Managing yourself

Are you hard for yourself to manage? Well you better learn fast if you want to succeed. Yeah, I’m calling you out.

Before you can manage your time effectively, you have to be able to manage yourself. We believe that the key to self-management is being able to organize and keep track of all the things that you have to do. College life is very hectic(what are we talking about! Life in General is very hectic). You may also have a job to help pay your way through college or you may have daily family obligations. The secret to getting organized is to create a balance among school, home, work, and social life.

In order to create a balance between all the things you have to do and all the things you want to do, consider the following points:

– Treat college like a full time job. If you are a full-time student, academic work should take up about 40 hours each week. So for the next several years, consider college your full-time job. You might be in class only 15 hours per week, but the other 25 hours should be spent studying and preparing for class. If you break it down, it is really not so bad. You will spend 3-4 hours in class and 4-5 hours reading, studying, and preparing for your assignments each day. The rest of the time is left for other activities that you want to participate in or a part-time job. The good news is that unlike a full-time job, in college you have more control over when you want to schedule your classes and your study time. No one says that your studying must take place between 9:00-5:00 Monday through Friday-you are free to study whenever you want.

– Schedule your classes for your most alert times. Are you a morning person? A late afternoon person? An evening person? Are you up with the sun or are you lucky to be awake by noon? If you know you will never make it to an 8:00 AM class, don’t schedule a class for that time if possible. Likewise, if you are totally useless in the afternoon, try to schedule your courses before lunchtime. Many students don’t consider their class times as an issue to think about when making their course schedule, but because you have the luxury of creating your own schedule, you should try to tailor it to your needs as much as possible.

– Go to class. Although many professors don’t take attendance, most still believe that going to class is a very important part of learning. Students who skip a lot of classes miss out on the important part of learning. Students who skip a lot of classes miss our on the important information that they can only get in class.

– Don’t procrastinate. Procrastination is intentionally putting off work that needs to be done. This problem may actually be the toughest part of self-management for some students. Because you are in control of your own time, it is tempting to put off work until later. It’s just human nature. But you can quickly become overwhelmed by all you need to do when you continually neglect your work.  Procrastination tends to become a bad habit and a way of life for some students.

Excerpt from College Success Strategies by Sherrie L. Nist and Jodi Patrick Holschuh.