3 Keeping Up and Keeping Track, with Time Management
2021
Cascadia College COLL101 Team
Introduction
New college students are often very excited about having ownership of their own school time and about the prospect of so much unscheduled time between classes. This is especially true for students who are coming to college straight from high school or are attending college while still in high school. In high school, school time is often much more tightly structured from hour to hour with teachers often reminding or cajoling students of upcoming assignment due dates and projects (Wang et al. 2010). In contrast, school time in college is much freer and more flexible. Also, the responsibility for remembering assignment tasks and deadlines and for organizing one’s days shifts solely to the student. What many new college students discover though is that they often lack the skills around how to manage their school time effectively, especially in light of the substantially heavier workload and cognitively deeper demands of college coursework (van der Meer et al. 2010). This ineffective time management is often related to academic stress and is often met with self-blame (Misra and McKean 2000, van der Meer et al. 2010). Time management also seems to be related to school performance (Adams and Blair 2019).
Learning how to manage time as a college student has only fairly recently been addressed by most institutions of higher education in the U.S.; historically, becoming a college student has largely been assumed to be a rite of passage that everyone is expected to endure, often by muddling through, often with significant academic stress, in order to come out at the end of that time with the skills for how to study, organize time, and complete coursework. It is also a system that was initially designed for white, upper-class, male students. Thus, the organization of higher education and college life, the norms and practices, and the expectations, are often not familiar to many students. Although a few students may quickly recognize and learn college ways at little cost due to their family backgrounds or previous educational experiences, that is not often the case. For a great many new college students, and especially for first-generation college students, the acclimation to college and the way time is managed there is much more dramatic because college itself is a completely new setting to them, with new norms and practices (Gable 2021). Unfortunately, the transition can often be a costly one; for some, it may take numerous academic terms and possibly repeated coursework–costing hundreds to thousands of dollars– to get to the point where they are able to work within the system, organize their own study time, and attain academic achievements that finally reflect their potential.
Fortunately, recent educational research on the college student experience (in part from higher education systems similar to that in the U.S.) has indicated that new students do benefit from early guidance on how to do college (van der Meer et al. 2010) and that they do want to be organized but often lack strategies for doing so (Adams and Blair 2019). Today, First Year Experience or College Strategies/College Success courses at U.S. universities and colleges are exceedingly common, guiding students towards the academic skills and habits needed for successful college study. In a way, these courses help students develop a college student mindset that includes cultivating the skills and habits for regular, independent, deep study and for managing one’s study time, even in the absence of looming assignment deadlines (van der Meer et al. 2010).
This article supports the development of a college student mindset, specifically in regards to how to manage study time. The sections that follow outline common and less common time management challenges and offer practical suggestions and discussion starters for ways to meet the challenges. The goal is to help new students identify their own strategies to keep up and keep track of their college obligations and expectations.
Time management challenges and possible solutions
One way to learn about how to manage one’s college time is to first identify the ways in which one’s own time management is challenged and then to brainstorm ideas to address those. Certainly, there are many time management issues that are commonly experienced for which there might be some common, if not universal, solutions. At the same time, college students, like anyone really, also have unique struggles due to unique personalities, identities, abilities, and lived experiences. Additionally, diverse ethnic, linguistic, racial, and class backgrounds play a strong role in who we are and how we navigate situations. These may be hard to address with universal solutions because the strategies may need to be highly personalized, may require specialized professional expertise, or may relate to intractable societal or systemic issues about which society as a whole continues to struggle. For example, it may be that the time expectations of the current system of higher education are what need to adapt or change, to be more inclusive and responsive to the wider range of experiences and needs (see van der Meer et al. 2010 for a brief discussion of this).
To the extent that they can, many College Success/College Strategies and First Year Experience curricula do acknowledge that institutions could do more to change, yet most courses themselves focus on helping new college students face the most common time management issues that they face now in the given institutional context. That is the approach for this article as well: what are the main kinds of challenges college students face in the current collegiate environment, and what are some practical and commonly- applicable solutions that many students can adapt. (Again, this is not to ignore more systemic issues that need addressing.) The sections below consider three common ways that college students’ time management may be challenged, with suggestions for how to address those.
