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Lo! Behold the bleak, surrealist landscape of Winter Quarter.
Come winter in MAPH, most students find that they have much less structured time than they did in fall. Without Core twice a week and the set precept/social hour schedule on Fridays, the average MAPHer’s week looks very different from the fall.Winter inevitably means lots of unstructured time and lots to accomplish in ten weeks—which makes time management one of the biggest challenges this quarter.
For instance, I know a lot of you only have Tuesday/Thursday classes this quater—how do you make sure you’re structuring M/W/F (and the weekend) to stay on track and keep making progress with your thesis, course readings, and job hunts? Keep reading for some tips on managing your time and staying productive through the long winter months!
Make a schedule
This sounds pretty straightforward, but each day, write down a specific hour-by-hour schedule. You can do this on your phone, in a day planner, a sticky note—whatever’s most convenient for you. But the point is that it’s not just a to-do list. On the schedule, budget out exactly how much time you plan to spend on each activity. Specify how long you want to stay at the gym, how much time you want to take for lunch, how many hours you’ll put in at the Reg, and when you’ll go home at night.
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With a basic to-do list, it’s very easy to leave items undone; when you plan out how much time you’ll spend on each activity, it makes you more accountable for getting through the list, which ultimately makes you more productive!
SCS’s Academic Skills Assessment Program also has some great resources to help you plan out your time and prioritize to-do’s. Check out their page for recommendations on how to organize your to-do’s and PDFs to help you plan your weekly and quarterly schedules!
How to build habits
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Writing doesn’t have to be like that, Hercules.
One of the most important lessons I learned during my MAPH year is that good habits trump willpower. Sure, you could devote a week of Herculean effort and long nights at the library to writing your final papers—but it’s ultimately much more effective to make a habit of writing on a daily basis. The best way to build habits is to create conditions that make it easier to do the thing you’re trying to make habitual.
For instance, last winter I rented a locker at the Reg (such a good investment!) and moved all of my thesis books there. This meant that I couldn’t write at home, at a café, or in the MAPH Lounge—I had to go to same spot in the library everyday. Having the locker forced me to go there, and eventually the daily writing became a ritual of sorts: get out of class, grab a Peachy Green Rooibos from Ex Libris, and buckle down by locker on third floor to write for an hour or two.
It doesn’t have to be a library locker, but however you can create conditions that help make habits of structured writing/reading will be enormously useful. Developing consistent work habits will help you structure your time (especially on days when you have less class) and can help you chip away at thesis work and papers so that the end of the quarter is less of a time crunch.
Stick to a sleep schedule
Speaking of habits, one of the best ones you can develop this quarter is a consistent sleep schedule. The surest way you can mess up your grand time-management plans is to pull an all-nighter, sleep in the next day, miss the time you had budgeted to work, and then stay up the next night to catch up.
As I wrote in my sleep post last quarter, a consistent schedule is essential to time management, and also leads to better sleep! It’s tough when you’re juggling so many deadlines, but making a point of putting the books down at the same time each night will help you stick to the work schedules you’ve planned out.
Using the Pomodoro technique
Suppose you block out three hours at the Reg in the afternoon to do thesis writing. We’ve all had the experience of getting lost in the backwaters of Youtube for lengthy stretches of timImage may be NSFW.
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e, so how do you keep yourself on task?
Last year, I became a huge fan of the Pomodoro technique—the basic idea is that you divvy up your time into 30-minute segments, each one consisting of 25 minutes of focused work, followed by a 5 minute break. You can adapt this method however you like (I’m a fan of 50 minutes on, followed by a 10 minute break), but the important steps are: 1) set a timer for a specific period of time and 2) bear down and focus as much as possible while you’re on the clock. Afterwards, you can reward yourself with a walk around, a snack and fresh cup of coffee, or a short excursion on TheFacebook.com.
As for the timer, you can use your phone or this weird Pomodoro tomato timer, but I’m an enormous advocate of Self Control, an app that disables the internet on your computer for a set amount of time. Put half an hour on the clock, and try to pound out a page of writing in that time—Self Control will make sure email distractions don’t get in the way!
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Self Control, doing what it does best.
Consistency trumps all
If you haven’t noticed, the basic theme of this post is that consistency and habit are the best ways to help manage your time. Make a daily schedule. Make a habit of writing each day. Get to sleep at the same time each night.
Doing all this will make you feel more balanced through this quarter, and it will ultimately make you so much more productive. Now go forth and manage the heck out of all that time you have for the next ten weeks!