Time management & Study skills

Have you ever overtried to study and after a long, exhausting study session, the next day you couldn’t even remember a thing you studied? Or trying to study and not being able to focus? If the answer is “Yes”, then below we will discuss solutions for that problem, approaching time and studying in a way you can work smarter, not harder! Thus, your free time will increase and it will be more qualitative, since next time you’re out on a walk you won’t be feeling like you have pending tasks waiting for you! The solution lies in two parts. First of all, you need the proper time management, that is to protect the time you spent in reading as much as possible. Then, you have to utilize that time efficiently, by using study skills, with whom you will be able to understand and remember what you’ve read easier.

By definition, study skills are the skills that help us organize our learning autonomously, by acquiring, saving and expressing properly that information. The most important study skills are reading, noting, memorization, trial and time management. Time management is perhaps the most important of them all. Time management skills are those who allow us to plan and execute consciously how we will spend our time in a specific activity, so as to improve its productivity and its efficiency.

“During the first years in school, I was really absorbed in the student’s life merriment but basically, I was just sweeping the responsibilities under the carpet. A lot of classes that I hadn’t successfully passed begun to gather, which was negatively affecting me because I didn’t know where and how to begin. Thankfully, my anxiety decreased and my performance improved when I approached the time I’ve been allocating to my reading, calmly and methodically. “

• Ch., 4^th year

“Since my first year in school I’ve been using some habits, I had evolved during the time of panhellenic exams. Those habits were about time and the way I was studying. Thankfully, it was easy for me to implement these in the university too. So, until now I’m doing excellent with my classes and the best part is that I don’t miss out on any moment as a student, even during the exams.”

• N., 5^th year

Time management guide

The first thing you need to address is that of time management. Before you even open a book, your cell phone notifications are notifying you for something much more… alluring than studying, the videos and the posts on social media that you don’t want to miss out on are “running” with high speed and the time suddenly seems to have already passed, while your mind is “somewhere else”. Some suggestions in order to see your available time increasing:

• Choose and “clean” your workspace. Decide where you will study and make sure you clear the space of any objects that might distract you, or even place them in a different room. If for any reason this is not possible, think about going to the library or study in a different place, which is quiet enough for you to study, without destructions.
• Create weekly or daily lists with your goals, sorting them in important and less important ones. It is crucial not to overload your goals, because you might be blocked or disappointed for no reason. Instead, at first, try including fewer, more realistic and important goals. For example, if it’s about preparing for an exam, look at the syllabus and divide it into pages or chapters that you want to study per day.
• Define the time you want to allocate. As you did with your goals, make sure you give yourself time to relax, during which you will do whatever it is you want. Filling a whole day up with studying besides exhausting, it can also be counterproductive, as the human memory has limited ability in logging information.
• Reward yourself every time you complete a task. Gratification should be short and not something that can disorganize you.
• Organize or join a “study group”, if you need extra support. Find people that take studying equally seriously and meet in the same place to study. The very presence of other people doing the same thing as you do, will help you focus more on your goal, instead of getting distracted. Of course, this solution is not for everyone and it might lead to a lot of time wasted, especially if some rules are not being followed by everyone, like putting away their cellphones and not interrupting in order to ask questions. If you are studying for the same class, you can establish “question circles” that take place frequently.
• Assess how you are doing with your time management. If you manage to study efficiently for a few days, you might fall back, relax and return to your wasting your time. Constantly assessing how you manage your time, you will be in a position to quickly detect what is lagging you and how to address it.

Study Skills Guide

Following the time management guide, you have the self-control and now you have the time to allot to your studying. But how are you going to use this time efficiently to comprehend and remember all of what you’ve studied? First of all, it is important to understand that the human memory resembles the memory of a computer, since it has limited capabilities, capacity and flaws. If you study without an outcome, it is probably because you don’t try methodically enough to decode and store the information, and not because of an external factor.

Some suggestions in order to create a framework with which your memory will hold as much useful information as possible, discarding the useless.

• Body and mind preparation. In order for our brain to function efficiently we must have first fulfilled our most fundamental needs. Make sure you have slept enough, be relaxed and have been fed correctly and adequately, so as not to be interrupted by your body intervening your mental effort to study.
• Read in sessions, not stiffly, in long hours. As the body, the mind too needs breaks when it has been working intensively for a long time. The continuous studying, as the time progresses, not only exhausts you, but also diminishes in effectiveness.
• Attend lectures, keeping your own notes or focus on listening, if the first is hard for you. Visual stimuli (as looking at the board or at your notes) and auditory (as listening to the professor) can help you make a first, superficial, but important, nonetheless, registration of information in your memory. Study your notes for a few hours, then try to play the lecture back in your mind. By doing so, you significantly decrease the effort and the time you’ll spend when you have to study for the class during the exams and also you improve by far the level of understanding of the following lectures.
• The right way of reading. Find the method that helps you when you have parts of a text or tasks you need to learn. There are many ways to do that, however, you need to find the one that suits you in any case. One effective method of reading is usually made up by the following three parts: a. simple reading, b. careful reading with interaction, c. test trial. With simply reading the content, you briefly see what the text is about. By reading carefully with interaction, you underline and comment on the important parts in order to decode them. By testing, you summarize what you read, turning it into small questions so as to test your abilities and find if there are any parts that need further understanding
• Test and memory practice. Create questions out of what you’ve read or ask a friend to test you. Without practice, our memory easily loses information, so by repeating those tests, not only you find the answer to a question, but you also train in recalling information “on demand”. As you can see, something like that is crucial during the exams.
• Make identifications. Our memory stores useful information by filtering them out from the useless. This happens effortlessly, when we help distinguish what is useful and what useless. Key words, visual and auditory signs can always be of help. Namely, you can try one of the below.

1. Underline the important parts and add things that help you comprehend them.
2. Use flashcards (cards that have a question in the front and its answer in the back)
3. Use semantic maps and memory rules for the organized grouping or clarification of complex information.

• Find your own “blend” of studying. Every person is different and functions with different stimuli, so don’t forget to only embrace the methods that work for you, adjusting them to your needs.

Time management and studying aren’t two simple skills. They constantly affect your life’s course and its quality level. They are linked with the devotion to the goal and the ability to acquire other skills! They are of great importance during our school and academic years, and their role in every occupational field is crucial not only in finding a job but also in establishing a successful career afterwards.

In order to be able to utilize them, however, you have to have the right expectations, in order to implement the equivalent effort. Unfortunately, a skill is not acquired by using it once or twice. In order to acquire a skill, you have to constantly use it in your routine, until it becomes a habit. Therefore, this guide is not a book of answers that you can read once and be helped. It needs to be your daily reminder for everything you need to do until these repetitive tasks turn into skills.