You Can’t Succeed Without a Plan
Many students arrive in college having little experience with planning and managing their work and time. In high school, your teachers and administrators plan the work and the schedule. Bells told you when to move, learning happens during class periods – you get the idea. Even if you kept an agenda in high school, the work was probably planned by other people.
College is different. There’s more work, and you must plan when, how, and for how long to do it. To succeed, you need a system that helps you to prioritize work, plan where and for how long to do it, monitor your progress, and make continuous adjustments.
Explore this section to learn specific strategies for planning and scheduling your work and managing your time.
STUDY YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS MENU
Time Management Tips and Strategies
In college, studying priorities change from week to week and day to day. Balancing immediate and long-term priorities is a challenge. Fortunately, there are several simple systems for strategizing and planning that you can practice. As you do, remember – good planning and time management is a skill. You may see immediate results — but with practice, you will get much better.
Explore the links below for great advice on how to plan your work: what to think about, what steps to follow, and how to get better at it over time.
Time Blocking a Study Schedule
Planning your work thoughtfully is the key time management. Time Blocking is a great approach in which you look at a weekly calendar view and map out blocks of time for your activities, like when classes meet, your job schedule, and when you study. Time Blocking helps you to visualize your schedule, which is very helpful for allocating time effectively.
Explore the links below for details on how to set up a block schedule using Google Calendar (which comes free with your uri.edu email) or other block calendars.
The Study Cycle
When planning your week-to-week and day-to-day studying, it helps to know what kind of work you need to do and how to keep classes in balance. Your goal is always to use your time in a way that maximizes your learning and remembering. The Study Cycle is a simple system for planning your learning that does exactly that.
Explore the links below to learn about how to use the Study Cycle to help you learn gradually and in ways that build your understanding over time.
Overcoming Common Planning Challenges
When planning work, avoid making common mistakes! For example, there’s the Planning Fallacy: a common tendency to underestimate how much time you’ll need to do something well. Then there’s multi-tasking: shifting attention from one task to another and back again results in poor focus and wasted time. Even things like planning to study at times when you aren’t mentally alert, or in spaces that aren’t good for studying, can waste time and increase procrastination.
Explore the links below to learn more about common problems and how to overcome them.
Planning and online courses
With online classes and remote learning, your schedule can often be even less structured — no class meetings, less communication with professors and helpful classmates, and fewer reminders. It can be easier to forget things, harder to estimate time and harder to feel motivated. For these reasons and more, careful planning becomes more important than ever.
Click the links below to learn more about planning and managing your time when working remotely.