The days, weeks and months proceed relentlessly without accommodating our need for slowing down sometimes and speeding up at others. If only we could bank time in a way that we could use it when needed! I am sure that is a fantasy that many of us share. Then, it would be possible to pull out the hours we could use when deadlines creep up on us.
Plan
Unfortunately, time is a finite resource and one that we have little control over — or so we think. Lessons and lectures on time management abound on the Internet and elsewhere. It is the first thing you get told when you begin a course or start a new project: plan your time well so you can get everything done, and done well. Inevitably, it is an advice that we tend to disregard and recall only when it is too late to be of any use. Still, people like me continue to give it in the hope that it might light a bulb in someone’s mind at a point when it might actually be pertinent.
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At this point in the semester, I often find students complaining about multiple deadlines and demands from their various courses: mid-term exams or unit tests, assignments and presentations, a realisation that there is research to be done for papers due at the end of the term and that reading from the past few weeks have piled up. “How do we manage it all?” they ask, while trying to negotiate a deal on a deadline or two with whoever seems to be the most tractable professor.
My response at this point is usually, “But didn’t you read the course outlines? Didn’t you know all of this was coming up?”
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If the course outlines are done right, they indicate what assignments are due when. They have dates for tests and mid-terms. They detail what needs to be done for each of these requirements. A good hard look through this at the start of a semester or year will give you a sense of how you need to plan your work. Some assignments need advance preparation, so a research-based project cannot be dashed off in an all-nighter unless you have done the groundwork needed for the paper. A book review cannot be written unless you have spent some time reading the book (even if you are a speed reader). A group project needs to build in time for group meetings and consolidation of each team member’s inputs, and so on.
Even if your college or university does not do detailed course outlines, it is possible to get a sense of the distribution of work across a term by talking to your teacher or seniors. If you do this at the start of a semester, you can actually put together a nice schedule that shows different deadlines and tasks, and gives you an idea at a glance — where and when you need to focus efforts at different points in the semester. You may want to create a chart for yourself that maps the deadlines across the semester for each course, and figure out how to balance the work across courses so that you stay on top of things, and don’t need to go in for those desperate negotiations at the last minute.
The writer teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. usha.bpgll@gmail.com