6 Organizing Your Time

This is an important chapter. When you know what you want to do, why not just sit down and get it done? The millions of people who complain frequently about “not having enough time” would love it if it were that simple! Time management isn’t actually difficult, but you do need to learn how to do it well.

Time and Your Personality

People’s attitudes toward time vary widely. One person seems to be always rushing around but gets less done than another person who seems unconcerned about time and calmly goes about the day. Since there are so many different “time personalities,” it’s important to realize how you approach time. Start by trying to figure out how you spend your time during a typical week, using Activity 1.

Think about your time analysis in Activity 1. People who estimate too high often feel they don’t have enough time. They may have time anxiety and often feel frustrated. People at the other extreme, who often can’t account for how they use all their time, may have a more relaxed attitude. They may not actually have any more free time, but they may be wasting more time than they want to admit on less important things. Yet they still may complain about how much time they spend studying, as if there’s a shortage of time.

People also differ in how they respond to schedule changes. Some go with the flow and accept changes easily, while others function well only when following a planned schedule and may become upset if that schedule changes. If you do not react well to an unexpected disruption in your schedule, plan extra time for catching up if something throws you off. This is all part of understanding your time personality.

Another aspect of your time personality involves the time of day. If you need to concentrate, such as when writing a class paper, are you more alert and focused in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Do you concentrate best when you look forward to a relaxing activity later on, or do you study better when you’ve finished all other activities? Do you function well if you get up early—or stay up late—to accomplish a task? How does that affect the rest of your day or the next day? Understanding this will help you better plan your study periods.

While you may not be able to change your “time personality,” you can learn to manage your time more successfully. The key is to be realistic. How accurate is the number of hours you wrote down in Activity 1? The best way to know how you spend your time is to record what you do all day in a time log, every day for a week, and then add that up. Make copies of the Weekly Planner [PDF] and carry it with you. Every so often, fill in what you have been doing. Do this for a week before adding up the times; then enter the total hours in the categories in Activity 1. You might be surprised that you spend a lot more time than you thought just hanging out with friends—or surfing the Web, or playing around with Facebook or any of the many other things people do. You might find that you study well early in the morning, even though you thought you were a night person, or vice versa. You might learn how long you can continue at a specific task before needing a break.

Weekly Planner fillable [PDF] — you can download and save a copy to work with on your computer/phone, or you can print a copy from the website to carry with you.

Time management for successful university studying involves these factors:

• Determining how much time you need to spend studying
• Knowing how much time you have for studying and increasing that time if needed
• Being aware of the times of day when you are at your best and most focused
• Using effective long- and short-term study strategies
• Scheduling study activities in realistic segments
• Using a system to plan and set priorities
• Staying motivated to follow your plan and avoid procrastination

For every hour in the classroom, university students should spend, on average, about two to three hours on that class, counting reading, studying, writing papers, and so on. (For help figuring out how much time is needed, use this resource: Study Ratio Recommendations [PDF]. Remember, you may need more or less time depending on how efficiently and effectively you study.) If you’re a full-time student with 15 hours a week in class, then you need another thirty hours for the rest of your academic work. That 45 hours is about the same as a typical full-time job. If you work part-time, time management skills are even more essential. These skills are still more important for part-time university students who work full-time and commute or have a family. To succeed in university, virtually everyone has to develop effective strategies for dealing with time.

Look back at the number of hours you wrote in Activity 1 for a week of studying.

Do you have two to three hours of study time for every hour/unit the class is worth? For example, for a three-hour/unit class, you could spend as much as six to nine hours of study time outside of class. Many students begin university not knowing this much time is needed, so don’t be surprised if you underestimate this number of hours. Remember, this is just an average amount of study time—you may need more or less for your classes. Activity 2 will help you figure out what your typical week should look like.

Activity 2 shows most university students that they do actually have plenty of time for their studies without losing sleep or giving up their social life. But you may have less time for discretionary activities than in the past. Something, somewhere has to give. That’s part of time management—and why it’s important to keep your goals and priorities in mind. The other part is to learn how to use the hours you do have as effectively as possible, especially the study hours. For example, if you’re a typical university freshman who plans to study for three hours in an evening but then procrastinates, gets caught up in a conversation, loses time to checking e-mail and text messages, and listens to loud music while reading a textbook, then maybe you actually spent four hours “studying” but got only two hours of actual work done. So you end up behind and feeling like you’re still studying way too much. The goal of time management is to actually get three hours of studying done in three hours and have time for your life as well.

