Time management in college
S.S.M.R: Study

Getting your time management in college right can be daunting but not if you follow the S.S.M.R. method.  This page and its sister time management page explain the second S: Study.

Getting the study part right is obviously really important if you want success from your time management in college.  Fortunately like scheduling you can use methods and techniques to help you get it right.

There are four parts to the Study area of S.S.M.R:

• Break the topic into chunks

• Prioritize using past papers/exams

• Work on tutorials

• Understand what passing means

This page covers the first two parts and the sister page: time management in college covers the second two parts.

Break the Topic Into Chunks

Like most areas in life if you break study down into small manageable chunks it becomes less intimidating.

So for your first bit of work in Study you should break down the subject area you want into smaller chunks.  This should be relatively easy to do.  If you are following S.S.M.R then you'll have a full schedule for your academic year.  That will have already split out your subjects into topics.  The schedule will also contain a breakdown of the topics over the various weeks.  Hopefully you should already have something like this:

This is a sample form for the subject maths that has 3 topic areas attached to it.  You can see that I've added some time scales against each topic to show when it will be studied.

However it's probably obvious that you need to know more than "study transformations for 4 weeks".  You need to break this down into manageable chunks of time.

Breaking it into the chunks is often quite a simple task.  You should have a syllabus from your college, university or school.  That should split out the topic into its various detailed topic parts.  If the syllabus doesn't break up the topic, you can ask the lecturer or teacher to split the topic up for you.  However if you don't feel comfortable with doing that you can also look through the index of the recommended text book and pick out the parts there.

Size the Chunks

Once you have the parts you need to split them into the chunks.  You'll quite quickly discover that you need to decide how big each chunk should be.  It's easy to become stuck at this point and spend ages trying to work out the best size.

Instead of wasting time (this is after all about improving your time management in college) I suggest you follow a simple rule.  If you are going to study for an hour at a time break the subject into hour long chunks.  Generally when I talk to people about study this is the length of time I'd advise.

Take the topic an hour at a time with a short break in-between each session.  The break doesn't have to be long.  But you should get up from your study area and walk about.  Just five minutes will help to refresh you and set you up for the next session.

You should now have a list for the topic you are going to study that is broken into chunks.  You can schedule this list into the period of time you've set aside.

For example perhaps you've broken the transformation topic into 30 study sessions over the 4 week period.  That's about 1.5 sessions a day, five days a week.  You could try to draw up a chart showing this.  Alternatively you could simply have a list that is in the correct order and you start at the top and work you way to the bottom.

Prioritize With Past Papers

However you decide to set up your list you now have the start of your study component of S.S.M.R.

The next part of getting your time management in college right is to examine the past papers for the exam.  Past papers are easily the best way of figuring out what it is you are likely to get asked.  So dig some out from the library and start to research them.

It's likely that just by planning you'll have picked up enough terminology to figure out whether a question from a past paper applies to your current topic.  If you don't feel that confident don't worry.  Reviewing the papers should be an on going activity.  So anything missed now will be picked up later.

Hopefully your school, college or university will be able to provide you with multiple years of past papers.  Often they'll provide sample answers as well.  Your job is to go through them and figure out what the recurring questions are about your topic.

It's highly likely that you'll find that some areas come up over and over.  These are the areas that you need to make sure you prioritize in your study.  Once you've identified the topics make sure you highlight them in your broken down list of study topics.

I've built a sample list of the Differentiation topic.  You can see on the list that after assessing past papers I've highlighted derivatives and proofs.

As part of this time management in college process you need to make sure that you continually look at the past papers.  To make sure you remember you should add the review point into your overall schedule, the first S.

You should now have a topic list that is "chunked".  This list should also now have highlighted key areas to work on.

You might be wondering though what to do when there are no past papers, well that's the next part of the time management in college tutorials.