How Can I Manage My Time and Space?

Chapter Takeaways

• 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 but also in your future career.
• After assessing how you typically use your free time, plan your use of time based on your “time personality.” Then use an academic weekly and 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 college 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.
• Work to find or create the most effective spaces for studying and then strive to get in the flow zone.

Questions

1. What helps motivate you to sit down and start studying?

2. Describe the most important characteristics of an effective study space.

3. How can you prepare for unplanned interruptions while studying?

4. After you have analyzed how you typically spend time and have blocked out 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.

5. If you find yourself procrastinating, what can you do to get back on track?

6. Realizing that any action repeated consistently and frequently will soon become a habit, what habits can you establish to utilize your time and space more successfully?

Make an Action List

In the past, I have not started early enough on these kinds of school assignments or study tasks:

To ensure I successfully plan ahead to complete all work on time in the future, I will do the following:

I have the following problems with the places where I usually study now:

I will make the following changes in my study space (or I will try these new places) to help prevent distractions:

I often feel I don’t have enough time for my college work for the following reasons:

I will start using these techniques to make sure I use my available time well: