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So far we have discussed the importance of knowing what to do and when. We have discussed the importance of setting goals and knowing how to break them down into smaller, more manageable activities. Then we challenged you to think about these activities in terms of importance and urgency, effectiveness and efficiency, and Pareto's Principle. The next section allows you to take all of your wonderful hopes, aspirations and dreams and make them happen. How? Simple! Remember how we discussed importance and urgency, and we said that we can get side-tracked by the urgent and unimportant things? Well, in the following pages you will learn a step-by-step method of how to get control over your time and keep it. By learning to use a structured, detailed planner you'll be developing a set of skills that you will carry with you wherever you go, even long after you graduate. So, let's get started - shall we? No one really wants to be the kind of person that wastes 80% of their time. Most of us set out to use time effectively, but how many of us use methods that we know will work? Now if you are not completely confident in your present approach, you will want to ensure that the tools you choose will build the future you want. We are going to introduce you to 4 tools:
You might be accustomed to thinking of planners as simply collections of pages filled with lines and boxes to write things in. Everyone has seen (and most of us have used) a monthly or a weekly planner. What we would like to emphasize here is not the papers but the thinking process involved in planning. While we introduce these 4 planning methods we want you to think about how much planning you are already doing. What would your life be like if you completely stopped planning? Suppose for instance you never planned any of your school related activities. Would you know which class to go to or when? Or the dates and times of your exams? Or the due dates of term papers? Or which chapters of which text to read for next week? Or when your study group was meeting? Or when the tuition fees were due? Or when your vacations are? You can imagine the chaos! Imagine if you stopped planning in all the other areas of your life as well. Or worse, imagine what the world would be like if everyone stopped planning. Now with this image in mind, consider how much effective planning you are already doing. It should be obvious that you are doing quite a bit of planning already. You might not have really thought about it as planning, but it is planning nonetheless. The amount of planning that you have done up until now has resulted directly in your present state. Now, given the assumption that you would like to improve your time management abilities we are going to ask you to do more planning. After some practice you will find that this advanced planning will become as common place and effortless as your regular planning - except that your results will be very different. Imagine never forgetting an important task or date, or imagine the confidence that you will feel knowing that you understand all the material in a course or lecture, or better yet, imagine knowing everything you need to know for an exam - and knowing that you know it. You might think that this is pie in the sky but not only is it possible, it is realistic when you have a well thought out plan. The Monthly PlannerThe monthly planner is something that many students use. In addition to the days of the week and month are minimal marking students add on, such as due dates for assignments and essays, alongside dates of tests and exams, and important appointments, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, vacations and so on. To take advantage of its full potential as a planning tool, you must realize that the monthly planner can help us manage our large goals and the smaller sub-goals that we have divided these larger goals into. Once we have established our larger goals and broken them down into smaller objectives and activities, we can use the monthly planner to record important milestones along the way between now and the expected completion date of the goals. In this way the monthly planner becomes a tool for tracking the progress of all of our important projects. By looking at the completed monthly planner we can instantly determine not only on what subgoals we should be working on any given day, but when during the weeks to come will be periods of high work load, whether we realistically have time to take on more work, and whether we are on target for the completion for these already planned goals. The monthly planner simply gives us a longer range look at our time than either the daily or weekly planner and helps us to more accurately anticipate the unfolding of our time weeks in advance.
Let's say for example that you had an upcoming exam in your Friday class for Introductory Microeconomics. You would want to enter this date both so it would not be forgotten and because it prepares you to do further planning. In keeping with our suggestions for keeping subgoals in the monthly planner, you would enter a series of interim objectives between the start of your preparation for the Economics exam and the exam date itself. These milestones would serve as indicators of the progress of your study. You might enter a note to complete a review of the first-term's work, to complete a review of the first half of the second term's work, and to complete the review problems and practice test that your professor handed out in class. As well you might make notes of how far along in the term you are as a motivational aid or warnings of how busy certain times will be to assist you in planning the amount of work you take on. The Weekly Objectives ListThe weekly objectives list works in much the same way as the monthly planner, giving us an opportunity to sub-divide our shorter term goals into weekly objectives or subgoals and then further into specific activities for the week. The importance of these steps cannot be overemphasized: by listing out our specific activities, we can more accurately estimate time required for them and so better plan our time. Let's say for example that one of your goals for the year was to maintain your honours standing and that you had a series of exams coming up including one for first year Introductory Microeconomics. You might set an objective to score a B+ or A grade on the exam and list this on your objectives list. Your next step would then be to consider a variety of study activities that would prepare you well for the examination. You might begin by entering your first activity, "complete readings and review lecture notes", in the activities column. Once you have entered your activity it is important to assign it a time estimate, in this case we've assigned this activity a three hour block of time. This block of time reflects an important principle in time estimating; when estimating time you might want to add time to the amount of time you think it will take you to complete the task. This is important because we tend to estimate without considering possible difficulties or interruptions. In this example we have applied a factor of 1.5 to the estimate; that is, our best case estimate for the activity was 2 hours, so we assigned the task 3 hours.
Now, once you have entered the first activity for study, you would continue with the others you have in mind. So, you might want to add "select main concepts, one hour", "practice problems from the end of the chapter, two hours", "reproduce graphs from memory, one hour", and "write paragraphs to interpret the graphs, one hour". (Though the times used here are for example purposes only, some of these strategies might just be helpful to you as study skills.) The final two columns on the form allow you to track whether or not you have scheduled and completed the activities you have listed. Your next step is to carry the listed activities, along with their associated time estimates to your weekly planner to be scheduled. The Weekly PlannerOften the weekly planner that most people use carries on it a series of items such as lecture times, tutorial times, laboratory times, times for you favourite television program and times for extracurricular activities such as social events with clubs, exercise times and so on. If this sounds like your schedule then you are probably not fully using this versatile time management tool. Your weekly planner will not be as effective as it could be because many of the most important tasks (homework activities which move you toward your goals) are left out of the picture. The result of this should be clear. If it isn't on the schedule it doesn't get done. That means you can see a lot of seemingly full and busy weeks can go by without you moving substantially towards your goals. Earlier we mentioned the weekly objectives list. At the end of our discussion of the objectives list we suggested that it could be used to track whether or not you have transferred your activities derived from your objectives onto your planner. If you look at the partially completed weekly planner (below) you'll notice all the unscheduled time and there is usually lots of it. Using the time estimates for the activities on the weekly objectives list as guides, find a block of time of appropriate duration in your schedule. Then write in the activities one at a time in priority order until you have either scheduled all of your activities or you have run out of time spaces. To give you an idea of how you might go about scheduling these activities, consider the first activity, "Complete readings and review notes." This three hour activity could be placed almost anywhere in the early part of the week, say on Monday or Tuesday and it could be in, say, two 90 minute blocks or all in one three hour block, depending on your preferences. For demonstration purposes, we have decided to use the time on Tuesday between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.. For the next activity, "select main concepts" we require a one hour block of time. Wednesday at 9 a.m. seems like a good potential time for this one. Our third activity, "Problems from back of chapter" might be scheduled, by you early birds, on Friday morning between 8 and 10 a.m. The final two activities could be scheduled on the weekend as shown.
Figure 7. The Weekly Planner If we return to the weekly objectives list for a moment you'll see that, having scheduled the activities on the list, we can mark that we have done so. Notice the column next to the one marked "Scheduled" on this form. It has space for you to mark whether or not you have completed the scheduled items on the list. You will derive a real sense of progress as you check off each activity. When you look back on the past week's activities it will become quite obvious to you that you are accomplishing a great deal with your time. As your time goes on, the build up of these activities will eventually lead you to the accomplishment of your goals. As the minutes of your time become hours, days, months and eventually years, you will be designing your life rather than having it be thrown together by uncertainty. As the architect of your future the products of your labours don't come merely from time passing, but from your time being invested in the careful planning and building of your future.
Many students find, for various reasons, that their scheduled activities do not occur the way that they were planned. An alternative method would be to keep a to-do list structured in order of priority. The list would contain the most important and urgent (be careful here) activities in your weekly objectives list. If you do not have many urgent activities, the fall back tasks would be the most important of the non-urgent activities. Keep the unimportant activities off the list. A good time to schedule is before the week begins and it is important to construct a plan for the entire week. The most important reason for planning this way is that by having a plan laid out for the coming week you maintain reasonable control over your time. Even with unexpected occurrences that can impact your schedule you assist yourself in making decisions that are governed by your desire to reach your goals. Without using a schedule you may be governed by your moment-to-moment moods which may lead you to make time decisions that take you away from your goals. A great deal of time is saved by using a weekly planner. In the short run you avoid the wastage of time that comes from constantly having to reevaluate what to do next. As well, you relieve your mind of the responsibility for organizing and remembering all your tasks, allowing yourself to focus intently on the work you want to accomplish. In the long run you save time by ensuring that on a daily basis you are making decisions about your time use that will lead you step-by-step towards your personal goals, avoiding the pitfalls of chronically misdirecting your time and efforts. After you have taken the step of planning your time in a weekly planner, your next steps will be to put the plan into action and log your achievements. As you engage in the process of planning regularly you will soon notice that you become more proficient at it. You will make better time estimates. You may be able to reduce or even eliminate costly time interruptions. You'll get more done in what seems to be less time. You'll reduce your wasted time and you will become more confident in your ability to achieve.
The Time LogOne final strategy that we would like to recommend you use is time tracking. Using time tracking once every few months will really help you get a clear sense of where your time is actually going. The form used here looks just like a weekly schedule but it works in reverse. Instead of writing things in that you are planning to do, time logging is a process of writing down the things that you have already done. Doing this is sort of a get-to-know-yourself exercise because this procedure will highlight many of your habits. Some people find that every time they plan to do math homework they end up watching television. Other people just can't seem to follow their schedule until the week before finals. Whatever the case may be for you, we are sure that you will find this process helps you adjust and fine-tune your time management practices. Using a time tracking sheet is fairly straightforward. At the end of an hour (or half depending on your preference) jot yourself a quick note about what you did for the last hour. The note needn't be long, one sentence or less should suffice. If a particular planned activity doesn't transpire simply enter a comment as to what you really did during that time. This way you will be able to take a long, hard look at your distractions and tendencies, compare them to what you had planned, and act to reduce the impact these distractions have on your planning.
If you're really serious about making changes and getting results from your time management strategies you can analyze your time log by time category such as: sleep, study, work, travel and so on. Before doing the summary estimate the amount of time that you think you spend on the various activities listed on the form. Feel free to add any additional categories that might be helpful. Then log your time for one week on an hour by hour basis. When the week is over summarize your time by category for each day and add up the values for all seven days of the week. Summarizing your time use allows you to understand how much time your really spend in the various areas of your life. The weekly summary of time use form in this package is a sample that we have used in many workshops with students. As we have seen with many of these students it is almost certain that you will see a notable difference between the number of hours you expected to use in certain categories and the actual number of hours you spend. If you find that you spend more time in one area than you wanted, and less in another, the weekly summary of time use clearly indicates which activities to reduce to find the extra time you want for that neglected area of your life. A Final Note on PlanningLooking back on the material you have covered in these web-pages may give you the feeling that there is far too much to remember and even more to do. Setting goals, breaking them down into manageable chunks, allocating those chunks to specific time slots in your schedule, ensuring that you are working effectively on important tasks and keeping yourself on track may seem like more work than it is worth. To keep the amount of work involved in perspective, remember that your goal setting will take considerable time. But once your goals are set, your planning for the next week should take you no more than an hour or so. It is often said that one hour spent planning saves several hours of activity above and beyond the hour spent planning. This is true because of our tendency for all the things that have already been mentioned, like a lack of focus, distraction, procrastination and uncertainty. Once your week is planned you will experience clarity of focus, your tendency to be distracted will be reduced and you will be certain of your reasons for doing the things you had planned. When the next week starts you will be able to move toward your goals immediately. In this state you will be much more comfortable and capable of dealing with time shifts. In the next section we will begin an investigation into some unique challenges that you face as a student. |
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Law School Boot Camp |
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Passing the Bar Supplemental Coaching |
| February 2008 Bar Application Deadline November 30, 2007 |
| July 2008 Bar Application Deadline March 30, 2008 |
