Time management is a skill that does not come naturally to everyone. There are plenty of people in the world who are very bad at keeping a schedule and completing their responsibilities on time. Some of these people have it worse than others. I personally hold the title of having the worst time management skills in the history of the human race. I never seem to be able to budget my time, I always seem to be doing everything at the last minute, and I’m two or three minutes late to everything almost all of the time. I’ve been this way for my entire life. Having poor time management skills in college can make the already heavily stressful nature of college even more stressful and frustrating. Having dealt with this for my entire life, I’ve come up with a few methods of controlling it.

One particular method that can be helpful to get into the habit of doing is to structure your entire week right down to the hour. For example, three to five o’ clock on Wednesday would be for homework for one particular class, and then five to seven would be for another class, etc. This can help the person mentally envision their entire week, and then the rest is just a matter of keeping the schedule. Now if you have severe time management issues (like me), this can make things worse, because now all you have done is given yourself a bunch of new deadlines for you to not be able to keep. For this reason, I tend to default to my second method.

The time management method I usually find myself following is simple. I just try to always imagine that it’s the last minute, even when it’s not. People usually waste time and procrastinate with tasks such as homework and papers because they feel like they will have more time later. They then take it too far to the point where they are out of time. So the trick is to simply correct for that. Pretend that you are out of time so that you force yourself to get whatever task you are trying to accomplish done, and then go back and make improvements later. This can help with keeping deadlines and maintaining grades.