More Time Management Tips

- Now I'd like to talk about a couple of
additional problem areas
when it comes to time management,
and how best to troubleshoot those problem areas.
The first one is the commute.
Many students have commutes to and from school
when they're attending university.
Sometimes they have to drive.
Other times they need to take mass transit.
It's really easy to think about your commute
as just wasted time,
time that you could be studying,
but instead you're having to get yourself
from one place to another.
My tip for my commuters
is to think about ways
to power up your commute
to make it productive
rather than wasted time.
Now, of course, you can't do all
academic tasks while you're commuting,
especially, if you're driving yourself.
You're not gonna be able to
read a complex document.
You're not gonna be able to do problem sets,
but commuting, especially,
when you're in mass transit
is a great time to review study cards,
flash cards for a foreign language class,
or to do iterative note review
to look at the notes that you took
in lecture that day,
and to try to remember what the key
important points were from that lecture.
That turns your commute into
productive study time,
and the time that you spend doing that
doesn't have to be spent doing it later.
If you're a person who commutes in the car,
and you're driving yourself
think about taping some of your lectures,
and relistening to them in the car,
or try to get some books that
you're reading for class on tape
so that you can listen to them.
It's also a great way while you're driving
to just try to think back on your lectures,
and think about what was covered,
and think about the most important topics.
Again, it sounds really simple,
but that act of recall
recalling what you heard in lecture
while you're in the car
is going to help increase
your comprehension and retention.
So, again, don't think about
the commute as wasted time.
Think about it as an opportunity to do
kinds of studying that you are able to do.
I now like to talk a little bit about
students who work either part-time,
or full-time while they're in school.
This is an incredibly admirable thing to do,
but it's also really challenging
because you're taking
the demands of a workplace,
and you're adding them to the demands
of your curriculum in college.
Here's my tip for people
who work while they're in school.
One, be realistic about
what your demands of work,
and what your demands from school
are going to look like,
and understand that
it may not be possible
to work full-time,
and go to school full-time.
Those two things are
going to be very difficult
to accomplish at the same time
without giving up some quality
on one end or the other,
so be realistic about
what it's going to look like,
and understand, of course,
that every semester of school is different,
and every semester at work will be different,
so depending on what's going on
at one or the other
the balance is going to
look a little bit different.
The second thing I would say is to be
as transparent and communicative
with your instructors in school as possible
about your work situation.
It may be the case that
they're willing to offer you accommodations
to help you manage your work schedule
with your academic commitments,
but asking for accommodations early,
and proactively is the best way
to receive accommodations,
so if there are things you think
you are going to need in order to
accommodate your work schedule
make sure to ask for them early,
and make sure to be prepared to explain
what it is that you need and why.
A word on procrastination.
Procrastination is something that
college students struggle with a lot,
and it's something that
I've struggled with in my past.
It's very easy to think that
you're the kind of person
who works best under pressure,
and who produces their best work
when they have very little time,
but here's the difficult reality.
Procrastination is a learned behavior.
It's not something you are naturally.
It's not something that's been born into you.
It's something you've learned how to do.
If you're a procrastinator the reason
you do your best work under pressure,
or feel like you do is because
you've practiced working under pressure
over and over and over again.
When we practice something enough
we get pretty good at it,
and we start to think that that's
the only way that we work.
Here's the good news.
Procrastination is a learned behavior,
and it can be unlearned
by making small manageable thoughtful changes
to the way we approach our tasks.
Let me give you one example.
If you have a paper due
in a particular moment
it would be easy to procrastinate
and push starting that paper,
and writing that paper until
the very end perhaps resulting
in an all-nighter to get it done.
What you can do instead is understanding
that you're likely to
push that deadline back
you might create a new deadline
with your professor.
Say offer to give him
an outline of your work
two weeks before the paper is due.
By making yourself accountable
to someone other than yourself,
and by saying to the professor that
you'd like to turn in work ahead of time
you've now created a deadline
before the deadline,
so even if you procrastinate
on that original deadline
you're still ahead of the game
when it comes to writing the paper,
so do anything you can to create
a situation or scenario where you have
deadlines before the actual deadline
that force you and encourage you
to start the task before it's due.
Again, we learn to procrastinate,
and we get good at procrastinating
because we do it a lot,
and even though we've learned it
we can unlearn it.
Overcommitment.
If you're committed to doing
27 hours of work
in a 24 hour period
you will always feel like
your time is poorly managed.
People who say yes to everything
often have trouble doing any one
of those things particularly well.
They just have too much on their plate,
and they're spread too thin.
If you're a yes person,
if you're a person whose over committed,
if you're a person who has
extracurricular activities crowding out
the things that you have to do at school,
crowding out the things
you have to do in your life,
if you find yourself dropping balls
see what you can reasonably give up,
see what kind of tasks are in your life
that you might delegate to other people,
and critically cultivate
the ability to say no
when it's not something that
you can reasonably do.
Prioritization.
If you have a lot on your plate,
and if you're trying to
manage your time effectively
it's important to make sure that
you understand how important
the different tasks are
that you need to complete.
Not every task is equally important,
so not every task should be treated
as if it's equally important.
There are lots of ways to do this,
but I'd like to share with you just one,
and that is
the Eisenhower grid for prioritization.
Here you'll see
four categories of activities.
Activities that are important and urgent,
those activities that should be done
right now by you.
Activities that are important and not urgent.
Those things that are going to matter,
but don't matter right away.
Those are activities that can be planned for.
Activities that are not important,
but urgent such as immediate interruptions,
or urgent distractions.
Those things that can be done,
and probably should be dealt with,
but don't need to be done by you
those activities can be delegated to others.
Finally, activities that are not important,
and that are not urgent.
These are the things in our life
that waste our time.
You might even call this
the category of guilty pleasures.
If you're able to minimize
the amount of time
you invest in these activities,
or if you're able to avoid them altogether
you can take the time that
you're spending on those activities,
and you can put it into other activities
that are more important or more urgent.
This is the Eisenhower method because
this is how President Eisenhower
prioritized the tasks in his life.
Finally, the most important tip I can give
is to cultivate the practice of
honest and accurate self-reflection
when you're thinking about
how you manage your time.
People can give you tips all day long.
People can give you strategies
on how to do this or how to do that,
but your process is personal to you,
and nobody is going to
understand your process,
or what your process results in
better than you,
so the ability to look at your own process,
identify strengths and weaknesses,
continue to bolster those strengths,
and address those weaknesses
is going to help you to
continue to make progress
in making your process
a more efficient, more effective process.
So, for example, if you're studying
for a midterm exam,
and you have 10 hours to study for that exam,
and you use them in a particular way
when you're done with the exam
you might think back on those 10 hours
now that you've taken the exam,
and think to yourself
could that time have been
used more effectively?
Where did I get it right,
and where could I have done it better?
If you're able to do that,
and then turn that reflection into action
you can continue to make your progress
more robust and more effective.
If you're having a little bit of trouble
with that self-reflection piece
consider talking to a professor,
or a friend to help you think about
your own process out loud.
Sometimes, talking to someone else
helps us articulate for ourselves
what it is we need to do,
and makes it a little bit easier to make
our process more efficient and more effective.
Again, all of these trouble spots
are pretty common,
and different people are going to
struggle with one more than another,
so you shouldn't feel bad if prioritization
is something you struggle with,
or if you're a little bit
of a procrastinator.
It's not about beating yourself up
about the thing you struggle with
that's important,
it's being able to identify
what that thing is,
and doing everything in your power
to make changes to make it
less of an issue for you moving forward.