Time management

Garret Allen, Reporter

Time Management is something that everyone hears at some point during their life at school. Using your time wisely is so overused that, as this point, I’m not even sure what it means. Is using your time wisely using all the time you receive in class or is it using the time that you do work on the assignment effectively? In essence, what does it mean to be effective with your time?

For starters, I don’t think that using your time wisely necessarily means working diligently in class. Somedays you just aren’t in the mood to be productive in class, or you really want to talk to your friend about something and know you won’t be able to tell them later. Other days you just can’t focus at school with all the chatter or you get lost in your thoughts. Everyone has off days, days where even the most diligent and hardworking of students start to get off task or just stare at a blank piece of paper for 20 minutes.

I mean, using your time effectively may be dazing off for a little bit when you’re given work time. In fact, I believe I would put out a lesser quality of work if I forced myself to work when I was feeling a little out of it, and maybe that twenty minutes where I’m off task might help me recover my senses. For me, the most important part of time management isn’t necessarily working diligently in class. It’s making sure that the products you put out you are proud of and put effort into them, and that the time you worked on them was used effectively.

Is it bad if I wait to do an assignment until lunch if I have good enough time management skills to know it can be done? No, not if you ask me. To me, that’s an effective use of time; you might spend thirty more minutes at home doing something you want to do or something that will help you for the next day (such as sleep) and the next day you use the thirty minutes at lunch given to you to complete an assignment. All you did was maximize your time. No matter what, that thirty minutes was static each day. You get thirty minutes to eat lunch, period. But that extra thirty minutes you spend at home, awake past when you should be sleeping, is not only a detriment to the student but a waste of your precious time when you have a free thirty minutes the next day.

And someone may make the opposite choice. They may stay up that extra thirty minutes so they can chat or relax while eating at lunch. That’s perfectly fine too. Time management, most importantly, is being able to allocate time in a way that works for you, in a way that you succeed and put out quality work. It’s being able to know before you do an assignment how long it should take you, so you can better anticipate when the assignment needs to be completed so that you aren’t overwhelmed. It’s not necessarily starting a project a week before its due and spreading out work over every day. It’s what works and is effective.

And that’s really all that matters.