Special note for students who work. You may have almost no discretionary time at all left in Activity 2 after all your “must-do” activities. If so, you may have overextended yourself—a situation that inevitably will lead to problems. You can’t sleep two hours less every night for the whole school year, for example, without becoming ill or unable to concentrate well on work and school. It is better to recognize this situation now rather than set yourself up for a very difficult term and possible failure. If you cannot cut the number of hours for work or other obligations, see your academic advisor right away. It is better to take fewer classes and succeed than to take more classes than you have time for and risk failure.

Calendar planners and to-do lists are effective ways to organize your time. Many types of academic planners are commercially available (check the University of Arizona’s Campus Store), or you can make your own. Some people like a page for each day, and some like a week at a time. Some use computer calendars and planners. Almost any system will work well if you use it consistently.

Some university students think they don’t need to actually write down their schedule and daily to-do lists. They’ve always kept it in their head before, so why write it down in a planner now? Some first-year students were talking about this one day in a study group, and one bragged that she had never had to write down her calendar because she never forgot dates. Another student reminded her how she’d forgotten a preregistration date and missed taking a course she really wanted because the class was full by the time she went online to register. “Well,” she said, “except for that time, I never forget anything!” Of course, none of us ever forgets anything—until we do.

Calendars and planners help you look ahead and write in important dates and deadlines so you don’t forget. But it’s just as important to use the planner to schedule your own time, not just deadlines. For example, you’ll learn later that the most effective way to study for an exam is to study in several short periods over several days. You can easily do this by choosing time slots in your weekly planner over several days that you will commit to studying for this test. You don’t need to fill every time slot or schedule every single thing that you do, but the more carefully and consistently you use your planner, the more successfully you will manage your time.

But a planner cannot contain every single thing that may occur in a day. We’d go crazy if we tried to schedule every telephone call, every e-mail, every bill to pay, every trip to the grocery store. For these items, we use a to-do list, which may be kept on a separate page in the planner.

Let’s revisit the Weekly Planner [PDF] from earlier, but use it a little differently. A spreadsheet program is also an excellent way to keep track. If you’d rather write it out, you can make your own that is larger, or use a commercial planner, or even a piece of poster board!

Fill in this planner form for next week. First, write in all your class meeting times; your work or volunteer schedule; and your usual hours for sleep, family activities, and any other activities at fixed times. Don’t forget the time needed for transportation, meals, and so on. Your first goal is to find all the blocks of “free time” that are left over.

Make sure to plan all of your priorities, then you can see the “empty spaces” and add in your homework/study time.

Next, fill in a calendar. Here is a Semester on a Page (SOAP) example [PDF] that you can use to go by. Whether you use a printed-off calendar from the internet or make your own calendar, it’s important to have the info all on one or two pages that you can easily see. The updated version of the SOAP each semester can be found at the THINK TANK site near the bottom of the page (see the Fall 2025 SOAP [PDF]).

To use this resource effectively, check the syllabus for each of your courses and write important dates in the planner on the appropriate date. For example: Write in all assignments and when they are due (if you only know CHEM homework is always due on Thurs, then write that in), exams, and other deadlines, and break up large projects into several dates over a few weeks so you will see to work on them a little at a time. Estimate how much time you may need for each project/exam and work backward on the schedule from the due date. Use this document to complete your Weekly Planner each week. You can always look ahead at what is going to be due not only for the coming week, but for a week or more out. This way neither papers nor exams can sneak up on you. Here’s an example:

Remember that for every hour spent in class, plan an average of two hours studying outside of class. These are the time periods you now want to schedule in your Weekly Planner. These times change from week to week, with one course requiring more time in one week because of a paper due at the end of the week and a different course requiring more time the next week because of a major exam. Make sure you block out enough hours in the week to accomplish what you need to do. As you choose your study times, consider what times of day you are at your best and what times you prefer to use for social or other activities. If you keep up with your normal work and work ahead, doing outlines and rough drafts, you will find your schedule overall is much less hectic and stressful.

