Study Tip #14
HOW TO PLAN YOUR TIME SO THAT YOU CAN GET YOUR HOMEWORK DONE

Put a high priority on doing schoolwork. 

Most people's problems with "not enough time" are really decision problems. Is your time problem really caused by your choices? 

• Many people don't like to study, so they put a low priority on doing their homework. When they get free time, they choose to do leisure and family activities that feel important.
• They cannot get their schoolwork done and must work hard at the last minute. They complain they don't have enough time! Wrong! They had rated school work as low in importance. They had treated schoolwork as lightly as any sensible person would treat a low priority activity.
• Suggestion: Decide that you feel it is very important to do your school work. Then you will automatically begin to have more time for it.

Use three kinds of time planning reminders. 

Many busy people use all three kinds of planners:

• To-Do list. It is notes on tasks for that day and the future, such as phone calls to return, errands, ideas. You make a detailed list, add new things that come up during the day, include small things and derive others from your long-term schedule.
• Long-term calendar. It marks the due dates & times of assignments, tests, papers, appointments, and other events on a calendar. 
• List of bigger projects. It lists on one sheet of paper all the big tasks you must keep working on. Often these lists indicate priority, the next steps, due dates.

Plan a master schedule at the start of each term.

Include the times each day that you read and do homework. Students who carry a course load of 12 credits will often schedule 10 to 30 hours of homework outside of class each week. A week has 168 hours.

How to make a daily "To-Do" list.

• Write down everything you need to do. Put both school work and other activities on it. Then rate each item's importance.
• Put "A" beside activities that are highly important. (Most people use the left column.)
• Put "B" beside activities that are somewhat important, but are secondary in comparison to "A" activities.
• Put "C" beside activities that would be nice to do, but are not as important as the "A's" and "B's".
• Then throughout the day, work on only the "A" activities until they are done.
• Rate most schoolwork as an "A". 
• Rate assignments with future due dates as "B" or "A" priority.
• Put relaxing time on your "to-do" list. It is important to give yourself time off to lead a balanced life, except possibly for doing brief periods of intense work. If you do not schedule times to relax, you may end up hating your work, rejecting it and plunging into fun activities.

Use your knowledge about the psychology of learning to plan time. 

Here are three facts about learning that relate to time:

• People can learn with the lowest amount of total study time by studying topics in many spreadout work sessions. The same spacing effect is true when practicing skills, such as a sport, doing math, solving physics problems. In contrast, working in a few long sessions is less effective.
  • Suggestion: Plan to make several contacts with the same material spread out over several days.
• Certain memory tasks take longer than others. It takes most people longer to learn information that is not very meaningful to them. Examples: new vocabulary, symbols, proper names, numbers and dates, and material in a new field. In contrast, people can quickly learn highly meaningful information.
  • Suggestion: Schedule more total time to learn less meaningful information.
• It takes a long time to build skills and do them with greater speed and higher accuracy. You will be learning skills any time you must learn to do such tasks as solving problems, writing essays, and performing procedures.
  • Suggestion: Plan to spread out your practice of skills over days, at least. In contrast, you can memorize information in fewer sessions.
• Plan time at the very small level of reading sentences, paragraphs and passages. Plan to read and pause and review in repeated cycles.
• Plan time when taking courses in math, science and other subjects that require solving problems. Plan to do some problems right after reading the text or taking notes on how to do them. Such quick use of your new knowledge will trap it while it is fresh and help you solve problems.
• When solving problems plan enough time to let yourself pause after each problem is finished to do two things: To review the steps you took (to strengthen the memory) and to praise yourself and feel good about using the techniques successfully (to give yourself positive reinforcement).
• Use your knowledge of the rapid fading of information from working memory and of fading of weakly learned associatiions as a basis planning the times when you review.

Plan time for large assignments by dividing them into parts. 

Analyze the tasks involved in such large assignments as papers and big study projects. Break them into small parts. Starting with the last task, work backwards and schedule time for each part. 

The purpose of this advice is to help you guarantee that you plan enough time to finish a big task. If you do not plan, you may think the task is shorter than it really is. Then you will put it off, start it late, and have trouble.

You will need to estimate three things:

1. What are all the tasks you need to go through to finish the assignment?
2. How long will each task take?
3. When will you need to do each early task in order to make enough time to do the later tasks?

An example:

Suppose you are writing a short paper. The steps are: read the assignment, take notes, think about it, write an outline, write a first draft, edit it, and write a final draft.

If your paper is due Monday, ask yourself when you need to start writing the final draft (the last task) in order to be done on time. Next ask yourself when you should edit your first draft (the next-to-last task) in order to allow time to write the final draft. Next ask about writing the first draft. And so on. Work backwards from later steps until you schedule the first step of reading.

Start big projects by doing "foot-wetter" tasks.

Some projects look so huge that people find it hard to start them and keep putting them off.

• You can often get started by picking out an easy part of it to do, the "foot-wetter." Once you start, you can continue easily.
• Schedule a short work-session. The purpose is to make it seem easy, not hard.
• Do easy things: get the books together; take out the typing paper; and read the class notes.
• You can also find something in the middle of the project to do. You don't need to start at the beginning. Many good writers say that they start in the middle and later write the first paragraphs.

When you get short periods of time, work on short parts of longer assignments.

• Do not wait for long blocks of time to come open before you study. Your penalty for waiting for long time periods comes in yout waste of short time periods that you could use for studying.
• Read three pages while waiting for the bus. Write one paragraph for an English paper while waiting for a TV program to start. And so on.
• You may wonder whether people's minds can handle broken-up periods of work. Yes, they can. As you start, remind yourself where you were in the task. Do a 1-minute review to warm up your memory for the task. 

Learn to say "No" to people who try to interrupt you. 

When people suggest that you do something with them, they do not usually realize how necessary and important it is for you to do homework. So as you say "No," explain it to them. If you promise them some time later, they will usually accept it.

You will have to pay a price in order to manage your time successfully. Some people will feel dissatisfied with you, and you will feel frustrated when you give up doing certain things you like. Are you willing to pay that price in order to get your education? Only you can decide.

Do your most difficult school work during your best time of day. 

Many people know that during certain times of day they work faster and think more clearly than at other times. They know that they are slow or sleepy or grumpy at other times. You should notice what times are good and bad for you.

• If you are a "night person", then night is when to write your papers and to read the deep books. Do easier work at another time. If you are a "morning person", use morning for creative work and hard work. You will accomplish more.
• Do not do ordinary, routine homework during the time that you are most alert. Save the best time for the hardest work.

Follow the "Work First" rule. 

Some successful students do not schedule their time at all. How do they do it? They put schoolwork ahead of everything else almost all the time. So they usually get it done.

• The rule: When you have school work waiting, always do it ahead of anything less necessary.
• Don't be silly about this rule. Of course, you can eat, sleep, and mow the lawn on Saturday.
• People who follow this rule never put things off. They don't procrastinate. They start new assignments immediately. Frequently, they get their work all done early and they have free time for play that they can use without feeling guilty. Some people say that the biggest benefit of using the "work first" rule is that you don't feel guilty when you do something else.

(Dan Hodges. 7/07)

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