Imagine if you were given $86,400 every day. The trick to receiving it every day is that you have to use it (spend it) all day.. Every. Day. If you didn't spend it, you didn't receive it and would never receive it again. Each of those dollars represents your life. You are given 86,400 seconds in a day. Many of them are spent sleeping. Lots of them are spent with family, friends, or on a job. But how often do you spend them on school? If you find yourself spending them on school, screaming that you don't have any seconds to give to your family or to your job, this message is for you.
Spend your seconds wisely.
Work in small chunks (<3 hours). Do a mindless task (like cleaning) to take a break. Get up and walk around, focusing your eyes on the horizon, to rest them during these sessions. Stretch. When you leave for a break, write down what'll you do when you return and stick to it -- making it easier to have a goal immediately when you come back.
Only check e-mails and texts at a specific time of the day. If constantly distracted, you can lose up to 23 minutes after an interruption. Set your phone to "do not disturb" and share with your loved ones that something better be on fire or someone headed to the hospital before they interrupt. Don't prioritize responding a nonurgent e-mail; instead, set a reminder on the message to respond to it later. Tell your text partners that you're out of the zone for the next few hours.
Do one thing at a time. Do not try to do multiple things on different screens or toggle from screen vs. in-person. You're more likely to finish a single task if you do just one thing. Then you can take a break and go to a different task when you return. Break projects into little steps, and then do just one step at a time.
Understand your deadlines as a series of stops rather than one big stop. If you see it as "one big stop" at the end, you're more likely to slam into it like a car without brakes. Instead, write down in a planner, on your phone or in person, the smaller deadlines that will occur before it: getting the first draft done, for example. Do something small on a big project every day.
Just as you shouldn't do all the work of the semester in the first two weeks of the semester, there's no need to do all the work in the last two weeks of the semester.
Here are some additional articles about time management.
