Effectively utilizing 24 hours in a day is an art. Effectively utilizing 24 hours in a college day? Magic. There seem to be two prevailing thoughts about how a college student should manage her time, and they happen to differ greatly. Most universities have the studying golden rule of “three hours per credit.” At Southwestern University, standard classes are four credits. I wanted to see if this rule provides a healthy and attainable daily routine and if students actually live by the truism.

Applied theory at Southwestern

Let’s take the three hours per credit theory and apply it to one day as a general, second semester Southwestern First-Year. We begin with 24 hours…

One day you might have three classes. Subtract four hours from 24.

Then Southwestern promotes studying 2.5 hours per credit per week. Most students take 4 classes (16 credits). So if we want to focus on studying for four classes in one day, subtract five hours.

Eating is necessary, so subtract two hours.

National polls show that 80% of college students work around 17 hours per week, so subtract three hours for one day.

Don’t forget your extracurricular. Subtract one hour.

Personal time, like exercising and wellness, account for roughly two hours.

If you did the math right, the above scenario leaves you with about seven hours of sleep. Most students dream of getting that much sleep, and most students don’t fit this nicely compartmentalized, supposedly ideal profile. There are classes that require more attention than others. There are expectations to be involved in more than one activity, and there are social norms that persuade students to go out and socialize without setting a timer. Moreover, college life is unpredictable with unusual hours, so a successful student should leave room in her schedule to adapt to changes.

According to students

Southwestern is part of the National Survey of Student Engagement, and the most recent statistics from 2014 show quite a different schedule than the golden rule suggests.

We start again with 24 hours….

The majority of students reported studying and preparing for classes for 2.5 hours a day; participating in extracurriculars one hour; volunteering one hour; going to class four hours; socializing one hour; and the majority of students reported working zero hours.

With this profile, you’re left with about 14 hours of time. Again we can take away personal and eating time and are left with about 10 hours. This is also a very general, student-reported profile, but it makes a bit more sense than the first one. The real question for me, though, is whether students feasibly have the ability to get eight hours of sleep per night. The answer is yes. Yes, a college student can get eight hours of sleep, but he/she has to block off that time before scheduling anything else. We start with 24 hours a day and automatically subtract eight hours, as if we only have 16 hours a day. If we schedule our day in a 16-hour time frame, maybe priorities and distractions in our lives would become evident, and maybe we would attain more autonomy as a result of putting the most important part of our health first: sleep.