College is no joke when it comes to deadlines. I mean, have you ever had more than four different assignments due in one day?! Do you know how that feels?! That’s like the equivalent of a doctor taking in all their patients at one time with varying symptoms and sicknesses, trying to fix them up. It just doesn’t work out. That is why we make appointments for doctors to see them one at a time. In essence, it is time management.
Okay, so maybe a doctor’s appointment may not be a good use of comparison for time management, but you get the picture. To overwork yourself with many burdens at one time, with little to no time to get them out of way let alone assess them, isn’t good. In the case of a visit to the doctor’s office, one must make an appointment. Why? Because a certain time must be set up in order to see them, so rather than being seen with many people at once (which would be confusing as heck, and frankly, very impersonal to your condition) or stressing the doctor out (which isn’t a good thing either). Of course there is the concept of walk-ins, which I’ll get to in a second. But similarly like scheduling an appointment to visit the doctor is better than walking in to the office, setting aside time to do your assignments will help you in the long run.
The reason why time management is so essential to college students is not only because of the workload that all our courses come with, but also because we have lives of our own, too… at least we try to. Time management helps us to schedule between free time, work, school and everything else you can think of. It doesn’t necessarily have to be “scheduled,” but as long as you have a plan as to how you’re able to utilize your time throughout the day and possibly into the next, then you’ll be fine! Personally, throughout my college years, I’ve experienced the troubles of time management. It seems impossible but it’s manageable, when you put practice into time management, attaining the skill comes quickly. Ways in which you can practice time management is by buying a planner and marking down all the things you need to get done and events and meetings you have to go to. Throughout the day, check your planner for what you wrote down to and try to finish it within a certain amount of time. Whenever each thing is completed, mark it down that it is has been dealt with and done. Another way in which you can practice time management skills is to use your phone’s timer and set it for a certain amount of time to get things done, I like to do this when I study in order to set times in which my work needs to get done and when I can take study breaks.
Previously I mentioned the the concept of “walk ins” for the doctor’s office analogy. The thing about “walk ins” for a doctor’s office is that you have to wait to be seen, rather than if you were to schedule an appointment to be seen with the doctor right away. That is the same thing when it poor time management is discussed, if you wait till last minute to get things done, or you do important tasks at inappropriate times, it won’t be completed or done half way or badly. The same goes for walking into a doctor’s office, you can still get a check up done… but you also might not because the office could close.
Time management is hard, but it is an essential skill for the future. It comes in handy when managing a career or even daily tasks and obligations. Just like you wouldn’t wanna walk in and wait for a doctor to see you, you don’t want to do important things at the wrong times. That would mess up your plans for the rest of the day and set you back. But don’t even get me started on scheduling a doctor’s appointment and showing up late…
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