TIME MANAGEMENT

What is the only thing everybody in this world has in common?  Time.  Everybody has the same 24 hours in a day, neither less nor more for any individual. Behind every achievement, there’s a human being doing his best day after day. Time management actually does not exist. Because time passes, you cannot stop it, change it, or bent it depending on your wishes. What you have to do when managing your time is to manage yourself.

Good time management means deciding what you want to achieve and establishing ways to attain your desires and objectives. Appropriate time management means less stress and strain, more recreation, more enjoyment, and greater completion and success.

Becoming better at managing time helps learners become more coordinated, more optimistic, and more successful in learning. It can also help students escape the dreaded issue of procrastination.

Best Time Management Tips

Time management is a concept that discusses the efficient management of time. It provides every person with an opportunity to determine how to use time; it enables individuals to make the most of the least, improving their understanding of how to use time constructively.

1. Set Goals

Setting goals crucial for planning your day. By setting goals, you can create proper targets. Setting goals can help you maximize your productivity, see bigger pictures, and help you do many things in a certain amount of time. Zig Ziglar says, “Lack of direction (goal), not Lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four-hour days.”

Determine specific, meaningful, achievable, relevant, time-based goals.  Write down your goals and make them visual, vivid, including pictures, drawings, etc.  Research has shown that you are more likely to remember when you write your goals on a paper. Please write down your goals, decide the steps you take to achieve them, and then share them, and your success with a friend gives you the best opportunity to achieve your goals. Nothing more than a dream is a target that is not written down.

2. Plan Your Time (Study Plan)

The fundamentals of time management for students are to draw up a detailed study plan. A study plan is a schedule that outlines your study times and daily routines.  The development of a study plan helps you to see how you manage your time.

Before you create a study plan, block out all your standing commitments, including classes, work, and extracurricular activities. This will help you see how much time you have to study.  If your schedule leaves very little time for studying, you may need to evaluate what you can cut back on or rearrange your schedule.

Study plans help you to have self-discipline and determination to complete your studies. It’s all about your study plan to help you be more effective and profitable. If you find that it is not working, make changes, figure out what works best for you.

3. Motivate Yourself

Keep yourself motivated, no matter what.  Do not question your ability. Everyone has different abilities, qualities that superior to others. The first secret of success is to believe in yourself. Believing in yourself activates the positive energy that plays an essential role in making you strong and focused.

Write down reasons why you want to study hard, and put the list at your study desk. For example,

• I’ll study to get admission to Harvard University.
• I want to have a meaningful career.
• And I want to live with no regrets.
• I want to learn more.

Whenever you feel unmotivated, not willing to study, look at this list, remember your goals. All successful people never stop learning.

No one feels motivated all the time. So, you should be ready to study even if you are not motivated.  Sometimes a little work you do can inspire you.

4. Eliminate Distractions

Social media is known as a base to consume an immense amount of time for the students. Undoubtedly, students wasting most of their time scrolling through social media. Put your phone away, block out your social media notifications. Create a workspace that is only meant for study and completing tasks, so your brain can associate that space with work.

Tell everyone that you are busy for a certain period of time and ask them not to disturb you. Instead of chatting with coworkers, you can work all the time. You will earn a lot of time, which will allow you to move much faster and achieve even more. This includes turning your phone off as well. Either do it entirely or mute it, at least. So, no one gets between you and your task.

5. Prioritize Your Task

Why is prioritizing very important? Prioritizing increases your productivity. You are a student, and your priority is to study, get a high mark in your exams, and go to the University you dreamed of.

Economists and psychologists say that having too many options can paralyze your momentum or even push you to make illogical choices. Stanford University Professor Mark R. Lepper and Columbia University Professor Sheena Iyengar have demonstrated this effect in an experiment performed in a luxury grocery store. They set up a booth where buyers could sample jams and then alternated between offering 24 jams and six jams every few hours.

The findings were shocking. 60 percent of consumers were attracted to the larger range, while just 40 percent avoided tasting the smaller assortment. However, 30 percent of the people sampled from the small assortment bought jam, and only 3 percent of those in the larger assortment ended up buying jars.

Professor Iyengar said, “people may find more and more choice actually to be debilitating.”

Make a list of the most important subjects (ex: 1. math, 2. English, 3. music practice, etc.). Write down the main things you need to get done in those subjects. Concentrate on the most important one first.

