Adapted from How to Study (Phil Race, 2003, Oxford: Blackwell)

Managing your Time and Getting Started

(Adapted from Practical Tips for Students Phil Race: published by Blackwell in 2003) [Note: though I wrote the suggestions below with students in mind, they apply to just about anyone. Youre welcome to download these tips, and pass them on to anyone who may benefit from them].

Managing your time

Only you can do this. Its your time. Weve all got exactly the same amount of time to manage in a day: 24 hours, yet some people seem rushed and other people seem laid back. Its happier being laid back about time, especially when you know that you deserve to be laid back. Thats your reward for tackling your timemanagement head on. 1 Decide that youre in charge of your time. This doesnt mean that youre going to sit back and waste it, but it also doesnt mean youre going to get so flustered about all the different things which you need to do that youre going to end up doing nothing much but scrabble around. Being in charge of your time is about making sure that you get good value from using it. 2 Remind yourself whats in it for you. Being good at timemanagement will improve your quality of life. Youll be more efficient, more effective, and under a lot less pressure from other people. Managing time makes time. Yes, it takes some time too, but the hours youll save by getting good at time-management will be your time to do what you want to with. Get a degree in time-management! You wont see these listed in any Prospectus, but just about all degrees depend on being an accomplished time-manager. The better you are at using your study time well, the safer you are at getting whatever qualifications you want. Think in terms of high learning payoff. Choose to use your time to do things that have high learning payoff, such as making summaries of things, discussing things with others, quizzing yourself about what youve just learned, quizzing yourself about what you learned three days ago, and three weeks ago, and so on. Limit the time you spend on things with low learning payoff. Theres less learning gain per minute in tasks such as passive reading, writing essays, writing reports, doing practical work, and simply sitting in some of the less stimulating lectures. Youve still got to do these things of course, but dont kid yourself that youre getting a lot into your mind just because youre busy doing them. Dont waste time thinking about doing some work. Were all very good at putting off the evil moment of actually starting work. Just start thats saved you from wasting any time putting it all off. Manage your minutes, and the hours will look after themselves. Dont wait till youve got a good, solid, quiet three hours to get on with your next bit of studying you havent got such a time window! Use what youve got, five minutes now, five minutes soon, and lots and lots of short-butuseful spells of time. Spend some of the short bits of time on your learning agendas. For example, it just takes a few minutes to look over the notes from one of last weeks lectures, or make your own summary of something youve read, or a checklist of things youre going to do in the next few hours or days. Choose to use the first 10% of the time available for a task. Youll probably have noticed that left to human nature we usually manage to finish a task well enough in the last 10% of the available time. Its pure logic that just as much could have been done in the first 10%. Think of all the other things you can then get through in the remaining 90% of the available time for that task not least spending a little time now and then going back to the task and polishing it up. That means more marks, if its an assessed task a lot more marks.

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Adapted from How to Study (Phil Race, 2003, Oxford: Blackwell)

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Set your own deadlines. Your lecturers will set you deadlines, but make yours earlier ones much earlier ones. Set staged deadlines as well as final deadlines. Break big tasks into manageable chunks. Tell other people about your targets and deadlines. Knowing that they could then ask you have you done what you said you were going to do by today? is a great incentive to making sure youre going to be able to reply of course, yes. Be an early person. Dont just turn up on time for lectures, tutorials, practicals, and so on, but get there that bit early. Even if youre standing around doing nothing as a result, you can use your brain to do some useful thinking. You can tune in to what you already know about the topic, and what you want to find out about the topic, and how that topic relates to other things youre learning all high learning payoff thinking. This is all far better than being late, when most of your brain would just be full of thoughts about being late! Get ahead of schedule. Try to get yourself a couple of weeks (or more) ahead of where you need to be. Its a great insurance policy. You wont then be completely thrown by the unexpected a bout of flu, the sudden family crisis, a friend who needs your time, and so on. Its a great feeling when youve got time in hand. You then dont use up energy worrying about hand-in dates, assessment dates or exam timetables, and can use your energy instead gaining learning payoff. Keep going backwards. Make time to stop and reflect. Go back to what you learned yesterday, the day before, the week before, and so on. You still need all of this. Dont just go surging forwards, letting all of your learning evaporate in your wake. Consolidate. Youre measured sooner or later on how much youve consolidated not on how much you once learned then forgot! Plan time off. When youre ahead of schedule, you deserve some time off. When you take planned time off, youve got a clear conscience and can enjoy the time off far more than if youd just escaped from the pressure of a backlog of work. Enjoying time off restores you brain and body, and makes you fitter for your next bout of high-payoff learning.

