Procrastination at its best 

How well is your time management?

The idea of college can be very fun. There are no parents to tell you what to do and you are now free to do what you want whenever you want. The idea of being off on your own can be very exciting but once it actually happens students will find out that it actually gets a lot harder than they thought.

Yes, it is true that your parents are no longer there to tell you what to do but that just means that it is now your responsibility to make yourself do all the chores that you are probably so use to being done for you automatically, except for homework of course. You are now the one that needs to step up to the plate and take responsibility for yourself. Your parents are not there to constantly remind you that you need to do homework, to study, or to do your laundry. The key to keeping up with everything is being able to manage your time wisely. It has been said that one hour of any lecture at a college level course requires the student to study for at least three hours to contain all that information in their head. This would be the time to know how to manage your time because three hours of study is no joke. There are so many possibilities to learn how to manage your study habits, just remember to always put school first before having fun nights with friends.

Use a planner to plan out all the projects and papers due and write done all of your homework so you would never forget a thing. Look at how much you have to do and plan out which hours are the best for you to study and actually accomplish the massive pile of homework. Of course, don’t cram yourself and never see daylight, just schedule certain hours to do certain things. Such as from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. study for math and then from 2 p.m. to 3p.m. do some chores around the house, scheduling things from an hour to hour basis can help getting use to a certain routine as well.

Part of the college experience is to go out and have adventures with your new college buddies, which is all right to do and very fun. Everyone can go out and have fun to relieve the stress that college can bring down on a person sometimes, but how much fun is actually needed? Going out on the weekends to let off some steam is normal for anybody but going out every night and coming back super late is not a good idea, especially if there was an exam or an important paper due the next day. This is the best situation that is needed to put time management into play. I personally had difficulty with this my first semester of college because eventually I made some new friends and we would have go out super late on a weekday and not go to sleep until 3 in the morning. This was a bad decision on my part when I could have spoken up and said that we should all go home and get some rest since we all had early morning classes as well. Waking up and not getting a full night’s set of sleep is not fun and makes you unable to concentrate in your classes as well because all you want to do is just fall right back to sleep.

You need to know when to have fun and know when to get down to business and start all that work. When you finally start to realize that you have to be paying such a big amount of college tuition for your future, going out and having fun with your friends is no longer a “necessity” for you to do everyday constantly.

Going out and making new friends is good thing to do and a college experience that you should never forget but always remember what your actual priority really is. Going to a university and getting a college education is a privilege to have and you should feel honored to get this opportunity to further your knowledge into having a better future. Set aside some time for having fun on the weekends where the next day it would be okay to wake up late. To get into good study habits go straight to the library after class and study there for about an hour or so and slowly soak in all the material to make sure that you understand the concept that was being taught. If you struggle with the same problem as I did the best thing to do is knowing when to say no, even though you know that you will be having a lot of fun with your friends, will your grades be worth it in the end?