One of the most frequent challenges that students face in their college life is time management. Balancing your time between various activities, classes, studies, competitions, exam preparations, functions, skills, societies, friendships, assignments……ohh! It is a never-ending list! And honestly, none of these is a waste of time. These are important for the all-round development of your personality, and you surely will not get an opportunity as precious as in these times to upgrade yourself. You get up in the morning, attend your first class, sometimes skipping breakfast to be on time, then attend meeting of a society you are a part of, take further classes, practice for some upcoming competition, come back home, do your assignment, get tired and sleep. Moreover, if you are an aspirant of some competitive exam, say CA or UPSC, balancing your time becomes even more challenging.
Since most of the students had never experienced and handled multiple tasks at a time, they fail to manage their time. Consequently, it leads to stress and tension. College life is a very precious phase to learn the invaluable skill of time management and once learnt, it will help you further in all walks of life, forever.
Here, in this blog we will try to guide you for a better managed and balanced college life.
Importance of Time Management for students
But why, at all, students need to manage their time? Can’t they just carry on without thinking much? Yes, they can. But let us look at the following benefits of managing time. They may convince you 🙂
- It reduces stress. You don’t worry about your pending assignments or chapters to study anymore, because you already plan it in advance.
- It helps you fight procrastination. You become active, your work effective.
- It helps you identify your priorities. You become more aware of yourself and your choices. Consequently, taking decisions becomes easier.
- Your work productivity multiplies. You become more productive, without stress. It enables you to complete your tasks on time.
- Boosts your confidence. You start believing in yourself a lot more. This is the most precious benefit of time management. It stays for life
5 TIPS FOR STUDENTS TO BALANCE THEIR TIME BETTER
- Track your time
It’s simple. Take a diary (or a digital notepad) and note down your activities for each hour since you woke up. Analyse and find out the thing that is eating up most of your time. Check whether there is any scope for eliminating any activity you spend your time on.
Once you track down your time for a few days, it does two things:
- You become aware of how much time you waste per day and identify those time-consuming/wasting elements. This makes you a little more conscious about wasting time and you start to take the responsibility on yourself, instead of saying “How do I do this. I don’t have enough time.”
- It helps you identify the time slots when you can do some productive work. For example – if you have realised that you waste 2 hours on social media between 3-5 pm, you can now reduce that time to half-an-hour from 3-3:30 pm and do your guitar practice in the meantime instead!
- Prioritise your works
You will always have to sacrifice one activity to another, based on your priority. If you are preparing for any competitive exam, you certainly cannot devote your time in many societies of your college. If you are an excellent badminton player and have a national tournament next month, you probably need to give less time to studies and more to your practice. If you want to grab that placement, give more time to preparation and less to your outings with friends.
It is completely up to you, and you need to decide it for yourself. What do you want? What are actually your priorities? Once decided, you won’t face much confusion in devoting more time in one thing, and less in other. Prioritising things provides a clear vision, and confidence.
- Always carry a planner with you
There is so much to do that we often forget certain things. Carrying a planner (whether digital or manual) helps here. Whenever you get a new task which you need to remember, feed it in your planner immediately. This comforts down your brain a little bit, as instead of remembering a lot of things, now you can just look at your planner to see your pending tasks.
There are a variety of digital planner applications available where you can create a to-do list and adjust it in your timetable. It also sends you reminders to complete your task, making it much easier.
- Plan your day in the morning/previous night
The best way to utilise your 24 hours at its best is to plan it out in advance. Now, you can’t plan your upcoming Friday on Monday. You don’t know what tasks you will have to do on that day.
So, the most preferrable time to plan your day is early in morning just after waking up, or at pervious night, just before sleeping. You just need to look at your planner (that you carry always), your class schedules, free time slots and adjust your pending tasks in your timetable.
If you fail to complete a certain task scheduled on a certain day, include it in your planner as ‘pending’. You can consider rescheduling it on the next day. This is the most effective way to plan, and schedule your day.
- Fix your sleep schedule
Fixing your sleep schedule is one of the most important elements of time management. Whether you sleep at 9 pm or 2 am, doesn’t matter. Just make it fixed, ensuring that you get at least 7 hours of sleep per day.
This helps you in two ways:
- Good health. Obviously. Your peaceful sleep very important for good health, mood and productivity.
- It leaves you with a fixed number of hours per day to remain productive. In other words, your day gets organised in terms of working and sleeping hours, automatically. And you remain happy 🙂
We hope that these tips will help you in balancing your busy college life in a better way, and lay the formation for a better and organised you.
Thank for reading!
