With the tightening grip of a competitive market perpetually around their necks, students of today find themselves overburdened with classes, huge syllabi, tests, and co-curricular activities. It becomes extremely difficult for students to keep up with the massive amount of pressure they are under, and they often lag behind.

Lagging eventually ruin your career. Read this article to find out why is time management important for college students along with some very effective tips to guide you.

Especially for college students, balancing a huge load of studies and co-curricular activities while preparing for higher education or setting the ground for a successful career at the same time often becomes next to impossible. Further, this huge workload ends up taking a toll on the health of students.

Just after the excitement of stepping into college life, meeting new peers, and adjusting to a new surrounding wears off, the urgent need of ensuring a bright and successful career sets in. With this comes the need to keep up in the perpetual competition for which one needs to succeed in every field of life. This leaves the students with too much work to be done in the limited hours of every single day.

Most students are unable to face this challenging situation effectively and eventually end up losing track. Many, on the other hand,  have to sacrifice their physical and mental health to barely keep pace. Efficient time management is the only way students can keep pace with the increasing demands of the cut-throat competition that governs today’s world.

What Is Time Management?

Time Management is a skill that enables students to prioritize their regular tasks and correctly judge the time they would need for completing them. It makes your day, and your life at large, purposeful, fitting in all the herculean tasks along with the little things you need to take care of on a regular basis.

When you plan a day in advance and employ effective time management strategies, you can make sure that all major tasks at hand are completed on time and the minor ones adjusted somewhere in between, with sufficient time left for resting to maintain your health.

These strategies help you in utilizing your time in the most efficient way possible, optimizing your productivity, and helping you to strike a balance among all the spheres of life.

For students, time management skills are one of the most useful abilities that can make academic success much easier to achieve. Especially for college students, time management plays a very significant role in determining the amount of success and satisfaction they achieve at the end of each day.

Between attending ceaseless classes, preparing for numerous exams, enrolling in newer classes, following their co-curricular passions, reading books of their choice, writing papers and assignments, and interning with reputed companies, there are too many boxes for a college student to check in just 24 hours.

If you too are a college student and are overwhelmed with the number of tasks you have at hand, do not worry anymore.

Why Is Time Management Important For College Students?

The life of students is an extremely busy one. Just like a student has a seemingly unending to-do list, they also have too many distractions that can cause them to stray away from their goals.

Good time management skills reduce this risk of being distracted while ensuring that all-important tasks are done in a timely fashion. Here are some of the major benefits of time management in the life of a student.

#1. Development of effective learning habits

An efficient schedule and training in time management can go a long way in ensuring that a student achieves great heights of success. When trained in time management from childhood, students develop healthy learning styles and skills that make studying easy and fun.

They intend to make a routine and stick to it. They also learn to prioritize their work, decide which activities are more important than the others, and make time for both work and leisure, which ensures a healthier lifestyle.

#2. The Key to Success

Effective time management is the key to success. Time Management teaches you to categorize your work and prioritize it while keeping you focused on your goal. This helps in optimizing hour productivity, making sure you do achieve the success you aim for.

#3. Learning to work ‘smart’

Time management increases your productivity while reducing your workload. It removes redundant tasks from your to-do list and makes sure you can achieve the greatest productivity in the shortest time, and by exerting the least effort possible.

#4. Increase productivity

Effective time management skills help in increasing the overall productivity of an individual. It helps you plan your schedule in such a way that ensures effective carrying out of all your tasks, with enough time left for leisure and resting.

#5. Maintains mental and physical health

With effective time management skills health concerns caused by overburdening of work shall never be a concern anymore. When you learn to manage your time effectively you shall always have enough time for leisure and rest that would keep both body and mind healthy.

Now that you have learned why is effective time management important for the success of the students, let us look at some useful time management skills that would help you in managing your time and work in an efficient, orderly, and timely manner.

Top 10 Most Effective Time Management Skills

Now that you know the importance of time management you must be looking for tips that can help you manage your time efficiently. If you don’t follow any specific logical system, then you can operate nothing. Human beings are logical beings too. And in the case of time management, you should look for a system that is scientific.

Too much work may seem productive at the start but it will gradually wear you out. Inadequate breaks or too many breaks are also enemies of productivity. To create a perfect time management system follow the tricks and tips mentioned below.

#1 Setting up a Master Schedule

To fully utilize the time you have in a whole day you should always have a schedule. But schedules can be messy and confusing. Maintaining a messy schedule brings up more problems than solving the ones already at hand. That is where the master schedule comes into play. With the master schedule, a student can allocate tasks in each hour of a day to make it more productive.

