Time Management for Students, through Data & Graphs

Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to read this article! Whether your ending off your year as a senior, or starting off college as a freshman, I want to let you know that I’m here to help 100%. Keep doing your best, enjoy life, and invoke yourself in life’s boundless knowledge.

As humans, we like to complain — about a lot of things. However, one thing I like to share with my friends and family is that time isn’t something that should be a nuisance to our lives. I’d like to bring up a quote that can explain it in shorter words:

“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.” ― Lao Tzu

In short, we all have the same 24 hours as that friend who always seems to have it together. Some of us just need better ways of using it. Here are a few different ways that you can strategize your time for studying, extracurricular, and hanging out with friends.
Note: If you can, be proactive and do them as you read. However, if you do decide to do participate try doing the activities in order for better results.

1. Create a weekly routine (and stick to it)

This is the easiest step in your four-step plan to time management success. In college we can get a bit side tracked by parties, events, and nightly outings. However, you should always have an idea of what you should be doing throughout the week. By having a weekly schedule for activities such as eating, free time, studying, and classes — you’ll be able to coordinate what you can and cannot make time for.
Note: I know it seems like a lot, but don’t worry — I’ll walk you through it.
I’ve given you an example of my schedule from last year. This schedule shows what I would be doing normally Sunday to Saturday, hour for hour.
5 AM : My morning routine was getting dressed, brushing teeth, ironing clothes, etc.
6:15 AM I also dedicated free time to myself in the morning because that’s when I know I’d be least obligated to do studying or classwork.
8:30 AM After that, I studied for 30 minutes, took a 15 minute break (usually exercising or reading a quick article) then when back at it for another 30 minutes.
10 AM Now that I’m finally awake, I’m able to do things like write articles, read, or work on an Udemy course.
10:45 AM Depends on the day, but I usually had time to eat some breakfast followed by some more free-time. However on Tuesdays and Thursdays I had class after Free Time #2 so I walked to the bus stop.
The rest if self-explanatory. Classes on each day are followed by Pre-Studying and Post-Studying for reviewing the lessons I will be learning, and learnt.
9 PM At the end of the day, my Evening routine is brushing my teeth, reading for 15 minutes, and heading to sleep around 10 PM .
TL;DR — Essentially you’d want to get a schedule around how your week usually goes (eating, sleeping, free-time), followed by necessities (classes, studying), then filling in the blanks with extracurricular activities (Worship Service, Ult. Frisbee).
The more detailed your schedule, the more you get out of your week. There are a lot of schedule-making websites out there, but ScheduleBuilder is my preference as it has an easy interface and color schemes (color is also important as it refines what is what).
You still with me? Ok — let’s move on the next step!
Note: I will be making a more detailed article about schedules as it is a lot to cover. Once it’s complete, I’ll link it here.

2. Finding out your workload output for the semester (or year)

Now that you have a schedule (or an unfinished one) for your semester, now it’s time to figure out how much work you’ll be putting into this year.
If you haven’t noticed, maybe your first 2–4 weeks of school are easy, while the next month may get a bit difficult. It’s not that the class is getting harder, per-say, it’s the fact that one or two of your classes are influencing the others.
There’s only so much a syllabus can tell you. However, we can get an idea of how much work you’d be doing by looking for keywords.
Keywords such as: Notebook check, Exam, Essay, Test, Quiz, etc. all followed by due, submit by, etc.
Once you’ve highlighted your keywords, you can now start looking for dates corresponding with those due dates. I’ve uploaded an example for you to look out.
I suggest doing this monthly, bi-monthly, etc. as your teacher may add assignments or revise their syllabus. This was my workload for the first month of my first and second semester.
There are two ways you can calculate the amount of work you’d be putting in for each term.
My first suggestion would be to use your own intuition using your keywords. Let’s look at my Week 1 for Semester 2: That week I had a test in two subjects, and a public-speaking assessment due. That’s probably why it’s rated 7/8 as I’m not a very good test taker. However, if you’re just getting into college, you probably don’t know what you’re good at yet.
My second suggestion would be a keyword-point system. Let’s look at Week 4 for Semester 2. Looking back at my syllabus for College Algebra and History 1101, I had two tests and two homework assignments due by the end of the week. Thus, I had 4 keywords and ultimately put the point near 4 on the chart.
Note: You may notice that some of the points are closer or farther from it’s corresponding number. I added some decimals here in there to remind me whether that was a week that something was due that week (closer to the next number) or I needed to work on something (farther or settling on the number line).
I’d try using PowerPoint or Microsoft Word to create a graph for this project. If you don’t have these applications, try searching up graph creators online.
TL;DR — Make a line graph that corresponds to the amount of work you’d put in weekly. Use keywords such as due, submit, test, quiz, etc. to validate your list.

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