When time management eludes you, life can turn into a waking nightmare. Making the transition from high school to university has taught me valuable – and incredibly hard – lessons about managing the precious few hours in a day effectively.

Sweating profusely, eyes beady with anxiety and heart pounding in my ears, I would often wonder through which mystifying wormhole the time I had thought was so abundant had managed to slip. Typing faster than anyone thought possible with my notoriously unskilled two-finger tap dance, I would finish projects, essays and assignments at the literal last minute – sometimes even a little later – red-faced and blustering.

The problem with being late – and specifically procrastination – is that you never seem to catch up where you let slip. One project, when left unattended to, will eat up the time you planned to use for the next. Before you know it, you have been sucked into a vortex of fretfulness, haste and half-baked attempts.

Although my workload has increased – probably tenfold – since my arrival in the semi-real world of half-adults, I have found that certain skills and tools, when honed well, can yield remarkable results in managing time. I remember the exact point of my realisation of the world of trouble procrastination would get me into – the Dean of Humanities at Rhodes was addressing a stiflingly packed hall of future Humanities students, and made it abundantly clear that deadlines were definite. I finally grasped the first and most important lesson in effective time management: nobody cares about you. Nobody is going to make things easier for you, and nobody is going to trouble themselves with your lack of self-discipline (that is why it is called self-discipline) and your time restraints.

Taking responsibility for my life and my time after five years of furiously extracting sympathy from teachers and “forgetting” assignments at home turned out to be easier than I had thought. A few specific tools have helped me incredibly in this journey, and although I am not an expert, I believe these tips are universally applicable on this foreign planet of looming deadlines, increased workloads and the ever-quickening hands of time.

By performing daily reviews of my to-do list, I eliminated the possibility of my forgetting about a test or assignments, and this activity also allowed me to prioritise my work. Planning ahead is crucial to avoid clashes and backlog, which eats away at your time and your nerves. Plan to finish work in a timely fashion, leaving yourself enough time for everything you need to do – which includes downtime.
All the planning in the world, however, will not result in a word of finished work. The second step is to start – start anywhere, start with one word, a mind-map, or do some research. The old Chinese saying – that every journey starts with a single step – holds true in all cases. Once you have started, very little will stop you from completing your task.

The most difficult hurdle for me to jump in my quest for sustainable and effective time management practices was the issue of distractions. On the university network, movies, series, music, games and documentaries are shared in massive quantities and can be freely perused – at the peril of grades all over campus. The allure of a night on the town or a movie at the Roxbury Movie Theatre also threatened my survival as a Rhodes student. Instead of saying no to these small pleasures, I learned to say later. They would be more fun, I argued, when I did not have the stress of my workload looming over my head.

One important element of effective time management that is often overlooked or underestimated is the value of resources. The internet, lecturers, tutors, fellow students and the library are all incredible resources that can help you in your endeavours, cutting the time you spend on each project, assignment, essay or test by as much as half in some cases.

Managing one’s time is a crucial life lesson that should be learnt by all. It is, however, important that every person develops their own style of time management, as what works for one is not necessarily going to work for another. When this skill is applied successfully, it can take you from dazed sleepwalker to powerful, effective and productive dynamo.

About the author: Kayla is currently a first-year Journalism and Media Studies student at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. She is the editor of the Comment & Analysis section of student newspaper Activate and she a writer for the Politics, Business, and Features sections, as well as a sub-editor for the paper. She is the Community Representative of the Rhodes African Drum Society. Her other subjects are Economics, English, History and Sociology. She devours books and sees herself as one of the blessed few who actually enjoy working. She is involved with student society SHARC (Student HIV/AIDS Resistance Campaign) at Rhodes and is busy with a course in Peer Education. She loves watching art films and her guilty pleasure is shopping.

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