How to manage your time: Time Management and Meeting Deadlines

Employers are constantly fine tuning their application process to identify unique students from the rest of their cohort to employ powerful, well organised students into their work force. Thus, it’s important to equip a bank of desirable skills, behaviours and habits to excel their potential in receiving your dream job.

One of the key skills to have is Time Management.

This could be implemented in a wide range of activities within the student daily routine. Every student has a 24 hour limit in the day, comprising of different activities, ranging from food, rest, social life, and university life. By not practicing good time management, you risk delayed submissions, absence from crucial lessons and missing key events within university life, all of which result into creating a link of bad habits that will feed their total final grade and can be devastating for your professional development.

Below are a set of questions you should ask yourself to evaluate your time management skill:

1. Do you have a time table scheduled?
2. Do you attend all lessons on time?
3. Do you go sleep and wake up in a specific time?
4. Are you allocating hours to your different daily activities?
5. Do you a plan for all your deadlines? Projects? Exams?
6. Do you organise yourself based on the free time you have?
7. Do you work on different projects across the day or do you work before the deadline and do a full time in the library until you submit your work?

The questions above are used to enlighten your thinking towards a variety of ways you can manage your time more efficiently. These are just suggestions.

Once you identify areas where you might be wasting time, you need to work towards changing those habits into more useful practices. Identify the key triggers to these bad habits and create a method of intercepting the trigger before it occurs.

Below is an example of how to schedule and time manage your work to meet your deadline: 

Let’s say you have a submission date for one of your modules and it is due in three weeks. This is based on example of 8 hour university and study schedule.

3 weeks is 15 university days x 8 hours per day. That’s 120 university hours in three weeks.

120 – 60 lecture and seminar hours (20 per week) = 60 university free hours during the three week period.

The project requires you to conduct a report, meeting with a group and a field visit. 

• Report time: 1 group report = 30 hours over three weeks period.
• Meetings: 1 per week (2 hours per meeting) = 6 hours.
• Field visits: 2 times (3 hours per day) = 6 hours.
• Total hours required for project: Report time + Meetings + Field visits = 30 + 6 + 6 = 42 hours + 10% buffer = 46.2 hours.

Therefore, the total amount needed to create this project needs to be broken down in different time slots within your daily routine. 

60 university free hours – 46.2 project hours = 13.8 free hours during 3 week period.

You will have this amount to use for a different project, events or social activity within the university. 

Conclusion

Once you get the habit of using this method, it will help you identify time requirements and allow you to recognise when you might be derailing from your goal of meeting your deadlines. The main idea is to continue practicing your time management skills across all your daily routines, whether its social, personal or professional. Practice will increase efficiency and help develop this habit.

The obstacles faced during your professional journey are immense. Being able to handle many projects on your shoulder at in your position or business venture will provide you with an efficient process to fulfil all obligations and meet your deadlines. This is the fundamental moral of work and separates the lazy from the competent. I really hope that this simple article provides help to all students, remember there are no limits to reach where you want but you need to know how to get there. 

Want to know more tips on how to meet deadlines?

Check out NTU YouTube Channel – Gaia’s top tips for managing deadlines whilst at university.

By Alhareth Elshibani

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aelshibani/

Alhareth is an NTU Alumni Fellow. You can find out more about how to get involved with the Alumni Fellowship Programme here