Attitude and motivation are very important. In other words, you don’t have to give up your life when you register for college, but you may need to work on managing your life and time more effectively.īut, time management works only when you’re committed to your goals. When you manage your time well, you don’t have to ignore some goals completely in order to meet other goals. Time management is mostly a way to juggle priorities so you can meet all your goals. Priorities always involve time: what is most important to do right now. You shouldn’t have to choose between these, except at any given time. It is important to do well in your classes, but it’s also important to earn money to support yourself and have a social life. The question of priority is really a question of what is more important at a specific time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to rank goals as always more or less important. In reality, priorities don’t work quite that way.
#HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR LIFE AFTER COLLEGE FREE#
So what does that mean-that you never play guitar again, or at least not while in college? Whenever you have an hour free between class and work, you have to study because that’s the higher priority? What about all your other goals-do you have to ignore everything that’s not a priority 1? And what happens when you have to choose among different goals that are both number 1 priorities? It sounds easy, but do you actually feel comfortable doing that? Maybe you gave a priority 1 to passing your courses and a priority 3 to playing your guitar. Try this experiment: go back to the goals you wrote in the last chapter and see if you can rank each goal as a 1 (top priority), 2 (middle priority), or 3 (lowest priority). We might think, This is a really important goal, and that is less important. We often use the word “priorities” to refer to how important something is to us. Thinking about your goals gets you started, but it’s also important to think about priorities. In the following Alleyoop Advice video, Alleyoop (Angel Aquino) discusses what many students discover about college: there is a lot of free time-and just as many challenges to balance free time with study time.
#HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR LIFE AFTER COLLEGE HOW TO#
To be successful in college, it’s imperative to be able to effectively manage your time and to manage all aspects of your life including school, work, and social opportunities. Time management isn’t actually difficult, but you do need to learn how to do it well. In this section, we zoom in on learning how to skillfully manage your time. One of the main goals of a college education is learning how to learn. It is easy to fall behind when there are so many choices and freedoms. For example, a free day before an exam, if not wisely spent, can spell trouble for doing well on the exam. And while this can be exciting, you may find that social opportunities and job responsibilities conflict with academic expectations. For many students, college is the first time they are “on their own” in an environment filled with opportunity.
Having clearly defined goals with specific deadlines leads you to be deliberate in planning your time and makes it easier to establish an effective time management system.Īs most students discover, college is not the same as high school. Your goals guide how you spend your time and resources. When you have a long-term goal and break it down into mid-term and short-term goals, it leads to the question, “What do I need to do today in order to achieve my goal?” This question is at the heart of time management. Now that you have spent some time exploring your values and your goals, you can easily see how you need to manage your time well in order to accomplish your goals. Identify procrastination behaviors and strategies to avoid them.Explore time management tips and strategies.Use a calendar planner and daily to-do list to plan ahead for study tasks and manage your time effectively.Understand the basic principles of time management and planning.
Identify your time management personality.Consider how your priorities impact your time.Understand the relationship between goals and time management.By the end of this chapter, you will be able to: