9.1 Time Management

Tara Lawrence; Wayne Miller

9.1 Time Management

For college-level learning, you can expect to spend much more time on learning activities outside the classroom than you will in the classroom.

In fact, the estimated time you should spend will be at least two hours of outside learning for every one hour of lecture.

Another guide you can consider when planning your time is to budget to spend 2 hours for every 5% an assignment/task/quiz is worth. This is only an estimate and you may find you need more or less time depending on your understanding and interest in the topic.

Taking time to track how long things take you to do will help you estimate how much time you will need to schedule for you to do this same or similar task in the future.

You have an exam worth 25% of your grade, approximately how much time should you schedule to make study notes, review, revise, look up more information and do practice tests for the exam to be successful?

Schedule up to 10 hours of time (2 hours per 5%), but break this down into daily tasks. After every class, review your notes, slides and readings. Fill in gaps and summarize what you learned, create questions for things you don’t understand and work with your professors, your classmates and others to fill in any missing information, and do practice questions.

You have a short paper to write worth 10% of your grade. How much time should you budget to complete this task?

Schedule up to 4 hours to review the assignment instructions and marking rubric, ask questions, collect the information you need, outline what you want to say, do any research, write a draft, review your work, get any final assistance, submit and check to see your submission went through. Ideally, complete the paper a few days early and then go back and give it one last look over before submitting. Breaking down this four hours will ensure you do a bit each day and have time to identify any problems with plenty of time to problem-solve with the help of your professor, classmates or other Fanshawe resource people.

If both of these are due 7 days from now, how easy will it be to schedule the estimated time into your current schedule?

This will depend on what other things your schedule contains and how important they are. There are also often unexpected things like car repairs, broken computer, illness that prevent us from meeting deadlines. By creating a schedule each week based on what we have due, we can start to work backward from the due date.

Some weeks may be more intense, especially around mid-term and end of term. If those hours are multiplied over several courses in a given session, you can see how there is a significant amount of time to manage.

Unfortunately, many students do not always take this into consideration, and they spend far less time than is needed to be successful. The results of poor time management are often a shock to them.

If you work part time, time management skills are even more essential. These skills are still more important for part-time college students who work full time and commute or have a family. To succeed in college, virtually everyone has to develop effective strategies for dealing with time.

A Medical Radiation technologist performs multiple procedures using modalities that other health care professionals, such as the radiologist and treatment physician rely on in a timely manner complete a diagnosis and treatment plan.

Jamie Kueneman, MRT(R)

Reflective Practice

Read each statement in the brief self-evaluation tool below, and check the answer that best applies to you. There are no right or wrong answers.

Always

Usually

Sometimes

Rarely

Never

I like to be given strict deadlines for each task. It helps me stay organized and on track.

I would rather be 15 minutes early than 1 minute late.

I like to improvise instead of planning everything out ahead of time.

I prefer to be able to manage when and how I do each task.

I have a difficult time estimating how long a task will take.

I have more motivation when there is an upcoming deadline. It helps me focus.

I have difficulty keeping priorities in the most beneficial order.

This exercise is intended to help you recognize some things about your own time management style. The important part is for you to identify any areas where you might be able to improve and to find solutions for them.

After you have decided your best response to each statement, think about what they may mean in regard to potential strengths and/or challenges for you when it comes to time management in college. If you are a person that likes strict deadlines, what would you do if you took a course that only had one large paper due at the end? Would you set yourself a series of mini deadlines that made you more comfortable and that kept things moving along for you? Or, if you have difficulty prioritizing tasks, would it help you to make a list of the tasks to do and order them, so you know which ones must be finished first?

In Strategies for Success classes at Fanshawe students regularly identify that they feel time management is their weakest skills and often they create a S.M.A.R.T. goal and plan about around how to get better.

This chapter will provide some solutions, but there are many others that can be found by researching time management strategies.

“4.0 Introduction” and “4.1 Self Assessment” from Fanshawe SOAR by Kristen Cavanagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Pre-health Science Pathways to Success Copyright © 2023 by Fanshawe College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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