action. Self monitoring involves paying attention to how well you are working your plan, how accurately you have planned, how well you have forecasted for various events and so on. The ideas for self-monitoring come from important research on student academic self-regulation which emphasizes the importance of adaptation in student success (see Zimmerman, 1998; Butler, 1998, and Bookers, 1995). The final phase of the cycle is time shifting and adjusting (i.e., changing where you spend your time to better match your intended use of time) in which you make corrections to the system before starting the cycle again at goal setting. Taken together, these phases permit you to initialize a process of gradual, performance-based improvement in time management skill. Everybody wants the "quick fix", but the complexity of changes involved in really getting a grip on your time management process will take some time to move through. Resist the urge to cast aside strategies that don't promise instant results; like it or not, change takes time.
Goal Setting
What are your goals? Really, what are your goals? It might help to divide your goals into time frames (immediate goals, short-mid-term goals, long-range goals) but you don't absolutely have to do so for the exercise to be useful. And, you don't have to have firm answers to those gripping questions about what you want to be or do when you're done at college to make this work; your goals are likely to shift and change over time anyway. All you need to do right now is think of a handful of goals to get started. Write down a list of goals now before reading further.
Take a look at your list of goals. How many of the tasks you intend to do today contribute to accomplishing the goals you have set for yourself? Are you actively working on these goals? Are you putting any of them off for a later time? What would you have to change in your life to make it possible to work on these goals?
Sub-dividing Goals into manageable pieces
Once you have a set of goals, it is useful to decompose the goals into manageable steps or sub-goals. Decomposing your goals makes it possible to tackle them one small step at a time and to reduce procrastination. Consider for instance the goal of obtaining your degree. This goal can be broken down into four sub-goals. Each sub-goal is the successful completion of one year of your program. These sub-goals can be further broken down into individual courses within each year. The courses can be broken down into tests, exams, term papers and such within the course, or into the 15 weeks of classes in each term. Each week can be further subdivided into days, and each day can be thought of in terms of the hours and minutes you'll spend in your classes and doing homework for today. While it may seem challenging to take in the whole scope of that convergent goal, thinking of your goals in this way helps to reinforce the idea that there is a connected path linking what actions you take today and the successful completion of your goals. Seeing these connections can help you monitor your own progress and detect whether you are on track or not. Take some time now to think through the goals you've set and to break them down into their smaller constituent parts.
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Thursday, September 27, 2007 11:16:10 AM (Atlantic Standard Time, UTC-04:00)  |
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