Time management for Students
Getting the balance right

Time management for students is a really important aspect of succeeding.  If you want to get through the studying and make a success of your course then you need to tame time from the outset.  This page and those linked to it will help you do just that.

Like many people I've studied both at university and I've studied whilst working.  I've been through the pain so I understand the difficulty.  Fortunately I've also had a great career learning all about taming time and as part of it I've developed a method that will help.

S S M R

• Schedule

• Study

• Measure

• Reinforce

This system is designed specifically to improve time management for students.  It starts with an overview and then builds quickly into the actually learning and reinforcement activities.

I developed this system because of the lack of time management for students work provided by the universities, colleges and schools.  Sadly often the best they do if provide a leaflet saying plan it out and work hard.  They don't get into the detail of what to do or give out forms to help you along the way.

The system is pretty straightforward.  You start by working out what you need to learn and how long it will take you to learn it.  You then move quickly onto planning out the schedule and putting together a detailed plan.  That's pretty much if for the Schedule part.  You can sum up this need to plan with the quote:

"fail to plan, plan to fail"

This is a great quote to print out and put on your wall to remind you of the need to keep a plan and follow it.  To help you I've included a free time management for students downloadable graphic so you can just "print and go!"

If you're keen to get started with the schedule part it's split in two.  The first section, is about your motivations and the second about the detail of the planning.

Next you move onto Study.  When explaining how time management for students this is often the area that tutors start with.  However if you haven't worked through the Schedule part first this part will quickly become unstuck.  Study falls into four categories:

• Break the topic into chunks

• Get hold of past exam papers

• Do the tutorials

• Understand the requirements to pass

This might seem pretty obvious but you'll notice that the emphasis here is on passing the exam not in learning the subject.  That comes later.  First you need to make sure you can pass the exam and then later you need to build up subject knowledge.  There are two pages covering this.  the first study 1 covers a breaking your topics into chunks.  The second study 2 covers tutorials and exam passing.

Most time management for students programmes won't work this way.  Instead they'll talk about getting a broad understanding and then deepening it.  Well my system is different.  Instead I suggest learning to pass the exams and then broadening your subject knowledge.

If you think this a counter intuitive way of time management for students then you should consider how we normally learn things.  Take one of the first things we learn:  how to talk.  We learn how to talk by copying others.  I'm sure like me you've repeated a work to a baby over and over hoping they'll learn it.  Well one day they do.  They don't need to study how to read, phonetics, grammar, punctuation and so on to take part they just need to be able to talk.

So a baby's first focus is learning how to talk (or pass the exam) then they move up to full speech (better marks) and ultimately reading and writing (great topic knowledge).  So for time management for students to succeed you need to focus on passing the first hurdle, passing the exam before moving on to the higher and harder hurdle of the whole subject.

Once you have Study under control you can start to measure things.  Measurement is one of the most important things you can do.  It enables you to achieve two things.  Firstly it'll quickly and dispassionately identify your weak areas.  Secondly it'll act as motivation for you.  If you see things improving then you'll know it's worth the effort.

Measurement comes in a variety of forms but with studying it is mostly about being able to pass exam or tutorial questions.

I've built two pages to help you with measurement.  The first covers some basics of measurement to measure your success against the strategy and study plans you've developed.  The second covers the development of Memory sheets and personal testing to enhance your college study skills.

Finally we arrive reinforce.  This is the part where you can start to broaden your knowledge of the subject.  By now you'll have the basic of a subject understood and ready to go.  However I expect that you're like me and everyone else, it's hard to keep remembering stuff you've learned whilst learning new topic information.  Well the secret is reinforcement.

If you want to broaden your topic knowledge you need to do two things.  First you need to make sure you have a rock solid foundation.  Secondly you need to keep building on that foundation.

To build that rock solid foundation you need to keep going back over the subject material you've learned.  This is where the first S, the Schedule, comes in.  You've already planned out the schedule of events.  You know what you'll study when, all you need to do is add in reinforcement study.  So for each topic do a reinforcement session at 1 week, 1 month and 3 months.

As you solidify the foundations you'll find that the new stuff becomes easy to add in.  You'll be confident in your subject so adding in new information should be pretty simple.

Over the coming weeks I'll be adding more and more detail to explain this system so check back soon.