This blog is calling out those of you who have a mobile screen time of three hours or more. Fear not – you’re in the same situation as I was during my first year at LSE if your screen time hasn’t decreased since the first term. Following the Christmas Break, I was having trouble staying motivated and focused, just like many of you, until I made the decision to put some helpful time management strategies into practice. So what are you waiting for? Continue reading to discover three effective strategies for overcoming procrastination and enhancing your time management abilities.
Pomodoro technique
If you’re anything similar to me, studying for and actually revising for final examinations can genuinely feel like a chore. Enter the Pomodoro technique. This time-management method, constructed by Francesco Cirillo, is ideal for students like me who routinely put things off.
How to implement it?
In essence, you schedule and split your work into brief intervals using any timer, whether on your watch, phone, or laptop. Each Pomodoro interval, or period of time in which you work on a task for 25 minutes straight, is followed by a 5- to 10-minute break. Pomodoros are 25 minutes long because it’s believed that this amount of time will prevent procrastination and allow for the most effective performance of the task at hand.
Usually, I find this quite challenging at first, but after a few weeks and once I get the hang of it, I actually gradually increase the intervals. I start aiming for 45-minute intervals to train my brain to focus for more extended periods of time, which is very challenging after the summer or Christmas breaks when students’ motivation to study drastically decreases.
Quadrant method
While many of us are prone to putting off essential tasks during exam season, the quadrant method can help those of you who aren’t adept at time management. The following quadrants allow you to prioritise your tasks by ranking them according to importance and urgency.
The quadrants are as follows:
– Quadrant 1: Urgent and important
– Quadrant 2: Not urgent yet important
– Quadrant 3: Urgent but not important
– Quadrant 4: Not urgent and not important
This method of prioritising your daily or even weekly tasks enables you to be more effective when juggling multiple tasks, which is a problem that many university students face. As students, we frequently struggle to strike a balance between our social and extracurricular activities and our academic responsibilities, which leaves us feeling stressed and overburdened. However, this quadrant method is one strategy that helped me make sure I met deadlines while also attending society events and leading a full social life.
ABC method
The ABC method helps to ensure that all deadlines have been met, much like how we prioritised our tasks using the quadrant method according to their importance and urgency. If you enjoy keeping a list of everything you need to do, you can organise your list into the following categories.
Conventional task organisational hierarchy
A: tasks to be completed within the day
B: tasks to be completed within the week
C: tasks to be completed within the month
Since this model enables me to visualise my tasks in the bigger picture, I frequently use it during term time, especially when I’m behind on lectures. Of course, my personal favourite is the sense of accomplishment that comes from crossing off each task as you complete it, which is what makes this organisation method one of my favourites!
Concluding remarks
Overall, if you’re still having trouble focusing, try not to worry too much. Although I found these methods helpful, they might not work for you. But testing them out is the best course of action. Try a variety of time management strategies until you find one that suits you. Once you discover that method, revising won’t just seem like a chore; you’ll also start to remember much more material, which will make your study sessions even more productive. Feel free to leave a message below if you have any questions about anything I’ve written. Happy studying, folks!
