Students need time management skills if they are to succeed
I have become increasingly alarmed at how much time students and youngsters waste and how they seem incapable of setting daily, weekly and yearly priorities and managing them successfully. Digital tools can greatly help people manage their time effectively and efficiently, but they are also, unfortunately, the main cause for this timewasting phenomenon.
When I walk into a classroom nowadays, the students who are there waiting for the next lecture are invariably hunched over their smartphones, reading and typing messages or other such nonstop social media activity. The digital addiction is obvious. Moreover, one can often find students playing smartphone/internet games during the “free” hours they have between classes. And I can only imagine how weekends are spent.
Study habits are also problematic, as it is not uncommon for a student to tell me that they spent most of a night “cramming” for an exam or finishing an assignment. This not only affects their sleep very badly, it is not even effective as a study strategy.
Time management is a huge topic, on which people have published bestselling books, conducted workshops, and developed all kinds of programs (video series, smartphone apps, etc.), to varying degrees of success. Indeed, the fact that millions of people buy books, watch videos and sign up for workshops on time management is indicative of the need, not necessarily of the effectiveness of those products. In education, many schools conduct time management lectures or workshops for their students; some universities even offer courses on the subject.
The problem is a modern one, of course. Companies and institutions are seeking to maximize productivity, trying to squeeze every minute from their employees. And competition at the individual level has pushed us to try to use time to the utmost, reducing the amount of sleep we get in the process (recent studies have shown that average nightly sleep periods have dropped from more than eight hours to less than seven).
It is amazing that, in times when we have digital calendars, many people are incapable of managing their time and activities properly
Nidhal Guessoum
There also seems to be increasing demands on our time: Work, communication (text messages and email), exercise, family and social, hobbies, entertainment, travel, and more. But at the same time, our attention spans have shrunk, our ability to control life has weakened, and our capacity to prioritize tasks and achieve our goals appears to be slipping away.
It is amazing that, in times when we have digital calendars such as “Outlook,” where we can easily program tasks weeks and months in advance and get notifications and reminders as we choose (hours or days ahead), many people are incapable of managing their time and activities properly.
Organizing one’s weekly, monthly and yearly schedule helps one complete more tasks, as one dynamically manages them by rescheduling some as things evolve. With this, however, comes the danger of seeing many “empty” slots on the screen and thus being tempted to fill them with more tasks. It is important to know how much one can do and not overfill one’s calendar and then start to feel depressed for not being able to complete all the tasks.
Greater productivity reduces stress, increases one’s self-esteem and happiness, raises one’s professional reputation (as a doer), leads to promotion and career advancement, and improves one’s social relations. Conversely, procrastinating and missing deadlines or submitting hashed, last-minute work will only lead to low professional status and reputation and increased stress and psychosomatic illnesses.
In addition to such easy tools for time management, there are work management strategies to help complete tasks and work. One simple tactic is to break big jobs into more manageable bites, for instance by writing an outline of a report, thus achieving a little milestone, and then seeing the sections of the report as small upcoming tasks that one will more readily approach.
Coming back to students, we need to teach them how to manage time and work properly, how to study in effective and efficient ways, and how to thus succeed by achieving their full potential, being happy and enjoying their time in school.
My students are always amazed when I tell them that never in my long years of study (all the way up to my doctoral courses and thesis) did I stay up past midnight. In fact, I rarely studied past 10pm, as I am an early-to-bed person (and an early riser). It is all a question of managing your 24 hours. Even if you stay up all night, you still have the same 24 hours as I have; I may just be using mine more efficiently, giving myself more time to sleep, being in good mental shape when I sit down to study or work, and thus performing better and succeeding more.
Managing time well in this digital age with all its distractions is a challenge that we need to prepare our children and students for. It is a skill that can serve them well their whole lives, on both the personal and professional levels.
- Nidhal Guessoum is a professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Twitter: @NidhalGuessoum