Getting started
This is about task-management, over and above time-management. Suppose youve got something important to do in your studying: if you dont start it, you certainly wont finish it! Human nature seems to be that the harder the task, the easier it is to postpone starting it. Once started, however, most tasks get done. Once under way, they often get done far more quickly and comfortably than we ever imagined. These tips are in two parts: looking at the enemies of task-management those work avoidance strategies we can fall prey to, and how to really get started when you decide to get started. Check out your work avoidance strategies: do any of those below apply to you? If not, well done. If so, however, know your enemy, and do something about them. 1 Doing all sorts of tidying up before you start? For example, tidying your desk, tidying your room, tidying your flat, tidying the town? By all means do a little tidying after youve done half-an-hour on the task (if, that is, you still want to). At least then youll still be thinking about what you did in that half-hour as you tidy up. Doing easy little tasks, so as to put off getting started on harder bigger ones? This ones easy to put right: just do half-an-hour straightaway on the bigger one, then spend a little time on one or two of the easier ones to catch your breath mentally. Youll be surprised just how much of that big task you got done in just half-an-hour anyway, and its no longer in the realm of the unstarted. Indulging in displacement activities? Doing your laundry? Ironing your socks? Going off on a food shop? Oiling your bike? Oiling everyone elses bikes? There are enough displacement activities available to you to fill a book twice as big as this one! Dont kid yourself youre not likely to invent any new ones. Theyve all been done before. And theyve always had the same effect slowing people down from doing important things. All of these displacement activities have their proper place after the important task is well under way, when you can keep your brain full of important stuff while you potter around with easy stuff.

Adapted from How to Study (Phil Race, 2003, Oxford: Blackwell)

Collecting all the bits and pieces you may need to do the important task? Getting together all of the books, papers, handouts, notes? Getting together pens, pencils, drawing instruments? You seldom need everything just to get started on the task. Once its under way, you can rest your brain by doing a little more collecting. Getting things just right to start? Sorting out whats on your computer. Filing everything properly in folders. Backing up important stuff on floppies. Answering that email youve not replied to yet. All useful stuff, of course, but far better to do it as time out once the big task is under way.

Tactics for really getting started on a task: choose from the list below those actions which will really help you. Better still, this is where you can be inventive: invent some even better ones of your own. For the purposes of discussion, imagine youd been set an essay to write (but you can easily extend the ideas below to all sorts of other important tasks). 6 Get out two pieces of blank paper. Dont now walk for two hours looking for a shop thats still open to buy some paper the back of a handout will do for this. Some things one can do straight onto a computer, but other things still need paper. This is not least because once youve powered up your computer, there will be yet more displacement activities open to you. If its logged on to the net, theres the whole Internet to surf! At the very least therell be a game or two on the machine. Furthermore, you can stick useful bits of paper on the wall while you work later on your computer, to remind you about what youre actually doing. Jot down what you already know about the topic. On one blank sheet of paper, put down the topic title or keywords from the task briefing in an oval about the size of an egg in the middle of the page, and draw spokes radiating round the egg, and write something you already know (just a word or two to remind you) at the end of each spoke. Be free-ranging with your egg diagram. Hatch your thoughts, dont just keep them cooped up in your brain. Jot down what you dont yet know about the topic. Sorry, what? Use another blank sheet of paper, again with the topic in an egg in the middle. This time draw spokes with questions at the ends of them all the questions relating to things that you dont yet know about the topic, but might need to find out. Now look once again, very carefully, at the task instructions. Look for the key words in the instructions. What exactly have you been asked to do? Is it discuss, or describe, or compare and contrast or evaluate or find out and so on? Look again at what you know and dont-yet-know, and check out which things are really relevant to the task as asked. Phone a friend? Talk to other people if theyre there? These egg diagrams of what you know and dont yet know are even better if you do them with a friend or two. This isnt copying. This isnt cheating. Its just thinking together, and enriching everyones ideas bank. There will always be things or questions which you wouldnt have thought of just sitting on your own. Now start prioritising. Whats most important in the various things you already know? Which are the most important questions among the things you dont yet know? What do you really really need to find out? Go round both egg diagrams making the things on the ends of the spokes out in order of importance. Put brackets around the things that didnt turn out to be important. You could cross them out or erase them forever, but its sometimes useful to keep them as a record of things you thought about briefly then discounted. Now start on the task itself. Dont start at the beginning necessarily, but just start. Put something down on paper (or compose something on the computer) that will be a rough draft of one small part of the bigger task. Then you can happily spend a little time doing one or two of that mountain of other things you might have still been doing if you hadnt been so wise as to have already started. But strangely enough, most of the displacement activities wont seem nearly as attractive to you as they were before you started the real task.

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