Time management is a skill that is both necessary and terrifying. It has been drilled into us over the course of our education, and personally, it gives me a looming sense of dread. As someone who is a master procrastinator, I recognise the irony of this piece as I write it the night before it is due, but the scrambling I’ve been doing all weekend to get overdue assignments completed led me to this exact topic. 

Before the pandemic started, I never worried about getting stuff done. I would often wait until the last minute for assignments that should’ve had more time dedicated to them, but they would always get done, somehow. Once COVID hit, all of that went out the window. Isolation made my mental health take a rapid decline, and my motivation for school was basically nonexistent. I scraped through my junior year, keeping my GPA just high enough to maintain my scholarship, but I could not have been happier for summer break. 

Last semester, I was studying at the WCSC house in Washington D.C., and that experience was exactly what I needed. I was able to be around people again and didn’t feel completely overloaded by assignments, as we had a lighter load to allow us to focus our time on working at internships. I still did a lot of my work at the last minute, but I finally felt motivated again.

This semester is my last, and I’m seeing myself begin to slip back into old habits. My motivation for school is waning as I plan for my future after college. I’m ready to be done and move on to the next chapter in my life, but I want to end school on a high note. I decided to write this piece as a way to hold myself accountable. 

There’s no universal way to manage your time well. I can only share what I’ve found works best for me, and hopefully, it will help some of you too. 

The first thing I can recommend is actually looking at your syllabi. Radical idea, I know. My first week of classes, I set aside some time and went through all of my syllabi and entered due dates into my Google calendar, complete with color-coding by class. I’ve never been a particularly organized person, so it felt a little silly at first, but having everything written out in a centralized space made it all seem a lot less scary. From there, I was able to plan out what I need to do each week and each day.

To-do lists saved my life. I’m obsessive about them at this point. There’s something so fulfilling about crossing something off that list. On days where I feel a lot less motivated, I make my to-do lists excruciatingly detailed. I write down things like “eat lunch,” “shower,” or “trim my nails.” This helps me feel a little more on track with life, because even if I didn’t finish all the assignments I needed to that day, I was at least able to cross something off my list.

It’s so easy to just not do anything at all, to instead open Netflix, or Youtube, or Spotify and eat away at the hours of the day instead of doing the work that needs to be done. Sometimes we need a little nudge in the right direction. Let this be your nudge. Find the tools that work best for you, because the stress is not worth it. I can’t tell you how much better I feel after just finishing this piece.