Author: Snickerdoodle

Time management is a large stressor for me in my academic career and has been a problem I’ve been facing for as long as I’ve been in school. I frequently won’t start large projects until just a few days before they are due and for smaller projects, I don’t work on them until the day they are due. As a result, I would spend whole nights working on projects and turning in unedited work, greatly hurting my grades. I have tried many ways to help with my time management and set plans for my schoolwork. I have tried to use daily planners but always forget about them or they would stress me out more trying to keep the planner updated. This time management problem hurt my class reading most of all. I have never been good at doing class reading, and in my first semester at GB, I didn’t look at nearly all the assigned readings.

I have gotten much better at my time management this semester, largely because I have set myself on a stricter schedule in the morning. I now spend most of my morning in the library where I don’t have anything to distract me from my schoolwork. When I arrive at the library there is always an open private room, which is both a comfortable space and eliminates most distractions but not all distractions which helps me not feel burnt out by schoolwork. I also use better techniques to keep me in my work, like planning things out on a whiteboard because it makes me feel more official and engaged in my work longer.  I still spend some of my time in the mornings avoiding schoolwork but once I get myself to start working, I rarely have a problem continuing. I also have started putting large projects on my phone calendar which has helped me both see how much homework I have coming up and helps me work on the assignments in small amounts over the whole time it is assigned. I still struggle with time management a lot but I have made many improvements in my time management for school over the last few months and I believe I can use these improvements to help outside of school.

I believe I did very well last semester, I adjusted well, not just to the new school system but also to being back at school after my gap year. My biggest obstacle last semester was when and where I did my work out of class. I started a bad habit of not working on my work in between classes and only starting after all my classes finished for the day making me work far later into the night than I needed to.  I would also do my work around friends who would often not be working on anything, becoming a major distraction for me. Luckily this semester I have started a system that works much better for me. I come to the library a few hours before my classes start and get as much of my work done in one sitting as possible. It has proven to work so well for me that I have free time between classes because I get all my work done in the morning.

Last semester I also failed to do the amount of reading for the class that was assigned. I started the semester doing the readings but quickly I read less and less. I spent most of last semester not reading any of the things I was told to read for class. I never felt like I wasn’t understanding the class without the readings because I would get the important information in the reading from the class itself. This semester I have been much better at reading for my classes. My understanding of classes has skyrocketed as a result and I have been able to be more involved in group discussions, especially in my philosophy class. I still miss reading sometimes but the number of missed readings is dramatically lower from last semester.