The spread of the coronavirus
made students all over the world turn to online education. The dramatic change
caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed additional challenges on students
practicing distant learning, since virtual classes require high levels of
self-organization and time-management. Let's dig deeper and find out how to
develop them.
Essential time-management skills
Setting goals
Setting objectives is a great way
to motivate yourself for studying. But unfortunately, most people do it
completely wrong. They typically define a goal as the end result, which is not
really helpful because they don't think about how exactly they will achieve it.
Instead of viewing the goal as
the thing that you will eventually get, see it as a set of tasks that need to
be done. Ask yourself what you have to do every day in order to get the desired
result. It means that you should focus on completing routines that will drive
you to the endpoint. What's more, regular activities leading you to the goal
must be measurable, so you can understand how much work is left.
Planning
Successful students know how to
organize their time and space for the day and week ahead. The best way to do it
is to create a calendar that includes the dates of assignment submissions,
program-related activities or events, and virtual office hours with
instructors.
While making a plan, you should
be aware of so-called "planning fallacy." Psychologists define
this term as being overly optimistic about how much you can get done. Planning
fallacy is really harmful to your time-management because you might take on too
many courses, mess up your schedule, and get stressed when the tasks take more
time than you expected.
Prioritizing
The ability to prioritize your
workload means that you can distinguish urgent and important tasks. Note that
urgent things are those that require prompt actions but they are not
necessarily important. Working on urgent but insignificant tasks can cost you a
lot of time.
To become better at prioritizing,
you can use a priority matrix that helps to divide your issues into a few
categories:
- Urgent
and important
- Not
urgent but important
- Urgent
but not important
- Neither
urgent nor important
Always keep your focus on the first category as it is essential for your success. Once you've completed all urgent and important duties, move to the second group of tasks. Things that belong to the third category should be delegated or postponed. The last type of issue should be completely ignored if you want to save your time.
Meeting the deadlines
The research
conducted by Keith Wilcox at Columbia University showed that people who changed
the deadline for a task in their schedule needed approximately 16 more days to
complete it. So eventually, those who don't stick to their schedule spend much
more time to finish their work. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
As you might understand, missing
deadlines diminishes productivity. That is why you should try to study in
accordance with the schedule you've created. To make the most out of your
online learning, don't neglect your original plan.
Using energy efficiently
All people have natural energy
highs and lows. At some points, we are more alert and energetic than usually
because our body rhythms change. So one could use such periods to work on the
most difficult tasks.
It's impossible to fight against
natural rhythms, but you can learn how your body functions and use this
knowledge for better productivity. Once you understand what kind of work you
manage more efficiently at a particular time, organize your tasks accordingly.
Managing your time in the right
way allows being more productive and efficient. This ability is essential to
get all the necessary things done. Sometimes, time-management is taught in academic
settings. School teachers and university professors may provide students with
information on this topic and set some tasks, like doing a project or writing a
paper. Those who lack knowledge on this can check completely free essay samples on time management at the
service offering academic help for students: WritingBros. On this website,
students can get information about time-management strategies and struggles as
well as the impact of stressful time-management on their health. But in case
you want to learn more key skills needed for managing your time, keep reading
this article!
Final thoughts
Obtaining a degree online means
learning in a new environment where you need to organize the time on your own.
Managing your time might be quite hard, especially when studying in untypical
settings. But if you want to be a successful student, you should work on
developing time-management skills explained above, no matter how difficult it
can be.
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