In her article, Oliver gives various tips for managing time. My favorite is number one--"manage your energy, not just your time." This means that you should pay attention to how much energy you're putting into your tasks. For example, if you're putting a ton of energy into a low-value task, you just wasted energy that you needed for a high-value task. This is such a perfect tip that I have never heard before. Now that I think about it, most of my problems with time management revolve around the fact that I spend way too much time on stuff that doesn't really matter, and then I have nothing left in me to work hard on the high-value tasks. I'm definitely going to keep this in mind this semester.
In his article, Oppong discusses tackling the task you least want to do and how you should do it first, before anything else in the morning. I found his tip of dividing your to-do list really helpful. Sometimes a to-do list can seem really overwhelming (like the image below--very in-your-face and alarming) and actually de-motivates me. His clear categories for dividing the list makes the tasks seem a lot easier to tackle.
(Bulletin board from Wikimedia Commons)
I think my biggest time challenge will be allotting the right amount of energy to each task (as Oliver mentions in her article). I always try to put 110% into every little (and big) assignment, which leaves me incredibly burnt out, and it's just not healthy. I'm working hard on not worrying about everything being perfect, and I'm getting better, but I still have a ways to go.
My time management strategy is usually to plan out my tasks and go back and forth from one difficult task to one easy task. When I'm feeling unmotivated, I either allow myself to take a break and re-visit the task later, or tell myself I'll only work on one minute of the task. More often than not, it is just the starting that I am dreading. That one minute turns into an entire assignment done.
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