Personal mindset issues
Research has shown us that our personal mindsets can hamper or enhance our educational and other outcomes (see Dweck 2016). Personal mindsets may also be related to college, and to college time management, because our psychological make-up can influence how we see and feel about our college experience and time, and how we approach these. This is similar to how we can think about water glasses as half full or half empty (see van der Meer et al. 2010). Are we generally optimistic about what we can accomplish in college, and how we relate to time in college, and our capacity to use and organize that time? Or, do we see college and time in college as always being out of our control, or as full, or unchangeable? Consider the following questions:
- When faced with school tasks, are you confident that you can assess what needs to be done and make appropriate plans?
- Do you make learning goals for yourself, plans for enacting them, and adjust them as necessary?
- Does new information spur you to rearrange your plans?
- Do you see failures and successes in school as learning experiences?
- Do you prioritize study time?
- Are you able to work on school tasks with other students in ways that benefit everyone?
- Do you have the ability to decide when you have done enough, or your work is good enough?
- Are you able to limit your screen time, taking time to be alone with your own thoughts or to be engaged fully in tasks without multitasking?
Mindset time management suggestions
If you answered ‘no’ to some of these questions, you may be making it harder on yourself to succeed in managing your time and college studies effectively because you may not feel like you are able to effectively organize your time or take control of your time. Maybe you feel it is futile to change how you relate to time, in the face of exhausting daily experiences you may be facing, or fears, or other factors that may be reinforcing a negative mindset. Maybe you careen from situation to situation letting these control your time, rather than stopping to think deeply about how to adjust your reactions to the situations. You might fear or resist the hard personal work it might take to shift into a mindset that supports college-positive study habits and time management. To that end, highly personalized solutions to time management that are related to mindset or psychological issues are beyond the scope of most College Success/College Strategies or First Year Experience courses. A possible first step you can make on your own is simply to become self-aware of mindset challenges you pose to yourself. Then, secondly, to engage in self-reflection about how you might adjust your approach.
Suggestion:
You might seriously consider looking at Dweck’s very insightful and useful book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2016), available at most college libraries or for purchase at booksellers. The research on mindset is powerful and actionable.
Suggestion:
You may also find other resources at your college to guide you in your self-reflections or in pursuit of a growth mindset: campus learning center, academic advising, counseling services, campus library. Your instructor may also be able to direct you to other appropriate campus resources.
Logistical issues
Logistical issues are the practical ones that we face each day, and some of these are commonly experienced by many college students. Consider the questions below.
- Do you use a calendar or planner for your school tasks (homework, reading, class time)?
- Do your school tasks have set times on your calendar or planner that are realistic, logical, and ample enough?
- Do you have reminders for what you should be doing during your school task times? Have you broken up your tasks, especially for complex school tasks?
- Have you set aside free time? Have you set aside time to do regular planning each week?
- Do you have physical spaces in which to do your work, and the tools to do it?
Logistical time management suggestions
If, as a college student, you answer ‘no’ to more than one logistical question, look at the ideas that follow for how you might concretely solve some of the most common logistical issues related to managing college time.
Do you use a calendar or planner for your school tasks (homework, reading, class time)?
Suggestion:
If no, create a weekly schedule that lists both your face-to-face or synchronous class time as well as study time outside of this. This will help you see how your life as a college student is represented each week. You can use a weekly planner that you purchase, or a piece of paper, or a digital page to sketch out your schedule. It’s likely the schedule will shift slightly from week to week, but aim for routine over the course of the quarter. You can re-draw the calendar each week, or use a single one for the week and then adjust it daily. (The next section offers some thoughts about how to allot time more accurately.) Additionally, consider duplicating your efforts on a daily planner and a monthly calendar, so you can see both the big picture of your academic quarter and your detailed daily schedule. This will make your life as a student much clearer and you will know what you should be doing at a given time.
Suggestion:
Add assignment deadlines for each class to a monthly calendar so you see the full month or most of the quarter at a glance. This way you will not be caught at the end of the quarter with a major Computer programming project you didn’t plan for. (These deadlines are usually found on the course syllabus and/or learning management system. Ask your classmates and/or instructor if you are not seeing them.)
Do your school tasks have set times on your calendar or planner that are realistic, logical, and ample enough?
Suggestion:
Instructors will often offer an estimate of how much time you should expect to spend studying or doing classwork. (See the course syllabus. If you cannot locate this information, consider asking your instructor during their office hours.) The general rule of thumb is that you will spend up to three times the amount of credit hours the course is listed at. For example, a 5-credit hour course in a quarter system will entail upward from 15 hours a week of your time. (The expectations for a 3-credit course in a semester system will be calculated similarly.) Some of the expected time (out of the 15 hours or more for a 5-credit course, say) will be time spent attending class face-to-face or in a synchronous remote session. So, it may be that out of the 15 or so hours you should expect to spend on the course, 5 of it will be taken up by face-to-face time and/or say, work time in the Biology lab. That leaves at least 10 hours of time that is expected to be used in independent study of your subject: reading, working out problems, working in small groups, writing up assignments, submitting assignments. These are estimates, of course, and sometimes you may need more or less time for different kinds of academic activities.
