No way around it: time management is essential to complete any task. Whether it be picking up takeout, or finishing that midterm paper, we must take time into account and be sure not to let it slip away. One of the biggest adjustments I have made between my first and second years of college has been my time management skills. During my first year at school, I think it was safe to say that far too much of my time had been committed to “The YouTube.” Basically, if I wasn’t doing work or studying, I would be watching literally anything that popped up on suggested. This year, I work two jobs on campus, yet find myself with what feels like more time than I have ever had before. Now I’ll explain some of my time management techniques that I used to make every tick of the clock productive.
1) Have a planned schedule/stay busy
Although it may sound really counterintuitive to fill your schedule to increase free time, I found that this strategy really worked for me. Ironically, the more time I found that I had not knowing what to do, the more I found myself watching YouTube and daytime television. Filling your schedule doesn’t necessarily mean never giving yourself a chance to breathe though. Having time to be with friends, play sports, or just relax is totally fine, just plan out a tentative block of time to do those things. Saying that for example, you’ll give yourself an hour of “me time” sets a cap on how long you are just “taking a small break.” Not setting a block of time can lead to you passing hours by watching tv or playing video games, and you won’t realize how much that is cutting into your other priorities if you don’t have a set schedule in place. To sum it up: you don’t have to plan every second of every day, but you may find it helpful to have some sort of structure to your day.
2) Avoid the naps
To all of the avid daytime nappers out there: I am not trying to ban all naps forever. There are definitely circumstances where your body just needs a quick refresher, and a nap can do absolute wonders in a short time. The problem is when naps become part of the daily routine. A midday nap can take a lot of time right out of the heart of your day. Midday naps also tend to throw off your sleep schedule (or at least mine) and I always find that I’m not very tired when I’d normally be going to sleep. This creates a bad cycle because that night I’ll stay up later than normal, find myself tired the next day in need of a nap, and the cycle goes on. My solution to the midday crash is simple: get more sleep. Now for college students and probably most other adults, this isn’t always as easy as it seems, but getting a quality night sleep genuinely makes me feel like a man on a mission all throughout the next day. If you even try to get just an extra hour of sleep, you have a higher chance of getting a quality hour of sleep at night than you do taking a hit-or-miss one hour nap during the day. It may not be the perfect ideal for everyone, but I find that a hard day of work, makes a long night of sleep just that much sweeter.
3) Give your social life a much needed rest
This is probably one of the most crucial techniques, yet the one I find myself to be by far the worst at. This is not a hard concept at all: using social media and talking to our friends takes up time. A lot of it. People constantly want to be so up to date on just about everything going on in our world today, and to do that is no small task, it uses up large amounts of time. Between checking Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, on top of FaceTiming friends, and making calls to keep up with our family, communication eats up so much of the day. I agree that it is very hard to simply shut the phone off and say “I’m sure nothing important is going to come up for the next few hours” but there are little steps we can take to try and cut the phone usage. One step is limiting our social media use. Your friend’s cousin’s tweet about the new acai bowl is probably not atop the list of most important things going on at the moment. A good first step is to say, limit checking social media to once every few hours. Then it won’t be taking up as much time, and it will give you something to look forward to being able to catch up on everything a while later. Another harder, but more effective strategy is to establish a time where you won’t be responding to calls or messages. You don’t have to completely shut down all technology because emergencies do happen, but this is a great strategy. One of my close friends, use to have his own rule where he wouldn’t respond to anything after 8PM and it worked. All of his friends and myself included knew that if we needed to reach him for anything important, then it better be before 8. This allowed him to have no distractions past that time, and it let him get work done more efficiently which also helped him get to sleep earlier. Also, screen-time before bed makes it harder to sleep anyway, so this technique really serves a lot of good purposes.
So these were some of the main techniques that I have used or have been trying to use to help my time management skills. I would definitely say I have noticed improvement as these various tricks have even given me enough time to write this post even amidst school work, jobs, and still being social. I hope some of these were helpful, and definitely feel free to comment anything you have tried or are even thinking about trying. I’m sure we would all appreciate anything that could make our lives a little easier. Be sure to work on time management because the clock doesn’t stop ticking for anybody. Not even those midday nappers.
VG Creative 