For example, it’s Friday afternoon and you are planning your next week. You have a short paper due a week from today. You determine that you’ll spend ten hours total on it, from initial brainstorming and planning through to drafting and revising. Since you have other things also going on, you want to get an early start; you might choose to make an appointment at the Writing Center for Thursday morning. You block an hour Saturday morning (tomorrow) to brainstorm your topic and jot some preliminary notes. Monday evening is a good time to spend two hours on the next step or prewriting activities. Since you have a lot of time open Tuesday afternoon, you decide that’s the best time to reserve to write the first draft; you block out three or four hours. You make a note on the schedule to leave time open that afternoon to see your instructor during office hours in case you have any questions on the paper; if not, you’ll finish the draft on Wednesday, and go to the Writing Center for your appointment on Thursday to revise and polish the final draft due on Friday.

If you’re surprised by this amount of planning, you may be the kind of student who used to think, “The paper’s due Friday—I have enough time Thursday afternoon, so I’ll write it then.” What’s wrong with that? First, university work is more demanding than many first-year students realize, and the instructor expects higher-quality work than you can churn out quickly without revising. Second, if you are tired on Thursday because you didn’t sleep well Wednesday night, you may be much less productive than you hoped—and without a time buffer, you’re forced to turn in a paper that is not your best work.

The image below shows what one student’s Weekly Planner looks like for a week. This is intended only to show you one way to block out time—you’ll quickly find a way that works best for you.  The one thing every planner should have is all of your times you are in class, work, have meetings, time to do homework (2-3 hours per unit hour; a 3-hour class means 6-9 hours outside of class depending on the class), family time, time for friends and fun…. and don’t forget 8 hours of sleep!

Here are some more tips for successful planning:

• Studying is often most effective immediately after a class meeting. If your schedule allows, block out appropriate study time after class periods.
• Be realistic about the time when you make your planner. If your class runs to 4 p.m. and it takes you 20 minutes to wrap things up and reach your study location, don’t figure you’ll have a full hour of study between 4 and 5 p.m.
• Don’t overdo it. Few people can study four or five hours nonstop, and scheduling extended periods like that may just set you up for failure.
• Schedule social events that occur at set times, but just leave holes in the schedule for other activities. Enjoy those open times and recharge your energies!
• Try to schedule some time for exercise at least three days a week.
• Plan to use your time between classes wisely. If three days a week you have the same hour free between two classes, what should you do with those three hours? Maybe you need to eat, walk across campus, or run an errand. But say you have an average of 40 minutes free at that time each day. Instead of just frittering the time away, use it to review your notes from the previous class or for the coming class, or to read a short assignment. Over the whole term, that 40 minutes three times a week add up to a lot of study time, 32 hours to be exact!
• If a study activity is taking longer than you had scheduled, look ahead and adjust your weekly planner to prevent the stress of feeling behind.
• If you maintain your planner on your computer or smartphone, it’s still a good idea to print and carry it with you. Don’t risk losing valuable study time if you’re away from the device.
• If you’re not paying close attention to everything in your planner, use a colored highlighter to mark the times blocked out for really important things.
• When following your planner, pay attention to starting and stopping times. If you planned to start your test review at four o’clock after an hour of reading for a different class, don’t let the reading run long and take time away from studying for the test.

Your Daily To-Do List

People use to-do lists in different ways, and you should find what works best for you. As with your planner, consistent use of your to-do list will make it an effective habit.

Some people prefer not to carry their planner everywhere but instead copy the key information for the day onto a to-do list. Using this approach, your daily to-do list starts out with your key scheduled activities and then adds other things you hope to do today.

Some people use their to-do list only for things not on their planner, such as short errands, phone calls or e-mail, and the like. This still includes important things—but they’re not scheduled out for specific times.

Although we call it a daily list, the to-do list can also include things you may not get to today, but don’t want to forget about. Keeping these things on the list, even if they’re a low priority, helps ensure that eventually you’ll get to them.

Start every day with a fresh to-do list written in a special small notebook or on a clean page in your planner. Check your planner for key activities for the day and check yesterday’s list for items remaining.

