There is an automatic reset button at the end of every day.

So the phrasing of that is a little confusing, but it basically means that your “to do list” is never ending. It’s true that the college workload is vastly different from high school, because in high school your grades mostly depended on the work you did in class. However, in college (exempting labs, discussion, and seminar classes), you aren’t really graded for what you do in class. They say, “if you carry the standard load of 15 semester hours, you should easily expect to spend at least 30 hours a week in study and preparation. You should consider this to be your full-time job” (Mundsack, James, Ellin 10). It’s just too bad we don’t get paid for all our hard work, but I guess in the long run we eventually will. Stop thinking like a high school student; even upperclassmen have a difficult time reminding themselves about the realities of their course workload. You should start to think about your homework as more of a save point rather than the final boss in a video game: just because you’ve finished fighting a boss today doesn’t mean you’ve completed the game. Another way you can think about it is that in high school you had a single small pizza to eat; that was your homework load. In college, the pizza becomes an extra-large one, and you now have five more of them, depending on your credit load. You cannot realistically believe that you are going to finish all of those extra-large pizzas in a single night, week, or month. (Keep that in mind when registering for classes and when planning out your schedule.) It’s going to take awhile for you to get into that mind frame of a constant reset every day, but once you accept that your list of things to get done is never going to be completely done, you will find your homework much easier to manage.

Time management is considered a skill for a reason.

This is like the twin of the previous paragraph, but like twins, there are subtle yet substantial differences. Going off the video game metaphor from before, time management is the ability to look at all the elements of the game and realistically prioritize the best way to go about completing a level. To help you understand this better, I’ll use Skyrim as an example. In Skyrim there are numerous quests to complete on top of the main quest that allows you to beat the game. If you know the game well or have played it before, you could easily finish the main quest in four to five hours; however, you cannot complete every quest in the game in that amount of time. So you have to decide: do you finish the main quest or do you choose a smaller side quest that might take an equal amount of time to finish? That’s what time management is; it’s looking at your list of things to do and deciding what to accomplish first.

Since not all of us are familiar with video games, I’ll use a more applicable situation. Let’s hypothetically say that you have made a list of all the things you need to do for your classes for the week. When you look at the list, you should know what the highest priority task on your list is and be able to finish that before doing other activities or other projects. If you find yourself in a situation where there is no specific task that prioritizes itself over the others (and you often will), what I recommend you do is start with the most difficult thing on your list. A lot of times the most difficult tasks are the ones we try to, “save for last” because we don’t want to do them. However, I have found that the hardest tasks on our lists are often the ones that cause us the most stress, and the longer we push them off the more stress they cause us. The annoying thing about time management is that it is a skill we must learn to master. We are not born with the innate ability to plan accordingly when it comes to task completion, though I will not deny that I wish it we were. You are in charge of your own schedules now and you must hold yourself accountable for that. College is going to prepare you for the stresses of your future career, and often times, I believe that we tend to forget that.

If you’re still having trouble visualizing what time management looks like take a look at this video.

Give yourself downtime or you’ll be crying in a corner somewhere.

I guess I’m rolling with the sibling comparison today, but this is technically the third member of the “College Essentials” kit. I’ve discussed the expectations of a college student and how to manage those expectations, but there is one more thing that you must remember: Take care of yourself. The importance of this final addition to the family I’ve created cannot be stressed enough. I understand the stress of homework, the pressures of hanging out with friends, the tension between wanting to see your partner, and the desperate need to be by yourself. I have noticed that students don’t often think about downtime as a necessary thing for themselves, and that ultimately gets them into trouble down the road. It’s good to be involved on campus, be dedicated to your studies, or to go out and have a good time on a Friday night, but you need to be sure to allow your mind and body to rest and decompress. My planner is an hour-by-hour planner and I actually schedule in my bed time. Yep, that’s right. I make an appointment on my phone and in my planner telling me when my sleep schedule is. Maybe it’s because I’m overly organized, but I pencil-in my downtime. That way, I can physically see that I need give myself a break. This time could be spent napping, going for a walk, hanging out in the dining room with my beautiful sorority sisters, going shopping, or just lying in bed reading. The point is that I do something that removes myself from my work as a student, and to remind myself that I am a human being and not a scholastic robot. So when you do give yourself some downtime, try not to make the activity something you might find yourself saying, “I have to,” because then it goes from being relaxing to working, which was the thing you were trying to get away from in the first place. You will find that your stress level will slowly decrease if you give your mind and body the time it needs to recuperate.

These are the three things that I personally deem to be essential to remember when it comes to college life, though I understand that not everyone sees it the same way I do. What are some of the things that you think, find, or have found to be essential in your college career?

Sources:

Mundsack, Allan, James Deese, and Ellin K. Deese. How to Study and Other Skills for Success in College. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print.