Time management
Organising your time
- Use a time log to work out what time you have available.
- Be clear about your priorities
- Be realistic – if your days are already full, you’ll have to give something up.
- Identify your best time of day to study and use that for the tasks you find most difficult. Use your least favourite time for less challenging work like watching dvds and videos.
- Pin up your course calendar so the rest of the household know what your commitments are.
- If you have to share a PC, negotiate times when you can work undisturbed.
Things to try
- Make a ‘to do’ list. Tick the most difficult tasks then grade them in their order of difficulty. Do the hardest one first and you’ll feel much better.
- Use short chunks of time to recall parts of the course material. For example, while you are waiting for something to cook in the microwave.
- Study for half an hour at lunchtime – that’s two and a half hours over a week.
- Get up and hour earlier and study while the rest of the household are asleep.
- When you come across things you don’t understand, skip over them as they often start to make sense if you read on. When you’re really stuck, phone your tutor.
- If you’re feeling stressed about household chores that are mounting up, use the 4D’s to prioritise – do it, dump it, delegate it or do it less well.
- Use a foursquare grid to classify things according to important/not important, urgent/not urgent. Do the tasks that are important AND urgent.
- Divide tasks into must do, should do, could do.
- Create a daily checklist to keep you on track.
- Rotate housework – allow a set number of hours each week but always start with something different. That way everything will eventually get some attention.
- Listen to audio material while you’re travelling or doing household chores.
- Take time to re-work your notes so they make sense when you start to revise, and save you re-reading huge chunks of material.
- The 80/20 rule (Pareto’s principle) states that 20% of effort generates 80% of the result. In other words, 20% of the time you spend on your assignment generates 80% of the marks, and 80% of your time generates 20%. So, if you’re short of time, work out your priorities.
More advice