Time Management for University Students: Essential Tool for Success

Time Management for University Students: Essential Tool for Success

At last, you finally made the cut in the university and everything will be smooth sailing from now on. All the hard work back in high school paid off, you thought.

Yes, all of your hard work back in high school really paid off. However, you should not assume that everything would be easy as a university student. Be prepared that it is going to be more hectic and stressful than what you went through in high school.

Many students assume that they can now take it easy once they reached college. They think like these because of what they heard from many university students about great parties and many friends to meet. This is a common misconception of many new university students.

Being a university student means a lot more work and dedication to your studies, but it does not mean you should not have fun like what you heard about what other university students talk about.

So how can you mix studies and socialization?

The answer to that would be time management.

Planning to manage your time is not that easy, many university students often fail on achieving their goals and resulting in frustration because many of them set unrealistic goals. It is important that you should set goals that are both difficult to achieve but achievable.

There are many factors that you should consider when doing a time management plan. You should not only set specific goals, but also set time on when you will be working on it.

As you can imagine, there are many things to do as a university students. Your parents are not there to help you, you have to do every little thing and some of them may be time consuming.

Always remember that you will be living in the university campus or nearer and this means that all the amenities of home will not always be there. You have to drive to the laundry, do your groceries and cook your own food. It can be very difficult to adjust being a university student, especially if you are a freshman.

It is your responsibility to take care of yourself and at the same time study. There will be no parents telling you to do your homework. There will also be no one to assign what time you should go home.

You might think that all these are very good that there are no nagging parents to tell you what to do. Nevertheless, this is to train you to become responsible for yourself.

You will be tempted to go to parties on study night since no one will tell you that you are not allowed and you have all the time you have.

While it is true you can do whatever you want with your time while in the university, passing every exam should be one of your long-term goal. In order to achieve this, you have to study hard and know how to manage your time.

Here are some tips on how to manage your time:

Set a number of goals that you can achieve. Having too little will give you no satisfaction and often does not give the desired results and having too much will often result in failure and frustration. Achieve this by thinking of different goals and writing them down, always remember to be realistic.

After you wrote it down, the next step would be to determine the most important goals you have to achieve. Pick on how many you can achieve in a specific period.

The next step would be prioritizing your goals. Try to think of what is the most important goal you want to achieve and prioritize them.

Next would be planning it. Set an everyday schedule of task, it is important to follow everything you listed down. Always welcome the free time in your class, for example, the professor is late for 15 minutes. Use this free time to study or review your notes to get ready for exams that your professor might give.

Since this is just your first day of time management, it will not always be perfect. If you see something wrong or seem to have miscalculated the time, change it. Do not force yourself on work you can no longer do just to achieve it. This kind of attitude will only be stressful for you.

Always include in your daily schedule on what time you should sleep. Always welcome a break. You must know that sleep is an important factor in time management. If you study too hard and rest too little, expect failure on goals. You will not study effectively without sleep.

Lastly, always remember to have fun. After you achieved your first goal, get some time for yourself. Go to parties, or any other recreational activities that lets you socialize and relax.