Suggestion:
Make sure you are strategic about your weekly schedule, saving your freshest times each day for your hardest brainwork, while more mundane work might come at times when you are more tired, have less capacity for deep work. In this way, you are accommodating some of the external challenges you might face, like time spent at your job that may affect your school time. (Such external challenges—employment—are discussed in the next section.) If you are a morning person and are able to do some writing for your English class first thing in the morning, maybe schedule an hour to do so in the morning. If you have an exhausting work shift that ends at 11 pm, maybe don’t plan to read 300 pages of a really dense textbook (unless your goal is to fall asleep really quickly!).
Suggestion:
You’ll also want to account for so-called optional or extra study opportunities. Students are often unsure of what faculty mean when they offer additional, ‘extra,’ optional study opportunities (van der Meer et al. 2010). Is the video suggested by your Math instructor really optional? What students often do not realize is that while these are optional, they are being recommended as enhancements to learning, and probably are worth doing. The importance of exploring or embarking on them is often left to the students to determine, but if you don’t add them to your calendar, you won’t remember to engage or participate in them!
Have you set aside free time? Have you set aside time to do regular planning each week?
Suggestion:
Schedule your truly free time or uncommitted time into your weekly schedule, just as you do your study and class time. This way you know you have some downtime away from schoolwork, and it may even make the free time feel more rewarding if it is preserved. You might even consider setting goals for it to make it feel truly fulfilling (Wang et al. 2010), even if those goals are simply ‘to veg out’ or ‘do nothing’ or ‘snapchat with best friend.’
Suggestion:
In regard to regular planning time, commit to reviewing your weekly planner or schedule a few times a week, but especially at the start of your week (whether that is Saturday, Sunday, or Monday for you). This will help prepare you for what’s coming up that week, and you can check in throughout the week so that you prepare thoroughly for say, the Art critique or Communication speech that is due by the end of the week. This helps you avoid being caught unaware by assignment deadlines. Similarly, you may want to glance at your monthly calendar during your planning time, or maybe this can be taped to a wall or a notebook.
Do you have physical spaces in which to do your work, and the tools to do it?
Suggestion:
To help you keep to your time schedule, you’ll want to support your learning with an actual space or spaces to go to for studying. If you are able, organize a space for your studying at home that will be where you ‘go’ to do your college work. This space might be where you keep all of your learning materials when at home, where you charge up your devices, and where you are able to sit to do your work. Or, you might choose different kinds of physical spaces for different times, such as spaces outside the home when available (campus library study carrels, a coffee shop nook, a study area on campus or at a local library). Planning out where you do your studying can help you focus more quickly, saving you time.
Suggestion:
For tools, you may want to review if you have the essential physical tools and try to keep those together in your physical space or in a bag that you carry with you: your computing device (laptop, tablet, phone), chargers, headphones/ear buds, paper notebook, pen/pencil, school books or articles (Ex: Physics lab materials), and daily/weekly/monthly planner. Having these items in one place or together will also save you time as you settle in to study. Some colleges provide some of these items on loan or as student freebies. You can ask about them on campus at the Information desk or at Student Life.
Do you have reminders for what you should be doing during your school task times? Have you broken up your tasks, especially for complex school tasks?
Students don’t often recognize how to study all quarter long for the mysterious final exam that awaits them in some classes, or how to prepare for the final projects/papers they will submit. Knowing there is a lot of work to do ‘…[does] not necessarily translate into knowing how to approach the study load.” (van der Meer et al. 2010, p. 784), and most students do not recognize that studying towards exams is something they should be doing throughout the academic term (van der Meer et al. 2010).
Suggestion:
Carefully read or re-read the assignment instructions or listen to them if recorded by your instructor. Jot down or mark where you need clarification. See if your instructor has a question-and-answer forum online and pose your questions there, talk to classmates about your questions, ask your instructor’s via email or attend their office hours.
Suggestion:
Break down big assignments and projects into smaller tasks. Same thing as above: first, make sure the final assignment due date is noted on your planner(s). Then, take the assignment handout or page and identify the tasks you need to accomplish for your project, whether in Chemistry or COLL101 or any class. Your instructor might have helped you with this by assigning due dates for parts of the assignment. You can use this to help you plan your work.
