Time Management Tips for Students: Simple Hacks for Effective Life

Surveys reveal that time management is a major struggle for as many as 86% of students. It requires self discipline and dedication to stay on the right track every day. And constant time constraints only make it worse.

The inability to manage time wisely can negatively affect your studies and also add to daily stress, and cause damage to your mental health. Luckily, it’s possible to overcome this and find a balance! In this article, we’ll tell you about the top time management tips for students that are easy to implement and incredibly effective.

Why Should You Manage Your Time?

Time management is more than just the ability to plan ahead. It’s about integrating all routine tasks into your schedule so that you handle them and still have free time for other things that matter, such as spending time with family members and living your life to the fullest. It’s about using your resources efficiently and creating a balance.

What happens when you have poor time management? Here are the main consequences:

• It impacts your studies. Writing papers, handling homework, and other projects are hard if you don’t schedule time and plan dedicated study sessions.
• It holds back your academic progress and makes it hard to stay motivated.
• It affects your commitments, goals, and time beyond school.
• It can impact your mental wellbeing. Loads of daily tasks with time limits and a lack of social life and rest, and leisure can create too much emotional pressure. Studies show that 73.2% of students experience moderate to high levels of stress nearly all the time.

Due to these reasons, knowing how to improve time management for students is crucial to succeed in all spheres of life.

Top Time Management Strategies for College Students 🧑‍🎓

When you study toward your college degree, you’ll likely have a rather intense curriculum and high academic expectations. Besides, many college students are either engaged in multiple extracurricular activities or are working adults, which makes it even more pivotal to develop positive time management habits.

Some of the best essential time management techniques for college students include:

• Prioritization – Assess all the tasks based on their importance and deadline. Handle tasks with high priority primarily and postpone or delegate low-priority tasks.
• Planning – After you prioritize tasks, build a general study timetable for the entire school year or semester. Additionally, make sure you have a to do list for every day.
• Distraction avoidance – Stick to your daily to-do list by avoiding time wasters like video games, social media, etc.

Good Time Management Techniques for High School Students 📚

In high school, your curriculum and academic load should be generally easier than those in a Bachelor’s degree or a Master’s degree program. Still, you need to manage your time to juggle daily commitments and due dates effectively.

Here are a few tactics you can use to improve productivity and reduce stress:

• Leverage a task management or calendar app to create visual schedules and set up notifications to meet deadlines easily.
• Break down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks.
• Remove any unnecessary electronic devices and other distractions from your study space.
• Learn to work in fixed time blocks and take breaks in between. To do it easily, consider using timers or specialized Pomodoro method phone apps that will notify you when your work intervals and breaks end.

These simplified strategies can help you acquire and hone crucial time management skills for high school students that you need for future success.

Creating a Study Timetable

Being able to structure your studies in a comprehensive timetable is one of the main strong time management skills you need to be productive. Here are some tips on how to create a study timetable that will keep you organized:

Define your big goals.

1. Identify fixed weekly tasks.
2. Calculate the estimated time needed for different subjects.
3. Break the estimated study time into blocks with breaks.
4. Create a calendar capturing all your study commitments.
5. Set three levels of priority and assign them to each task/subject accordingly.
6. Integrate time for rest, social life, and extracurriculars.
7. Build a weekly timetable that covers fixed commitments, study hours, and personal time.
8. Create a daily plan based on your larger timetable.
9. Track the results and optimize your schedule for greater efficiency.

Leverage the Time Blocking Method to Accomplish Tasks Effectively

If you want to stay focused during your studies, the time blocking method can help. The time blocking method for students implies breaking your day into dedicated time blocks meant for a certain type of activity, such as studies, social life, etc.

Such an approach helps you have enough dedicated time for all types of activities every day. This should help you find balance while keeping your productivity high. Most importantly, doing certain tasks in a certain time block can help you build strong habits. Eventually, your brain will get used to the necessity to focus on specific tasks when the time comes, making it much easier to retain motivation.

Students’ Daily Routine Examples Using Time Management Tips

If you want a clear example of what your day should look like when you use the time management tips to increase productivity, below are two daily routine examples for students in high school and college:

Best Apps for Effectively Managing Your Time

If you have poor time management skills at this moment, specialized apps can help you prioritize, track, and manage your tasks easily.

Here are some of the best time management apps for students:

• For scheduling your time: Google Calendar, Calendly.
• For managing tasks: Google Tasks, Todoist.
• For blocking distractions: Cold turkey, Forest, RescueTime.
• For time tracking: Remember the Milk, Clockify Time Tracker, Focus Keeper.

Downloadable Worksheet for Simple Task Management

If you don’t want to use digital time management tools and need a physical planner, here’s a printable time management worksheet for students that you can use to track daily tasks:

Tricks for Balancing School and Life

Planning your studies is important. But, how to balance school and personal life so that you have energy and enough time for both? Here are eight time management tips that will help you find a balance:

1. Set realistic and time-bound goals.
2. Integrate personal activities and social life into your schedule.
3. Use effective learning techniques, such as sticky notes, flashcards, and others, to spend less time on studying while getting the best results.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Use services like Studyfy to delegate some of your assignments to professionals and save time.
5. Create self-care routines that work for you.
6. Get started on every large task or school project fast, without procrastination, to avoid task piling and burnout.
7. Learn to use your study breaks wisely.
8. Celebrate and reward yourself for accomplishments to retain motivation.

Managing Time Effectively

Now that you have a set of effective time management strategies and tips, how do you organize them into a single, uniform approach? 

Here’s how to manage time effectively for students in a single system:

• Set goals.
• Prioritize tasks.
• Create a study timetable and daily schedule.
• Work in fixed hours and use regular breaks.
• Stay focused during sessions and commit to one task at a time, avoiding multitasking.
• Break large projects into small tasks.
• Eliminate distractions.
• Leave time for social and personal life.

Top Courses to Hone Your Organizational Skills

Getting organized can feel overwhelming, especially if you’ve never tried to plan your tasks, eliminate time wasters, or keep a time log before. Luckily, you can use special courses and workshops for simplified skill-building. Here are some time management courses for students that you can try:

• Work Smarter, Not Harder, by the University of California, Irvine.
• Personal Productivity, Time Management and Prioritization, by Starweaver.
• Time Management Skills, by LearnKartS.
• Managing Stress and Time, by Arizona State University.
• Time Management Fundamentals, by LinkedIn Learning.

FAQ

Why do I need to manage my time as a student?

Poor time management has big downsides, including worsened academic performance, inability to successfully balance studies and life, and increased stress.

What are the main elements of effective time management?

There are four of them: goal-setting, prioritization, planning, and distraction avoidance.

How to become more organized and find a balance?

Set manageable goals and priorities for your everyday commitments. Then, build a big timetable and a daily to-do list to allocate resources efficiently.

Conclusion

Time management is an important skill for students that allows them to keep up with all important tasks and save more energy and time for social life, rest, and other personal commitments. Using the right time management strategies ultimately has many benefits, from reduced stress and mental well being to greater accomplishments.

Now, you have a list of the best time management tips for students that actually work. Make a to-do list, use apps to prioritize work and track completed tasks, and optimize the basic management strategies to your unique needs to achieve success in everything you do!