Time management for college students
S.S.M.R : Schedule 2

This is the second part of the Schedule series in time management for college students.  The first part covered discovering your motivations for study.  This second part explains how to set out a work schedule to enable you to succeed with your study.

Time management for college students and for all types of university or school often fails because students fail to plan effectively.  Often the advice about study is not broad enough and fails to take into account that people need fun as well as study.

Assemble the Information

Hopefully you've gathered together all of the pieces suggested in part 1 of this time management for college students course.  If you haven't then you'll need:

• the length of your academic terms

• the number of tutorials and times

• the timings of exams and their duration

• dates for any big personal events, parties, birthday etc

• a breakdown of your subjects in the order they'll be taught

• any coursework requirements and timings

To start the process let me describe for you where you are trying to end up.  You're going to produce a schedule or calendar that set out what you have to do to succeed.  This schedule will take into account the various activities that are often left out of time management for college students courses.

Five Point Plan

To produce the schedule, follow this five point plan

Work out the number of weeks from now until your first exam.  Don't include your vacations or other time when you'll want to have fun.

For each exam work out how many topics you need to cover.  Then split that number over the time frame.  So if you have 20 weeks until the exam and 5 topics, each topic is going to get 4 weeks in the schedule.

If you have course work you need to factor this in.  So work out when it is due and order your topics accordingly.  Allow at least 1 week between the completion of studying the topic and completing the course work.

Lay out the topics in the order that you need to tackle them on a plan.  This will form your initial draft plan.

Take your initial plan and now place onto it the personal events that you've listed.  If those events clash with the study topics then move the study topic about.

You should now have week by week plan setting out what topics you need to cover and by when.  Don't worry too much about the detail at this stage.

The objective here is to build a broad plan to follow through the academic year not a detailed on.

Often time management for college students plans try to get into the detail at too early a stage.  What you need is a strategy that convinces you that it is possible to achieve all the required studying not the day by day detail.

Focus on the BIG Picture

If you put too much detail into this plan then you'll lose sight of the bigger picture.  Losing sight of the bigger picture will make it hard for you to focus.  If ever area is fully detailed you won't be able to remember them.

You need to be able to always see the big picture.  When you're studying you'll always have moments when you get worried about whether you'll succeed.  If you have the big picture easily in your mind then this won't be a problem.

You'll be calm and relaxed and stress free.  You won't worry about going to family events or taking holidays since you'll know that your plan will enable you to succeed.

Time management for college students and others is not difficult but you do need to get organized and get that plan up on your wall.  Make it visible so that you'll remember day by day that you just need to follow it to succeed.