Time Management for MBA Students

Student Time Management

Are you a hardworking student but feel overwhelmed? Student time management can help you succeed in juggling your academic life with work and other extra-curricular activities, so that you can get the most out of being a college student.

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Our free student time management course will deliver time management lessons that put you back in control of your time, giving you the power to focus your energy and transform your life.

My Story as a Student

As a student, I often found myself in a situation in which I was confronted with too much work and not enough time to do it in. Does this sound familiar?

This left me with some pretty stark options of lengthening my day (usually by sleeping less), reducing my workload, or becoming more efficient in my habits.

Through trial and error, and commitment to change, I chose the latter option. Now as an academic, psychologist, and time management consultant, I find myself often helping well-intentioned students with their student time management.

College Time Management Tip 1 – Plan Your Work and then Work Your Plan

By planning your work and then working your plan, you will avoid the trap of last minute cramming sessions and stressful write-ups of assignments the night before – not only will time management reduce your stress it will also increase the quality of your study and improve your grade.

Furthermore time management is a transferable skill that is valued by employers.

So how do you set up a time management plan?

Plan your time for the semester

Draw up a semester timetable and plan your semester.

In the timetable put your assignment due dates and any other assessment dates. Also put your exam dates and a timetable of your lessons.

This should give you an overview of your commitments for the semester. It will also highlight bottle necks of intense periods of assignments and assessments, when all hands should be on deck.

Funnel your semester plan into a weekly plan

Developing a weekly plan of your work and then working your plan is essential for student success.

Download your free weekly planner and start today!

College Time Management Tip 2 – Instill Daily Habits of Success

Whether you are an elite athlete, a top business professional or great student – any success initially started with small steps, and building on those habits.

Daily habits of success are an important building block of any student time management system.

One way that you can start today is to develop a prioritized to-do list that you can use on a daily basis.

This is probably one of the easiest methods to increase personal effectiveness.

Here we give you three important steps that you need to take to maximize your chances of student success.

College Time Management Tip 3 – What is Your Goal as a Student

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Do you want good grades?

Are you a student who believes that anything higher than a pass is wasted effort?

Are you a student who wants to genuinely learn their art, and good grades are just a byproduct.

In essence – what drives you as a student?

By having a vision of what you want to achieve, whether it is good grades or a dream job, and knowing how you will achieve your vision is the essence of smart goal setting.

Student goal setting will keep you motivated, give you confidence and help you to persist when the last thing you want to do is to sit at the desk and study.

College Time Management Tip 4 – How do you Spend Your Time?

Often students feel stressed and overwhelmed with the amount of work they need to do. This is often a good indication that time management can help.

But often the question is where do I start?

There are a couple of options here. You can either take the time management quiz and see how good your time management is, and tweak those areas that could be improved.

Another spot to start is with a time management log that objectively assesses how you spend your time.

Once you know how you spend your time – you can then work on eliminating time wasters and becoming more effective.

College Time Management Tip 5 – Students are good jugglers…but the best are great at prioritizing

Part of student life is juggling the many demands on your time – work, academic study and social life to name a few.

….but knowing which tasks to do first is critical for college students who don’t have enough time.

Often these tasks need to be ordered in terms of priority.

I find that the students that I see really like the time management matrix to organize their priorities and time.

College Time Management Tip 6 – Conquer Procrastination

Facebook….Internet…even washing up dirty dishes…has been used as a form of procrastination.

I know that whenever I used to have exams coming up – it was uncanny how eager I was to help out around the house.

Be aware of the tendency to do things that you enjoy and put off what you don’t like.

Procrastination is a war that we all fight between a habit of ease and the discipline of action.

Conquer procrastination with these procrastination busters.

College Time Management Tip 7 – Become an Effective Studier

Studying effectively is not an all-night cram session the day before the exam. Nor is it chaining yourself to a desk for 12 hours straight.

Being a student involves readings, attending lectures and tutorials and juggling a social life.

One important student time management tip is being able to plan and manage the information. This involves keeping up-to-date with readings and being an active contributor to your learning experience.

Use these study skills to manage your time as a student effectively.

College Time Management Tip 8 – Try to Read Actively

One part of academic performance is being able you connect and relate facts with larger patterns of knowledge, and then communicating them in your own words.

Raise your academic performance will show you how to keep your mind optimally relaxed when taking information in.

Furthermore, reading in a passive way is not as effective as reading actively. Use the active method of reading to learn the content of your textbook in a more effective manner.

Summary

By using these student time management tips, the pressure of an exam deadline or the all night cramming is a thing of the past.

Preparing your work and working your plan is a way to maximize the chances of student success.

These easy to implement student time management tips will guide you to success as a student.

Importantly, the skills that you learn here are transferable into many other aspects of your life, and will be valued by any employer.

Tips for MBA Student

Improve Memory

Keeping our brains active can help improve memory performance. While the old tried and tested method of repetition is still an important part of memory techniques, we also need a bit of novelty to keep our minds awake and to stimulate our brains.

We all have times when we’d love to be able to improve memory – for school tests, college exams, business presentations or even just in our day to day lives. Pregnant women are particularly prone to memory loss, and often seek ways to improve memory. Age is also a consideration; as we get older, our ability to remember things slows down and we find ourselves misplacing things or forgetting appointments.

By learning new information, we can help improve memory in the long-term. The part of our brain that produces the chemical dopamine responds better to fresh images, ideas and experiences, and can improve memory retention more effectively that simply repeating the same information over and over again. To improve memory techniques, there are plenty of things we can do in our day to day lives:

Improve memory – with word games.

By simply doing the crossword or word game in your daily or Sunday newspaper, you’ll help improve memory by learning new words or phrases. Each day will bring a new challenge so you will be stimulating your brain regularly.

Improve memory – with number challenges.

Sudoku is a popular number game, but there are many other number puzzles you can try to help your quest to improve memory. Again, you will be keeping your brain active and opening up your mind to new challenges on a regular basis.

Improve memory – learn a language.

Exposing your brain to anything new will help improve memory function, but learning a language can be a particularly rewarding experience. You don’t need to go as far as taking classes, simply watch some of the foreign language learning programs on TV or learn a few words of Spanish or French, for example, each day.

Improve memory – play an instrument.

This is another fun way to get round the problem of increasing memory loss. Picking up a guitar or sitting for an hour or two at a keyboard could be a great way to improve memory performance. You’ll be stimulating your brain function by practising new chords or melodies!

Of course, many of us lead very busy lives and don’t always have the time to take up a new hobby or pastime. We can still improve memory techniques in our day to day lives, simply by paying attention to the things around us. Instead of walking or driving home in a daze, we can help improve our memory just by looking around!
by: Mike Paetzold