5 Time Management: Scheduling Time

Students in class taking notes and listening to someone giving a talk.The purpose of this section is to help you develop tools to manage your time effectively, facilitating the achievement of your goals. Students often must balance a thesis with many other projects and priorities, so learning how to effectively time manage is very important.

Scheduling time

The most effective way to manage your time, stay focused, and keep track of important meetings and deadlines is to use a calendar, either digital or analog. Monthly and weekly calendars will help you track due dates and see blocks of time that can be devoted to thesis work.

You may also want to consider tracking how much time you spend doing different tasks, and when you are most productive, either using your calendar of appointments or a productivity tracker such as Toggl [https://toggl.com/] or Clockify [https://clockify.me/].

Challenge: keeping all the other balls in the air, when I just want to double down on writing my thesis.

Tip: Writing out half hour blocks, and filling each block, one with thesis, and the next with non-thesis work, and back and forth. Keeps things fresh, I don’t get stuck nearly as much, because I’m engaging different parts of my brain.”

Anthropology, 3rd year, PhD

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