TIME MANAGEMENT (I)

 FIXED - CALENDAR COMMITMENT

Time management is very important because it is the way you regulate or schedule your time. The key to successful time management is allowing enough time to complete your work while still finding time to complete all of your other responsibilities. You don't have to fill your time with study only, because you also need time to rest yourself. You also have to spend your time with family and friends. You can use that time to release stress. In university, you may need to use time-management strategies to balance the study routine and your daily life. Good time-management skills can actually save your time. Once you learn good time-management skills, you may be surprised to find that you can do all the things you want to do. The first rule of good time management is:

Don't let time manage you; you must learn, instead, to manage your time.

What are fixed commitments? Fixed commitments are things you do at the same time every day or every week. You should complete the Fixed-Commitment Calendar to establish how much of your time is committed to other activities.

STEP 1- Write In Your Fixed Commitments

When completing your calendar, you should write first in your classes. Then, you also should write in hours when you are sleep in the night and mealtimes. If you're involved in co curricular activities, you may need to include additional hours for regularly scheduled meetings. If you know that you'll be socializing on most Friday and Saturday evenings, you should written in those times even though your plans aren't definite.

STEP 2- Identify Available Study Blocks

After you have written in all the regularly committed hours, you should begin to see some patterns in your uncommitted time. You may have some very short blocks of time between classes, some two- or three- hour blocks in the morning or afternoon, and some longer blocks in the evenings and on weekends. You can fill this blocks for study rather than leisure time. You also may notice that you have a lot of time to study on certain days but very little on others. All this information will be useful as you begin to schedule your study time. After determining your available study time, use a brightly colored marker to outline each time block. Being able to see at a glance the hours when you have time to study can be very helpful when scheduling study time.

STEP 3- Make Copies If Your Schedule Changes

If your schedule changes each week, this calendar is even more important for you. Before you put your changes on the schedule, make a photocopy of the calendar for each week of the term or semester. As you get your work schedule each week, go through and write in your hours. You will save more times if you already prepare copies.

STEP 4- Total Your Available Study Time

As a final step in preparing your Fixed Commitment Calendar, count the number of hours you have available for study. If you have many hours available for study, don't panic. You won't need all of them to study. You can use it for anything that you need to do last minutes.