Time management is one of the least-mastered and most-desired skills in our fast-paced modern world. Time management truly is critical to becoming successful, doing everything you want to, and achieving ultimate success.

What do you need to do to DOUBLE your time management ability?

Time management is a common problem faced by most of us. Oftentimes, when you are swarmed with multiple tasks at once, it becomes extremely difficult to identify which ones you must complete first. Too often, people eat up what is supposed to be their free time to be able to accomplish all pending tasks in time.

It takes a considerable amount of skill to manage your time properly. If you are one of these people, you are usually able to control your time efficiently and you can even finish tasks ahead of time.

Time Management in School

Due to more freedom merited to students, it can become quite challenging for new students to cope with time management. The liberty to choose your own schedule or extracurricular activities readily creates a false notion that they can do whatever you want. On the other hand, it reflects one’s priorities and how you are able to properly appropriate them into your schedule.

With lack of proper time management, a student will have trouble coping with deadlines set by their teachers. Most students tend to slack off during spare hours and they oftentimes end up accomplishing nothing.

By properly allocating your time, you will be able to finish your tasks much faster. Also, you are able to avoid overlapping tasks that tend to slow you down and will have sufficient time for extracurricular activities and assignments.

Do these things NOW:

1) Eliminate time wasters in your life. Time wasters are things that interrupt you and you spend time doing, but you wouldn’t have chosen to do them given the choice.

Eliminating these time wasters is critical for time management:

Email—If you are spending more than 30 minutes per day on email (unless that is your job) you are spending too much!

Telephone—If you answer the phone more than 5 times per day during your productive time (school, school work at home, etc.) you are sacrificing time management and efficiency. When you answer the phone, you interrupt your current productive flow, and this kills your productivity.

Television—This must be limited for you to achieve ultimate control over your time. My recommendation is 30 minutes per day, especially if you are not getting all the things done you need or want to.

2) Make a list of what is genuinely important in your life and just start doing the things on your list. One of the keys to time management is prioritization—you absolutely must know what you want to accomplish and then go do it. Today’s world has too many distractions and when you allow those distractions to become priority, you sacrifice time management. So, follow these 4 easy steps:

3) Begin to focus on time management throughout the course of the day. Your consistent focus must be on managing your time. Once you have determined your goals and your priorities, start focusing on simply getting those things done. If something isn’t on your goals list for this week…don’t do it until all your goals are done. When you prioritize every interruption that occurs and put your goals last, you will not accomplish your goals. Instead, you will be a slave (as you probably are now) to interruptions and probably feel like you never accomplish enough.

The Essence of Time Management

Aside from becoming more efficient, you also become more responsible when you learn how to properly manage your time. You can not only set your priorities, but also provide equal time for both work and leisure. Being responsible with your time will work effectively whether in school or work.

Probably the biggest benefit you can get from proper time management is that it improves the quality of your work. When you have ample time to work on a certain task, you will have enough time to determine any mistake and have enough time to correct or improve on it. When you are cramming, you do not have this luxury of revision and hence mostly settle for what you can accomplish under the allowed time frame.

Those students who fail to manage their time well, most of them work under pressure or hours before the deadline. Hence, they do not get the chance to check the quality of their work.

These are just a few of the practical reasons why Time Management must be practiced by any student who wants to become more effective in their academic studies.