One of the most common problems students face once they get to college is lack of time. On the one hand, college imposes a much less rigid structure on students than they were used to in high school. On the other hand, the workload is also much greater than anything you could have seen before. In addition, there are so many opportunities around that one literally does not know where to look first. Considering all the work you are supposed to do, and all the options offered by the college, and the need to manage your own living environment, and the necessity to earn money, how are you expected to find time for all this? Sometimes it literally feels that the day should be at least 36 hours long to cram everything into it. Nevertheless, some students seem to be doing alright without sacrificing their personal lives or sleeping four hours a day. How do they do it? How can you do the same? Let us find out.
1. Add Focus to Your Life
If you are like most people, you lack time not because you have too much on your plate, but because you never achieve full focus when you do something. There is a lot of difference between doing something (reading a textbook, writing a paper, revising for an exam, etc.) when you dedicate your full attention to the task at hand and doing it in a half-baked manner. When you distribute your attention between half a dozen things, take breaks every few minutes, get distracted both by your own thoughts and by things that surround you, you not just spend significantly more time on doing the same amount of work – you sabotage the results you get as well.
If you want to have more time, you have to learn how to do things efficiently, while applying complete focus to the task you work on. Eliminate distractions when you work: turn off your smartphone, get away from your PC, use tools like LeechBlock or Freedom to block the apps and websites that eat up your time. Work somewhere you will not be interrupted every few minutes.
2. Keep Track of Everything You Have to Do
Many students get into trouble for the simple reason that they have a very vague idea of what assignments they have to do at any given moment of time. They may know that they have a paper due somewhere next month, and that there is a test coming up in two weeks and that there is another project to be submitted in two or three months’ time… However, they do not have any way of tracking every task currently looming over them, nor do they have any grasp of how much time and work it will take to complete each of them. As a result, they regularly get into trouble because deadlines creep up on them suddenly, they misjudge the amount of time it will take to do something, or just plain forget about an assignment altogether. If you create a list where you keep all your current assignments, what you have to do for them and when they are due, you are much less likely to run into such difficulties.
3. Get Help When It Is Necessary
Chances are, some academic assignments take up an inordinate amount of your time, no matter how long you spend training and practicing for them. You may have to accept this as a fact, especially if the tasks in question are not relevant for your future career. In such a situation, you may free up your schedule by delegating some of them to professional academic assistance services like AdvancedWriters.com – this way you will both get them done and win yourself a bit more time to work on other jobs. Alternatively, you may simply ask somebody for help with dealing with a particularly difficult assignment.
4. Create and Follow a Schedule
Do you hate scheduling your life and believe it to take all joy out of it? Well, tough luck, because you are highly unlikely to achieve any results in college unless you teach yourself to do it, on a daily basis. There are simply too many things to juggle simultaneously without resorting to some sort of plan. Without a schedule, you will always find yourself short on time because you will never know where your time is going, you will constantly have to catch up because you will get behind, you will find yourself incapable of meeting all the deadlines. Create a schedule and force yourself to follow it – it is the only way to take your life under control when you are in college.
5. Be Realistic
Remember that things tend to take at least a little longer than you originally believe they would take. When you create a schedule or estimate how much time you will have to spend doing a particular task, always leave yourself some breathing room in case the job takes longer than expected. This will prevent situations when you suddenly find yourself with no way to complete an assignment on time because you have every minute of your day already dedicated to some job.
While it may seem impossible at a glance, there are ways to organize yourself sufficiently to find time for everything you need and want to do in college – use these tips, and your life will certainly get easier!
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