46 7.5 Chapter Review and Activities
Key Takeaways
- It’s important to have short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals that are specific, realistic, time oriented, and attainable. Goals help you set priorities and remain motivated and committed to your educational success.
- Planning ahead, and then following your plan, is the essence of time management.
- Organize both your space and your time to develop the best study habits.
- Learning strategies to stay on track, avoiding distractions of people and technology, and preventing procrastination will pay off, not only in college or university but also in your career thereafter.
- Use a semester at a glance, an academic weekly planner, and a daily planner to schedule blocks of time most efficiently. Start well ahead of deadlines to prevent last-minute stresses and problems completing your work.
- Because many students have significant time commitments with work, family, athletics, or other activities, time management techniques are among the most important skills you can learn to help ensure your success.
Exercise: Chapter Review
- Describe the characteristics of well-written goals.
- How can you prepare for unplanned interruptions while studying?
- After you have created your weekly planner with study periods for the week, you may still have difficulty using that study time well. List additional time management strategies that can help you make the most of the time that you do have.
- If you find yourself procrastinating, what can you do to get back on track?
Randy Pausch was known for his lecture called “The Last Lecture,” now a bestselling book. Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Pausch passes along some of his ideas for best strategies for uses of time in his lesser-known lecture on time management. Could there be someone better suited to teach about time management than someone trying to maximize their last year, months, weeks and days of their life?
Note this video is one hour and sixteen minutes. It is optional as it is long. However, it’s full of great strategies, goal-setting ideas, and ways to think about time management.
Video: “Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management” (length 1:16:21)
The first step to succeeding in your courses is to be committed to your education. You’ve been motivated to start post-secondary education—now you need to keep that motivation going as you target specific goals for success in your classes. Much of this has to do with attitude and managing your time effectively.
In fact, time management skills can make the difference between those who graduate from college and university and those who drop out. Time management is actually all about managing yourself: knowing what you want, deciding how to get what you want, and then efficiently and effectively getting it. That applies to fun things, too. In fact, you may want to think of the goal of this chapter as not just managing your time for studying but ensuring that even as you do well in your studies, you’re still enjoying your life while in university.
Text Attributions
This chapter is a remix of the following chapters:
- “2.4 Chapter Activities” and “Staying Motivated, Organized, and on Track” in University Success by N. Mahoney, B. Klassen, and M. D’Eon. Adapted by Mary Shier. CC BY-NC-SA.
- “Time Management Theory” in Blueprint for Success in College and Career by Dave Dillon. Adapted by Mary Shier. CC BY.
Video Attributions
- “Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management” by Carnegie Mellon University. Standard YouTube Licence.