Time Demands — Overview
You can also check out tips for setting goals at the bottom of this page.
Time management is important in college, where you’re expected to juggle the competing demands of classes, work, family, and other obligations.
How much time a class will take you depends on your individual goals, circumstances, and background. Just keep in mind that you have a limited supply of 168 hours each week. Taking care of your basic needs, working a job, taking other classes, and doing other time-consuming activities can stretch you too thin if you’re not careful. So, guard against time management problems by using the strategies below.
Estimating Time Required for Classes
One rule of thumb for 16-week courses is to spend about 3 hours per unit each week working on the class, including any time you spend in the classroom.
For a class that’s 3 units, that works out to about 9 hours per week (144 hours for the full semester). If the class is 100% online, that would mean spending about 9 hours per week on the class.
If the class is 100% on ground, that would mean spending 3 hours in class per week and 6 hours outside of class (9 hours total – 3 hours in class = 6 six hours outside of class).
Managing Your time
Creating a realistic plan that works for you
One of the major things that helps students succeed in their first year of college is good time management, so trying out different time management strategies and finding out which ones work for you is a brilliant idea.
Weekly planner
Creating a weekly planner helps you see how much time you have available for all the activities you need to do each week, like attending classes, working, sleeping, hanging out with family and friends, and so on. It might be possible to successfully take one class while working 40 hours a week, especially if you’ve had good academic experiences in the past, but you likely won’t have much time for anything other than work, school, sleeping, and eating.
The Calendars and College handout from the University of North Carolina Writing Center provides a helpful planners and planning strategies you can use to break down the tasks you need to do each week of the semester in order to be successful in your classes. It also includes blank schedules broken down in 30-minute, 60-minute, and larger chunks.
Daily priorities calculator
Using the Daily Schedule Calculator from the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative can help you figure out how to prioritize your time each day. I personally find it very disturbing how quickly I run out of time when I use this thing.
To-do list
The tool that’s helped me the most with my time management is the Google Doc where I keep my to-do lists, but you do you. There are plenty of apps and also good old-fashioned paper that you can use to make your own lists of things you need to remember to do.
Like I said, I prefer Google Docs. At the beginning of each week, I make a to-do list for each day of the week, and I figure out what I need to accomplish each day to stay on schedule. Because it’s on a Google Doc, I can easily access it on my phone or computer. I can also cut and paste easily, which wouldn’t be the case if I wrote my to-do list on paper. Feel free to try this method if it seems like it might work for you.
Apps & Canvas tools
There are plenty of other apps to help you avoid distractions and manage your time well. Many students find setting reminders in their phones helpful, and a lot of students use the Canvas Mobile App (Apple iOS Canvas App for iPhone/iPad, Android Canvas App for Android devices). If you download the Canvas app on your phone, you can set up Canvas to send you notifications about certain activities. You can also import your Canvas Calendar into Google Calendar to more easily remind yourself of when assignments are due.
Setting Goals & Achieving Them
SMART goals
Goals are important because they can help keep you focused and give you a sense of direction when the going gets tough. SMART is an acronym that describes qualities of good goals. SMART goals are:
- Specific. Specific goals are better than vague goals. For example, it would be better to have a goal of earning a passing grade on your research paper assignment than doing well in my English class.
- Measurable. You should be able to measure whether or not you’ve achieved your goal. You could measure if you earned a passing grade on your research paper, but it would be much more difficult to measure if you’re “doing well” in your class. What does “doing well” mean? It’s not clear.
- Actionable. Can you do what you need to do to accomplish your goal? If you need 18 billion dollars to accomplish your goal, it’s probably not actionable… unless you’re a billionaire, in which case I’d love to meet with you to discuss an exciting business idea I have.
- Realistic. Is it possible for you to achieve your goal?
- Timely. Do you have time to accomplish your goal and is the amount of time reasonable? It would be wild for me to expect that I could speak French fluently within three months (I currently don’t speak French), so I should either adjust my goal (I’ll learn 100 French words by heart within 3 months) or the time it will take me to accomplish my goal (I’ll be able to have conversations in French fluently within 7 years).
Watch the video below for an introduction to SMART goals from Khan Academy.
WOOP
WOOP is another acronym that can help you identify and accomplish goals. Its creator, professor of psychology Gabriele Oettingen, argues that the common advice to “think positive” can actually harm our chances of accomplishing our goals. In contrast, research shows that the four steps of the WOOP process, summarized below, increase the likelihood that we’ll accomplish what we set out to do. Here’s a WOOP worksheet that can help you create your own WOOP.
- Wish. Identify what you want to accomplish. An ideal wish should challenge you but not be impossible to accomplish.
- Outcome. Picture the ideal outcome of getting your wish. Really get into the concrete details. What would accomplishing your wish look and feel like?
- Obstacle. Identify an internal obstacle that you think is likely to interfere with your ability to accomplish your wish and reach your ideal outcome. The obstacle shouldn’t be something external. In other words, it shouldn’t be something outside of your control. For example, your obstacle might be you that you could get distracted by looking at TikTok on your phone.
- Plan. What’s your plan for overcoming the internal obstacle when or if it occurs. For example, if your obstacle is getting distracted by TikTok, your plan could be that you’ll turn off your phone and put it on the top shelf in your closet until you’ve finished the assignment you’re working on.
Watch the video below for a detailed introduction to WOOP.