Some items won’t require much time, but other activities, such as assignments, will. Include a time estimate for these so that later you can do them when you have enough free time. If you finish lunch and have twenty-five minutes left before your next class, what things on the list can you do now and check off?

Finally, use a system to prioritize things on your list. Some students use a 1, 2, 3, or A, B, C rating system for importance. Others simply highlight or circle items that are critical to get done today. “Examples of Two Different Students’ To-Do Lists” shows two different to-do lists—each very different but each effective for the student using it.

Here are some more tips for effectively using your daily to-do list:

• Be specific: “Read history chapter 2 (30 pages)”—not “History homework.”
• Put important things high on your list where you’ll see them every time you check the list.
• Make your list at the same time every day so that it becomes a habit.
• Don’t make your list overwhelming. If you added everything you eventually need to do, you could end up with so many things on the list that you’d never read through them all. If you worry you might forget something, write it in the margin of your planner’s page a week or two away.
• Use your list. Lists often include little things that may take only a few minutes to do, so check your list any time during the day you have a moment free.
• Cross out or check off things after you’ve done them—doing this becomes rewarding.
• Don’t use your to-do list to procrastinate. Don’t pull it out to find something else you just “have” to do instead of studying!

 

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Time Management Tips for Students Who Work

If you’re both working and taking classes, you seldom have large blocks of free time. Avoid temptations to stay up very late studying, for losing sleep can lead to a downward spiral in performance at both work and school. Instead, try to follow these guidelines:

• If possible, adjust your work or sleep hours so that you don’t spend your most productive times at work. If your job offers flex time, arrange your schedule to be free to study at times when you perform best.
• Try to arrange your class and work schedules to minimize commuting time. If you are a part-time student taking two classes, taking classes back-to-back, two or three days a week uses less time than spreading them out over four or five days. Working four ten-hour days rather than five eight-hour days reduces time lost to travel, getting ready for work, and so on.
• If you can’t arrange an effective schedule for classes and work, consider online courses that allow you to do most of the work on your own time.
• Use your daily and weekly planner conscientiously. Any time you have thirty minutes or more free, schedule a study activity.
• Consider your “body clock” when you schedule activities. Plan easier tasks for those times when you’re often fatigued and reserve alert times for more demanding tasks.
• Look for any “hidden” time potentials. Maybe you prefer the thirty-minute drive to work over a 45-minute train ride. But if you can read on the train, that’s a gain of 90 minutes every day at the cost of 30 minutes longer travel time. An hour a day can make a huge difference in your studies.
• Can you do quick study tasks during slow times at work? Take your class notes with you and use even five minutes of free time wisely.
• Remember your long-term goals. You need to work, but you also want to finish your university program. If you have the opportunity to volunteer for some overtime, consider whether it’s really worth it. Sure, the extra money would help, but could the extra time put you at risk for not doing well in your classes?
• Be as organized on the job as you are academically. Use your planner and to-do list for work matters, too. The better organized you are at work, the less stress you’ll feel—and the more successful you’ll be as a student, also.

Time Management Tips for Students with Family

Living with family members often introduces additional time stresses. You may have family obligations that require careful time management. Use all the strategies described earlier, including family time in your daily plans, the same as you would hours spent at work. Don’t assume that you’ll be “free” every hour you’re home, because family events or a family member’s need for your assistance may occur at unexpected times. Schedule your important academic work well ahead and in blocks of time you control. See also the earlier suggestions for controlling your space: you may need to use the library or another space to ensure you are not interrupted or distracted during important study times.

Students with their own families are likely to feel time pressures. After all, you can’t just tell your partner or kids that you’ll see them in a couple of years when you’re not so busy with your job and university! In addition to all the planning and study strategies discussed so far, you also need to manage your family relationships and the time spent with family. While there’s no magical solution for making more hours in the day, even with this added time pressure, there are ways to balance your life well:

• Talk everything over with your family. If you’re going back to school, your family members may not have realized that changes will occur. Don’t let them be shocked by sudden household changes. Keep communication lines open so that your partner and children feel they’re together with you in this new adventure. Eventually, you will need their support.
• Work to enjoy your time together, whatever you’re doing. You may not have as much time together as previously, but cherish the time you do have—even if it’s washing dishes together or cleaning house. If you’ve been studying for two hours and need a break, spend the next ten minutes with family instead of checking e-mail or watching television. Ultimately, the important thing is being together, not going out to movies or dinners or the special things you used to do when you had more time. Look forward to being with family and appreciating every moment you are together, and they will share your attitude.
  

