how to organise your time

Sitting down to plan your work in detail may seem like a waste of time. However, taking the time to organise makes your studying more effective:

1. You become more productive.
2. The quality of your work improves.
3. Because you know what you have done, and what you still have to do, you don't panic about "falling behind", or leaving everything until the last minute.
4. You build your confidence as a student, and enjoy the work more.
5. You enjoy your leisure time more.

The idea here is to take control of the things you have to do: aim to organise your time by making things happen rather have things happen to you. If the only thing that drives you is deadlines, you'll always find yourself pushed along by the tasks you have to complete, rather than being able to dictate for yourself the order of priorities in your workload.
In contrast, you'll find it an enormously liberating experience to have the luxury of choosing what to do and when; and all because you've planned ahead how to make use of your time, and had the determination to keep to what you have planned.

Planning Your Time

The key to it all is to impose a structure on your working time by dividing it up. This works at several levels: from the overall structure of a semester (or the academic year, or even the whole of your degree programme) down to planning how to organise a particular week (or a particular day, or even a particular free hour).

How to organise

The best way to organise is the one that works for you. There is no golden rule that works for everyone. These are general ideas that may help you to work out your own system for organising your time.
DO:

• Work out how much time you have available, and when.
• List the tasks in hand.
• Work out priorities between these tasks. Which are more urgent?
• Make decisions about how long to spend on each task, and set targets for each work
  Organise pieces of work (essays, seminar papers) into smaller, less daunting tasks.

DON'T:

• Don't try to do it all at once.
• Neglect any of your courses, especially those you find relatively easy (or particularly
  difficult).
• Drift from essay deadline to essay deadline. While working on an essay in one
  course, you should continue reading and preparing for classes in other courses, and
  perhaps make initial preparations for a future essay.
• Allow yourself to be distracted. Stick to your timetable.

Material adapted with permission from Study Skills in Linguistics by Martin Barry and Study Skills in History Booklet 1 "Organising Study Time".