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We all find ourselves exclaiming about how time flies. Heavens, it’s March already! Here’s a comment from a first-year student a few years ago:
“The majority of students complain about time and we are the ones who always misuse ‘this little time’ we have by sitting around complaining about the accent of that lecturer and that the lecturing pace is really fast, but I’ve learnt that complaining about it makes it even faster because I’ve lost time while I was complaining.”
As we said last week, time is like money – you only have a limited amount of it, and when it’s gone it’s gone. Better decide carefully how you are going to use it. The good news is, you can find time to do all your work PLUS sports and friends and family.
Start by drawing up a weekly schedule like this:
First fill in your classes and tutorials. Next comes study time. Being a full-time student is exactly like having a full-time job: you have to spend about 40 hours a week on your studies. If you spend 15 hours a week in class, you have to schedule another 25 hours of study time. That means about four hours every day, six days of the week. A full-time course is structured to fill that amount of time. If you don’t put in the time, you are not going to get the results.
Evenings are great for studying: 18:30–20:30, half an hour for coffee, and another session 21:00–23:00 gives you a solid four hours. If you prefer to go to bed earlier and get up earlier, fit in an hour at the beginning of the day and shorten the sessions in the evening. You will probably take Friday night off, so remember to find those three hours somewhere else in the week.
Often you have an hour or so between classes. Block out some of these pockets for “free time” when you can just hang with friends or potter about on social media – you need that as well – but don’t let all your days vanish in this way. You can “find” solid hours in those in-between times. Find a quiet place and get some of the less-demanding work out of the way.
Add scheduled times for sport, clubs, or student affairs.
Last, but not least, find time for friends and family and for yourself, to read a novel or to listen to music or to do whatever feeds your soul.
Whatever your religious convictions, it may be a good idea to work a bit more on six days every week so that you can give yourself one day off. You will find that it becomes an oasis you look forward to and a motivation to keep going on the other days. The Bible quotes Jesus as saying man (or woman) was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man. We all need a rest day, a day off every week.
Happy planning
The GRAD team
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GRAD – your guide to university success is a partnership project of Ruda Landman, StudyTrust, Van Schaik Publishers and Capitec Bank.