Plan your time

Five steps to successful planning

1. Looking ahead 

An important first step is to establish:

• what you need to do (e.g. coursework/taught sessions/private study);
• when things need to be done by (e.g. deadlines for assessed work);
• how long they are likely to take (e.g. time spent in taught sessions/time required to write a lab. report).

Read through your course handbooks and other information related to your modules to establish the demands that will be placed upon your time. Think of the broad range of study activities and develop a picture of how they relate to each other. This forward picture will be an invaluable tool in helping you organise your time. 

2. Making plans

Once you have established your commitments, it might be useful to enter these on a plan or calendar. Plan each semester at a time.

There are several advantages to using a wall chart for this activity.

• You can see the whole semester ahead of you.
• You can see where deadlines fall in relationship to each other.
• You can quickly scan the whole plan to remind yourself of the full range of your activities.

If you already have plans in a calendar or diary, use these in the same way. Construct a visual image of the term ahead, one that you can scan quickly to refresh and review.

Make filling in your plan an active process. Use colour and image to distinguish between different sorts of activities. For example, fill in deadlines in red, starting points in green. Use exclamation marks as warning signs or question marks to highlight vague commitments. 

Continually review your long term plan, assessing your achievements or adding further information as it arises.

3. Breaking up time

To begin taking control of your time you will need to break it up into manageable chunks. Try the following strategies for planning each day a week at a time.

Planning a day

As each new day approaches, review your week plan to make sure that it is up to date. Make a 'to do' list for each day if this will help focus your activities. 

• Use your day plan to add discipline to your working day.
• Be active with your plan. Tick off completed tasks and keep a check on uncompleted activity.
• Avoid overburdening your day plan - only set out to complete realistic tasks.
  
  
  

4. Setting priorities 

You may find that within a week you will need to tackle more than one task at a time. Find a way of putting multiple tasks in order, establishing a list of priorities. A priority graph (shown below) can be used to judge whether something is a priority or not. Put a cross on the graph for each task you need to complete. If it goes in the top right corner (Important/Urgent) it is an immediate priority. If it goes in the bottom left corner (Not Urgent/Unimportant), you should question why you were thinking about doing it in the first place.

.Reviewing progress 

It is important to continually review your planning strategy to make sure that it is up to date (an ineffective time manager allows all of their priority points to slide towards the top right hand corner of their graph when everything is urgent and everything needs to be done yesterday!).  Try to avoid this by forward planning, predicting any possible glitches and pitfalls.