Time Management Skills

It’s a 8 o’clock PM, and you are extremely stressed and overwhelmed with a million assignments and study guides. You have no idea where to start. You’re cramming your brain with information for your history test the next day. You end up texting all your friends frantically, waiting for a response. It’s 11:00 PM and you still haven’t started your homework. Ding! You check your phone, and your friend sends you the homework, but you quickly figure out that it will take 4 hours to finish. You stay up the whole night trying to finish it, and once you finish, you only get a few hours of sleep. Now, this situation could have been avoided if you had good time management.

There are many ways to have good time management, and having goals is one of them. Creating a vision board or writing down some of your goals can motivate you to accomplish them. If you don’t have time to make a vision board, writing down your goals has the same effect. This will help you brainstorm and express what you really need to get done. However, a pretty visual will not help you achieve these goals just out of the blue.

Having a plan can extremely benefit you in the long run. The key thing to know is that you can never go back in time, so it is important to do things right the first time. Although planning may take up some valuable time, you actually end up saving time as you’re working. Before you start your homework, you should strategize and figure out which assignments will take more time and energy. After school, you should do the assignments that are more intensive and finish them earlier in the day. That way, you can do the easier assignments at night when you are more tired, rather than doing your more important and longer assignments half asleep.

Good organization is essential to having good time management. According to coachingpositiveperformance.com, “It does take some time to get a proper filing system but… you save large chunks of time because you can store and retrieve information without having to think about it.” Working in a cluttered environment can not only be distracting, but also frustrating. A messy desk can potentially get a person sick and can also decrease productivity. Walking into a cluttered desk every morning can be very degrading and unmotivating. Searching through tons and tons of papers can be very time consuming and inefficient as well. Although organizing may seem horrible and boring, cleanliness is the key to success.

Just focus. Although concentrating can be very difficult for some, it is the only way people are truly able to get their work done in a timely manner. Listen to music, don’t listen to music, lock yourself in a room, surround yourself with peers: do anything that can help you focus better. You may believe that multi-tasking gets the job done faster, but in reality, that is false. You must put all your energy towards one assignment at a time in order for your work to be sufficient.

Overall, having good time management is extremely difficult and takes years and years of practice. Whether it’s school or working at a job, these tips can extremely benefit you in your workplace. It is especially essential that junior high students practice these time management skills because they are in the transition stage between elementary school and high school. In elementary school, it is easy to finish assignments without having good time management, but as you go into high school, time management is critical to be successful.

This content was originally published here.