  

• Combine activities to get the most out of time. Don’t let your children watch television or play video games by themselves while you’re cooking dinner, or you may find you have only twenty minutes of family time together while eating. Instead, bring the family together in the kitchen and give everyone something to do. You can have a lot of fun together and share the day’s experiences, and you won’t feel so bad then if you have to go off and study by yourself.
• Share the load. Even children who are very young can help with household chores to give you more time. Attitude is everything: try to make it fun, the whole family pulling together—not something they “have” to do and may resent, just because Mom or Dad went back to school. (Remember, your kids will reach university age someday, and you want them to have a good attitude about university.) As they get older, they can do their own laundry, cook meals, and get themselves off to school, and older teens can run errands and do the grocery shopping. They will gain in the process by becoming more responsible and independent.
• Schedule your study time based on family activities. If you face interruptions from young children in the early evening, use that time for something simple like reviewing class notes. When you need more quiet time for concentrated reading, wait until they’ve gone to bed.
• Be creative with child care. Usually, options are available, possibly involving extended family members, sitters, older siblings, cooperative child care with other adult students, as well as child-care centers. After a certain age, you can take your child along to campus when you attend an evening course, if there is somewhere the child can quietly read. At home, let your child have a friend over to play with. Network with other older students and learn what has worked for them. Explore all possibilities to ensure you have time to meet your university goals. And don’t feel guilty: “day care babies” grow up just as healthy psychologically as those raised in the home full time.

Time Management Tips for Student Athletes

Student athletes often face unique time pressures because of the amount of time required for training, practice, and competition. During some parts of the year, athletics may involve as many hours as a full-time job. The athletic schedule can be grueling, involving weekend travel and intensive blocks of time. You can be exhausted after workouts or competitions, affecting how well you can concentrate on studies thereafter. Students on athletic scholarships often feel their sport is their most important reason for being in university, and this priority can affect their attitudes toward studying. For all of these reasons, student athletes face special time management challenges. Here are some tips for succeeding in both your sport and academics:

• Realize that even if your sport is more important to you, you risk everything if you don’t also succeed in your academics. Failing one class in your first year won’t get you kicked out, but you’ll have to make up that class—and you’ll end up spending more time on the subject than if you’d studied more to pass it the first time.
• It’s critical to plan ahead. If you have a big test or a paper due the Monday after a big weekend game, start early. Use your weekly planner to plan well in advance, making it a goal, for example, to have the paper done by Friday—instead of thinking you can magically get it done Sunday night after victory celebrations. Working ahead will also free your mind to focus better on your sport.
• Accept that you have two priorities—your sport and your classes—and that both come before your social life. That’s just how it is—what you have accepted in your choice to be a university athlete. If it helps, think of your classes as your job; you have to “go to study” the same as others “go to work.”
• Use your planner to take advantage of any downtime you have during the day between classes and at lunch. Other students may seem to have the luxury of studying during much of the afternoon when you’re at practice, and maybe they can get away with hanging out between classes, but you don’t have that time available, at least not during the season. You need to use all the time you can find to keep up with your studying.
• Stay on top of your courses. If you allow yourself to start slipping behind, maybe telling yourself you’ll have more time later on to catch up, just the opposite will happen. Once you get behind, you’ll lose momentum and find it more difficult to understand what’s going on the class. Eventually, the stress will affect your athletic performance too.
• Get help when you need it. Many athletic departments offer tutoring services or referrals for extra help. But don’t wait until you’re at risk for failing a class before seeking help. A tutor won’t take your test or write your paper for you—they can only help you focus in to use your time productively in your studies. You still have to want to succeed.

License & Attribution

Adapted from: University Success © 2016 by University of Saskatchewan, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Any changes to the original chapters can be found in the Appendix.