Along with regular tasks they can push-in assignments or extracurricular activities in a master schedule. This helps the students to prioritize the assignments while keeping the structure of the schedule intact. You can also use different shades of colors to mark the most important tasks of the day.

#2 Using an Agenda

Agenda is the most efficient way to organize your time so that you don’t lose hours taking breaks. All upcoming projects and assignments with the due dates should be noted in the agenda section. Even television hours or web browsing hours should be included in the agenda so as to prevent excess loss of time in these activities. Agenda further helps you prioritize assignments before entertainment while making the latter a satisfying reward for your hard work.

#3 Distractions are Your Enemy

How many times did you find yourself laughing at a YouTube video about cats within thirty minutes of working on your laptop? That’s how you become self-destructive when you entertain even a little bit of distraction in your study hours. Mobile phones, television, tablets, social media, video streaming websites, etc all play major roles in distracting you.

Colour code your working hours on your master schedule so that you know which of them should be mobile and television free. Also, you can use focus applications that can be found in your app store to disable other distracting applications from your study tablet or computer. Also get rid of distracting things from your study table.

#4 Setting Goals Before Starting

To stay motivated during each and every study session you must set goals before starting. Your master schedule and the agenda will help you to set the goals for each study session, like how many pages you want to read in an hour or how many problems you want to solve before a break.

Setting goals is important but always start from smaller goals. Smaller goals will give you the motivation and the sense of accomplishment that will help you with the bigger goals. Notch up the level of difficulty of your goals every day little by little to improve yourself.

#5 Start Your Assignments Early

Assignments and projects that are pushed to the night before submission never end in a satisfactory way. The last-minute urgency of completing an assignment puts you at risk of bad grades and late submissions. The best way to complete an assignment without any stress and urgency is to start working on it at an early point in your schedule.

Put your assignment in the master schedule divided into small hours through a long period of time. In this way, you will get enough time to assess, research, and plan the way you are going to write it. This will also provide you the space to review your assignment thoroughly before submitting it.

#6 Plan Every Step of Your Project

As you start your assignments early, you may notice that even though you have plenty of time you are still not getting anything productive out of it. This is because you need a project plan to work on your project efficiently.

Break every part of your project step by step so that you know exactly how much time you have to spend on each step. Then add those steps to your master schedule. It is the ultimate way to manage your project so that you don’t lose time or suffer from last-minute panic and late submissions.

#7 The Meaning of Multitasking

There is a popular myth, that each one of us believes, that is people accomplish more work while multitasking. You may think you are saving time if you read a journal while listening to a lecture. But that is not essentially true. The brain of a human can only focus on one thing at a time.

In the case of studying you need to have the main focus on the task at your hand. So the most effective way to manage your time is doing one job at a time. Like reading a chapter of your book at a time and after finishing that focusing on writing an assignment.

#8 Taking Multiple Short Breaks

Instead of studying for hours and hours then taking a 30 to 40-minute break try going for 4 to 5-minute breaks after studying for 30 to 40 minutes. When you study for a longer time your mind wanders off while studying for a shorter time keeps you focused on the subject.

The short breaks that you take in between those study hours give you a space to relax a little bit. It improves both the quality and quantity of your study. Also, it trains your mind to focus deeply in a short time span which will help you in exams while solving a problem.

#9 Start Studying Early

As the day goes on we lose both time and energy to keep going on. There is a misconception that night hours helps you focus on your study as it can be quieter than the day.

But experts say that those night owls are mostly driven by the stress and the urgency of finishing their projects in hand. When students start studying early in the day after a few hours of waking up or after a few hours of coming back from school they have more energy. So students focus on their study efficiently as the lazy mind can wander off and get distracted easily.

#10 Get Enough Sleep

Last but not the least, getting enough sleep cannot be replaced by anything. You can think of sacrificing your sleeping time for the last page of your assignment but that won’t help you in the long run. If you cheat on your 8 to 10 hours of sleep you are bound to slack off the next day and thus mess up the whole schedule.

In reading this article you may have spent some time which would have otherwise been used for studying, but we think you now understand the importance of time management that will help you with your study.

To help you with your time management you can also go to professionals like your school or college counselor or an online consultant. Time management becomes a necessity for every student aiming to crack competitive exams and annual exams of a term. So to stop slacking off start managing your time with better skills.