Time Management Tips for College Students
To put it lightly, college is a lot. A full credit-load of classes. Homework from every professor who thinks their class is the most important. Working a job to afford tuition and fund activities with friends. Pressure to build the most comprehensive resume by joining clubs, racking up leadership positions, and securing multiple internships.
When navigating a jam-packed schedule, finding time to eat meals, sleep, and take care of yourself can feel like an overwhelming task. Effective time management skills might look different depending on your work style, but here are a few tips to consider to feel more in control of your schedule.
“There aren’t enough hours in the day.”
How to Prioritize
Writing out a master calendar of due dates for the week, month, or semester is important to stay organized. But that list can also be daunting and seem impossible to finish.
I like to say that college isn’t about figuring out how to do everything. Rather, it’s about figuring out what has to be done. If a professor is going to spend class time lecturing on the same content that the assigned textbook reading covers, we might choose to leave that chapter unread and prioritize the assignments that are more vital to our learning.
Without prioritizing your workload into something more manageable, it is possible to feel a mental block that prevents you from moving forward at all. Perfectionism is the enemy of progress.
“I don’t know how to budget my time efficiently.”
How to Stay Focused
In the late 1980s, Italian university student Francesco Cirillo developed the Pomodoro Technique for time management. Here’s how it works:
Set a timer for 25 minutes and focus on a single task.
Take a 5 minute break.
Repeat this process 4 times.
Take a longer, more restorative 15-30 minute break.
Cirillo’s technique is named after his timer that was shaped like a tomato (which is pomodoro in Italian), but luckily, you can substitute the tomato timer with an alarm on your phone.
To take this a step further, try setting a fixed amount of time for each task on your to-do list. I have found that if I have three days to write an essay, it will take me three days. If I have three hours to write an essay, it will take me three hours.
This concept has been popularized by Elon Musk. He recommends “timeboxing,” or estimating how long a task will take and incorporating that block of time into your calendar. Committing to a limited time frame will help prevent a 3-hour project from turning into a 3-day project.
“I can’t seem to put my phone down.”
How to Eliminate Interruptions
Have you ever looked at the Screen Time function on your iPhone to see how many hours per day you spend on social media? Me too. Yikes.
Although most of us are in agreement that we spend too much time scrolling through social media apps, completely deleting them from our lives isn’t always realistic. Oftentimes even our work lives are intertwined with social media.
However, there are ways to minimize the amount of time we spend scrolling.
Turn off notifications for unimportant apps. This will help limit the number of prompts you receive to open the app.
Work on eliminating the habit of scrolling the entire way through every social media feed and reading every unimportant group chat. I promise you won’t miss as much as you think!
“I’m Pulling All Nighters.”
Never Sacrifice Sleep
It’s no secret that consistently staying up all night or getting very little sleep can cause poor concentration, higher levels of stress and anxiety, dizziness, and low endurance, just to name a few. A pattern of poor sleep habits can even lead to permanent brain damage in the long term.
During finals week it might be more difficult to squeeze in a full eight hours of sleep every night, but focus on creating a pattern of prioritizing sleep in your normal routine.
Time will stretch to accommodate what you put into it. If you are not prioritizing sleep, you won’t get enough sleep. So, if you need to wake up every morning by 8 a.m., try to make a habit of closing your laptop by midnight even if you still have a few tasks left on your list.
If you hold your eight hours of sleep as a non-negotiable, you will find time outside of those hours to finish your mandatory tasks. It all goes back to the concept of prioritizing that we discussed earlier.
As a college student, you are bound to have days that feel stressful. It is completely normal to feel overwhelmed by your workload, and it might take some time to develop a routine that feels manageable for you. While you are navigating this busy stage of life, don’t forget to check in with yourself, take breaks to do the things you enjoy, and spend time with people that energize you and make you happy.
