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Time Strategies

My sophomore year, first semester, I was hitting a wall, and I failed a test in Real Analysis. I would have to get a 100 on every homework, quiz, midterm, and a 95% on the final to get an A in the class. In the process, I would likely need to throw all of my other classes too, so it became a question of prioritizing that one class, or the other five. I'll spoil the ending and say I got an A in analysis as well as my other classes, but it was not because I suddenly sacrificed my time like no other- I just became more efficient at using it. I read two different articles over time strategies, one which covers beating procrastination, the other over prioritization of tasks.

How to Beat Procrastination
Beating procrastination is likely the first step one needs to overcome in the path to achieving something. Often times, we can see a huge list of things we need to do, and we become so discouraged by the volume of duties, that we put it off all together. In this article, Caroline Webb discusses two interesting strategies to overcoming this: visualization and publicly committing. Visualizing the results and omission results makes the success realizable and achievable while publicly committing makes us accountable to more people than just ourselves. These are both interesting concepts because they work in tandem to move the assignment from out of our own conscience to something more.

The Myth of "Too Busy"
I had actually heard of this strategy in high school when people are feeling too busy. Tim Grahl suggests that often times when we feel busy, we are not actually "busy" per se, we are just prioritizing incorrectly. But what does this mean? For example, if I have intramurals, social media, Netflix, cooking, studying, extracurriculars, and dog-walking, but I become so enamored with six of those that I forget to cook, I might say "Fast food is okay, I'm too busy to cook." In reality, the next question would be how much time I am spending on Netflix and Social media, and whether or not the benefit from those two offsets the benefit/harms of eating 5 McChickens/day. Grahl urges us to think of our statements as "That's not a priority" rather than "I'm to busy for that." When we are confronted with an issue.

My Thoughts
One of my hobbies is actually learning how people learn, whether that be through peer studies or buzzed articles (one of them is read far more frequently than the other). What I find interesting is how little we research into how we spend our time each week, but we are more than happy to spend hours looking for a good restaurant for one meal. I was given a schedule for this class to trial run, but honestly, I think the class' design got the better of me on the schedule. Instead of waiting for my allotted times to do the assignments for the schedule, I did the assignments whenever I had small amounts of free time. Granted, this was the first week, so I will be trying the schedule next week when I have less free time, but its almost as if a schedule for the class is somewhat counter intuitive to the purpose of the class' structure in the first place. However, since I have not had a full schedule yet, those thoughts could very well ALL be wrong. As per time management, I use a logic formatted Excel sheet to plan my time and sum the hours that I am spending on each class/exercise/extracurricular so that my week is planned out well in advance. Though I might feel prepared to discuss time management, I definitely learned more from these articles. That's one thing I love about how people learn- there's always more for us to learn.

Going forward, I will continue to use my Excel sheet, but I will working the allotted time that was agreed upon for Week 2 (I don't think it's fair to disregard the schedule after deviating from it during my easiest week). However, if I am given free time, I will likely go ahead with the class as opposed to "waiting" to get work done.

Many tasks can be completed in the time we spend worrying about them. Source: Flickr


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