Suggestion:
Prepare for final exams all quarter long. First, have the exam date noted on your weekly planner, but especially on some kind of monthly schedule so you see when it is coming up. Then, aim to create daily artifacts of your studying: if you read a History chapter or viewed an Accounting video lecture, practice ‘retrieval techniques’ to summarize on a page what the main points were. Then, go back to the reading or lecture to fill in the gaps that you couldn’t remember. Label and save this artifact in a way that will help you find it to study from later.
Suggestion:
If you discover that you simply cannot fit everything into a week’s worth of time, maybe your course load is too heavy, especially if you have issues truly beyond your control (see the next section). Realize that college work is often quite heavy and it’s not unusual to feel like you cannot possibly do everything as carefully as you’d like. Furthermore, there may be times when you have been over-ambitious with your course load. If you think that might be the case, it might be wise to speak to an academic advisor about which class(es) to drop so that you don’t find that a dropped course will not be offered for several quarters.
External issues
External issues that influence our time management are those over which students have less control and which may be related to unique personal situations, cultural backgrounds, or social positions. External issues may not all be solvable, but recognizing them for what they are may give clarity about how to accommodate them. These external issues vary among students, and may also even vary in a single student’s life. Consider the following questions:
- Do you suffer from a health or (dis)ability issue that affects your energy or time?
- Are you preoccupied by a personal or family life transition (in addition to your transition to college)?
- Is your regular environment one in which you are frequently interrupted, or you lack privacy?
- Is your time for school further constrained by employment or family responsibilities?
- Is your approach to time different from that of the system of higher education in our society, possibly because of cultural, family, or other personal experiences where time is organized differently?
Possible solutions
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, the solutions will likely be in the form of accommodations that you will need to make in terms of how you approach your college career, or even in how you address the logistical issues above. In some cases, you may need to consult with professionals to help you, either from available campus resources, or from outside of the educational setting.
For example:
If you suffer from health-related issues that affect your time management, you may want to consult with a medical doctor, mental health counselor, occupational therapist, or any other appropriate professional about ways to manage your school time. After doing so, it may be appropriate to look into academic accommodations through the college’s disability support services.
For example:
If you have demanding family or employment responsibilities or find yourself distracted by an additional life transition, you may need to adjust or reduce your course load and study times. An academic advisor could help you strategize here about which classes would be ideal for you given the time constraints you currently have, and which classes you could postpone until later. If it’s too late to make class load changes, you may want to discuss with your professor some possible adjustments to particular coursework. If you can come up with some concrete ideas or requests ahead of time, this may help your instructor help you.
For example:
If you want to better understand how time management works in the U.S. system of higher education because it doesn’t reflect your own experiences with time, consider talking with classmates to understand how they are organizing themselves. Also consider engaging in time management sessions at your college’s learning center, or talk to your professors.
Conclusion
New students often discover that the free time they now have is in fact not that free. Instead, it is time that does need to be managed if the goal is to succeed in college without excessive academic stress. This article suggests you think about personal mindset, logistical issues, and external issues as you consider appropriate ways to manage your time. Clearly, the easiest and most common time management solutions for college students are those around scheduling, planning one’s time and space, and engaging in the daily work of keeping up and keeping track of the expectations in one’s courses. Other time management issues may be more intractable, requiring guidance from professionals inside or outside the college. In the big picture, having autonomy over how to spend one’s time in college is a perk of college life. Learning to manage that time in ways that benefit your college studies is also a perk, one that carries over to life after college.
References
Adams, R.V. and E. Blair. (2019). Impact of Time Management Behaviors on Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Performance. SAGE Open, 1-11. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018824506
Dweck, C. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
Gable, R. (2021). First Generation Students at Legacy Universities. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16f6d38
Misra, R. and M. McKean. (2000). College students’ academic stress and its relation to their anxiety, time management and leisure satisfaction. American Journal of Health Studies., 16(1), 41–51.
van der Meer, J., Jansen, E., & Torenbeek, M. (2010). “It’s almost a mindset that teachers need to change”: First-year students’ need to be inducted into time management. Studies in Higher Education, 35(7), 777–791. Education Source.
Wang, W.-C., Kao, C.-H., Huan, T.-C., & Wu, C.-C. (2011). Free Time Management Contributes to Better Quality of Life: A Study of Undergraduate Students in Taiwan. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12(4), 561–573. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-010-9217-7
