Tips to Improve Time Management for the Busy Grad Student

We feel time differently at different periods of life. Sometimes minutes feel to be hours long and sometimes hours flash by like seconds. But for graduate students time has a special value. Many of them have dreamt about having more than 24 hours per day to be able to cope with all the tasks and meet all the deadlines. Still, it’s possible to make life more organized and find time to finish all the tasks successfully. Good time management habits can change a person’s life. People who can manage their time well usually achieve all their goals in life. So, how can a person improve his/her time management? The following tips will be especially useful for graduate students.

Ways to Improve your Time Management.

Bad time management can be a serious problem. You always live in stress not being able to meet the deadlines. Like any other problem, it has an algorithm for solving it. Firstly, it’s necessary to evaluate the reasons causing the problem. Then, you can find possibilities for solving it. Blogger James Fox an argumentative essay writer claims that though time is a final resource you can learn to use it very effectively.

1. Audit your time spending. If you feel the necessity to improve your time management, you need to find out how you spend time. You should thoroughly write down the amount of time you spend on all your daily work. Most probably you will be surprised how much time you just waste, for example, social networking. You will be also surprised by the amount of time is spent daily on household chores.
2. It’s necessary to know what day activity cycles are characteristics for you. If you are an early bird, then you should better schedule at least some of your learning for early morning. On the other hand, if you are a night owl, most probably the best time for you to study would be the late afternoon.
3. If you have a very intensive schedule with a lot of tasks to do, it’s important to stay fresh and active. To achieve this goal, it’s necessary to get enough sleep (for an adult it’s not less than seven hours per day) and also be physically active. Walking, doing yoga, fitness or work-out at least once a week would be a very good idea. There is one more tip on how to get refreshed. A short nap makes wonders.
4. It’s very important to learn to say “no” to offers from your friends even if those offers sound very attractive. It’s also recommended not to say excuses as this way you provoke attempts to persuade you.
5. Social networks and e-mails are notorious time-eaters. This is when you are supposed to use your willpower. You should switch off your smartphone and block your e-mail if you don’t want to stay distracted. Plan communication there on your schedule.
6. Remember, that procrastination is a symptom. There is a real cause behind it. Most probably, you feel the task too big and too hard. A good way out is to divide a big task into several small ones. It’s also good to start with the most difficult part. And it’s advisable to reward yourself for accomplishing tasks. Such a reward might be a little walk, a round of a game, or a journey after finishing a big project.
7. The main piece of advice for bettering your time management is to start planning your day. Your planner might look any way comfortable for you. There are several kinds of software available as well. You should remember that it’s often rather hard to estimate correctly the time necessary for doing a task. People usually tend to plan too little time for big tasks and too much time for little ones. Stephen Covey in First Things First offers the tasks to be sorted into four categories: 1. Important and Urgent, 2. Important, Not Urgent, 3. Urgent, Not Important, 4. Not Urgent, Not Important. The trick is to do not only the tasks from the first and the third categories but also at least something from the second and the fourth ones.

Though graduation is the time when your life gets absolutely hectic, it’s possible to better the situation by improving your time management skills. This way you will manage to reduce stress, meet all the deadlines and also get very useful life habits.