4 Essential Time Management Tips for Working College Students

While most people envision college students as being able to completely dedicate themselves to their studies, that often isn’t the case. In fact, based on a report by Rasmussen College, 72 percent of students work steady jobs during the entire school year, with 20 percent working full-time.

On top of that, college students traditionally manage a variety of family obligations while also trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. When you bring all of those points together, the need for practical time management skills becomes all too apparent.

 
If you are a college student struggling to juggle your responsibilities or are getting ready to start your college journey and want to be suitably prepared for the demands, here are 4 time management tips provided by Ozessay to help you succeed.

1. Review Your Course Calendars

Course calendars provide a wealth of information about due dates, exams, project deadlines, and more. By reviewing their content carefully, you can identify critical periods for each class as well as any points where multiple courses have expectations regarding deliverables. This gives you a foundation upon which you can formulate an effective schedule, ensuring you won’t fall behind or be left scrambling because a critical due date snuck up on you.

2. Create a Schedule

Once you identify important dates, it’s wise to create a schedule to help you manage the workload. When possible, begin by entering details about your work-related obligations, including any known shifts. Add in any family obligations that need to be included, then the details about your assignments, exams, and projects, including blocking out time to work on each related task. According to Dartmouth, you should also keep your schedule with you at all times, so you can add unexpected additions whenever they arise.

Not only will this help you get organized, but it also gives you a chance to spot potential problems, like a plethora of responsibilities that happen to fall in the same window of time. This gives you the opportunity to adjust accordingly, ensuring you aren’t overloaded simply because you didn’t properly plan.

3. Use Checklists

While a checklist may seem antiquated, it is a valid strategy for tracking your activities and tasks. This provides you with an easy method for recording what you have accomplished in a single location that also allows you to see your forward progress with ease, which can be a significant morale booster when times are tough.

 
Every accomplishment is valuable, and checklists serve as a visual reminder as to how far you’ve come, and that is always valuable.

4. Focus on Organization

Each class likely comes with a range of materials and assignments, and getting these items mixed up while you are working is almost guaranteed to breed frustration, if not full blown panic. Instead of leaving things to change, create an organizational paradigm that works for you, like multiple physical and computer folders, each designated for particular classes and purposes. Then, be diligent about staying organized, as spending time searching for what you need because it was misplaced is time that could have been spent on other things if a few preventative steps were taken.

Bonus Tip

Utilise different resource to help you stay on top of things or complete tasks quicker. There are numerous apps and widgets available to make studying easier and saving you time.

Each of the tips above can increase your time management skills, making it easier to manage as a working college student.