Dear Sophian
I am feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to do for all my classes. Do you have any advice for me?
Dear Smithie,
It can be hard to get everything done in college, and it’s easy for work to pile up.
Time management has never come easily to me, but I’ve found some tips that work pretty well.
Having a planner has been my lifesaver. By having everything I have to do written in one place, I am able to keep from forgetting important assignments.
However, an agenda just provides a week by week look. I also use a calendar to see what’s coming up. This is especially helpful in college, since professors often assign long papers and projects several weeks in advance. Having a way to visualize all of my work for the next few weeks makes it easier to plan out how to approach everything.
With this in mind, I also find it really helpful to come up with short-term goals. Of course, you have a due date from your professor, but it’s also useful to come up with some other deadlines to guide you along the day. For a long paper, you might give yourself deadlines for finding sources, writing an outline and writing a rough draft. By spreading out big assignments, they can become more manageable.
There’s a lot of advice out there about how to get work done. I’ve found that it’s important to keep in mind that everyone has different strategies that work for them.
I’ve often heard that you should start with your most difficult work first so that you can get it out of the way. This approach definitely works well for some people, but I’ve found that I get more work done if I start with my easier assignments, since that I don’t procrastinate as much if I know I’m starting with something easy.
It’s also good to take breaks so that you don’t get burned out.
Some people like to take lots of small breaks, while others prefer to work continuously for a couple hours and then take a longer break. On nights when I have an overwhelming amount of work, I try to use the easier assignments as my break from doing harder ones.
Another tip that some people find helpful is making a checklist. The satisfaction of checking off assignments as you finish them can be helpful for staying motivated.
I also like to use a timer to get work done because it’s hard to motivate myself to do an assignment that I know will take hours. I’ll set a timer for thirty minutes and just do as much as I can in those thirty minutes. Again, by breaking a big assignment into small chunks and by working in breaks, huge amounts of work can seem a little more manageable.
Different approaches work for different people, but I hope some of these suggestions are helpful!