6. Focus on One Task

The multitasking concept refers to a person dealing with more than one task at the same time. Focus on just one topic and finish it.   If there is an incomplete topic (task), do not start a new one. An unfinished task may cause the Zeigarnik effect. In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. It means a previous uncompleted task will always disturb your mind and not let you focus on a new task.

Multitasking doesn’t save your time. It consumes your productive time as much as 40 percent. It slows you down. By multitasking, your attention is divided between two or more tasks, making your brain switch between them instead of focusing on one to complete it. Multitasking could take away your ability to think creatively because it takes up a lot of your temporary brain storage.

7. Learn to Delegate

Effective communication and seeking support, help from the teachers, parents, or friends improves efficiency, productivity, and time management. Teamwork, working together in groups, seeking opinions, suggestions, recommendations from others is highly effective for time management.

8. Build an Effective Study Habit

You can build an effective study habit by practicing good time management. You live no room for procrastination. The better you manage time, the more self-discipline you learn.

Create a consistent study plan and start studying. If you continue regularly, studying will become a normal part of your life after 5-6 weeks. You will be prepared mentally and emotionally for each study session, and each study session will be more efficient. If you need to change your schedule from time to time due to unforeseen events, that’s all right. But get back to your plan as soon as the event is done.

Time Management During the Exam

What is the reason why students fail in the exam? Some students fail in the exam due to failure to maintain time discipline in an exam. For better exam results, develop a time strategy, and no matter what happens, stick to the plan. Don’t rely on the clock in the exam room; take a good watch with you or a chronometer. Place it in front of you on your desk.

Answer all the questions that you know. When you come across difficult questions or time taking questions, don’t spend too much time on those questions. Leave it for now. And mark them as incomplete questions. When you arrive at the end of the exam, go back and solve questions that you could not answer—this technique is known as the touring technique. Touring technique very useful technique because you can manage your time. This technique helps you answer the maximum number of questions.

If there is no consequence for an incorrect answer, you can use the guessing technique. We will explain later how guessing techniques work.

Do not hurry through all the easy questions! You may think it is a waste of time if you work more on an easy question, but you can answer it incorrectly when you hurry too much.

Focus your time on the questions that are worth more. It makes more sense to spend 10 minutes on 1 question worth 10 points than to spend 10 minutes on five questions worth only 1 point each.

Take a deep breath, pause yourself a few seconds, then move on, answer the questions calmly, and carefully avoid making careless mistakes. This allows you to make sure that you are managing your time effectively and helps you mentally move from one task to another.

The Night Before the Exam

• I suggest you not to study anything the night before the exam. Studying a new topic makes you nervous, confuse you, and it May tire you.
• Don’t try to learn new information, make the evening as relaxing as possible, visit some places, watch a movie, play games.
• Get a good night’s sleep.
• Make a checklist of things like; watch, calculator, some pens, a bottle of water. Put them in your pack the night before the exam.

On the Day of the Exam

• Have a good breakfast, and you may have simple sugars like fruit juice complex, carbohydrates cereal, and some proteins and eggs. Your blood sugar can stay stable with these foods. Avoid detoxing or eliminating caffeine from your diet. Higher doses of caffeine can cause dizziness, anxiety, headaches. If possible, take a piece of fruit to eat or water to drink during the exam, which keeps your blood sugar level stable.
• Make sure you know the time on the day of the exam. Have plenty of time to get to the exam hall, because there could be traffic or transport problems.
• Arrive early so you can use the toilet.
• Make sure you know the exam location. You should go to the exam location one day before the exam; thus, you can learn about the exam location.
• Make sure you have all materials you need for the exam. You may forget exam materials due to stress, anxiety. Hence, you should arrange all exam materials the night before the exam.

References

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6. “CREATE A STUDY PLAN” Intelligent, https://www.intelligent.com/create-a-study-plan/
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8. Tank, A. “Prioritize This Guide to Learning How to Prioritize!” Entrepreneur Middle East, 12 September 2019, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/336506
9. “Tips for managing your study time.” Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat/new-sat-tips-planning/new-sat-how-to-prep/a/tips-for-managing-your-study-time
10. Loveless, B.  “10 Habits of Highly Effective Students.” Education Corner, https://www.educationcorner.com/habits-of-successful-students.html
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12. CIMA Australasia, CIMA Exam Preparation, YouTube, 12 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5KXeyDjz00