When Emma Kay started college, she had already begun to build a solid foundation in time-management skills. She was born in London, England, and moved to Chico, California, when she was three years old. During her senior year of high school she participated in a “college connections” program, which meant taking all her classes at a local college for transferable credit. Part of the curriculum was geared toward learning how to manage time and set priorities. She credits that course with helping her learn how to manage time in her first year of college and beyond. But even with a solid foundation, Emma didn’t make it through her first year of college without a few time-management roadblocks. “Sometimes I just got overwhelmed with school and just wanted to work or hang out with my friends and would put my schoolwork on the back burner. This had some bad side effects. Once I saw the drop in my grades, I knew that I had to reprioritize and get back on track.”

One key to Emma’s success with time management is organization. “I use both paper and electronic organizational tools. If my computer ever goes down, I still have all my information, plans, and due dates in my planner, and vice versa, if I lose my planner, I still have everything on my computer.”

Emma recognizes that prioritizing is key to maintaining her busy schedule and her sanity. “My first priority is school, second comes work, and then everything else—volunteering, exercising, friends, and family,” she says. “I find places in my schedule to fit them in every week. All these things are important and essential for me to be successful and happy. It’s like each piece of my life is a puzzle piece. If I don’t keep making sure that each piece fits, or if there is any piece missing, the puzzle doesn’t work and breaks apart.”

Emma recently changed her major from Interior Design to Business Management. She just returned from a semester abroad in France and is planning to transfer to a school more geared toward her new major and minors. After college she hopes to go to a big city, find a job with an accounting firm, and work toward getting her certified public accountant (CPA) license. Her advice to other first-year students: “Take a class on time management and balancing all your priorities. It definitely helped me ease into college life and balance my life.”

As you transition into your college experience, you will discover new and sometimes unanticipated demands on your time, demands that will require new strategies for time management. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey, high school students will spend an average of 5.9 to 6.4 hours a day on education, hours spent mostly in school starting early in the morning.¹ In college, however, the average full-time student (ages fifteen to forty-nine) will spend only 3.3 hours a day² on educational activities and the peak time when full-time students are engaged in the highest number of educational activities falls around 10:00 a.m. For part-time students, those peak hours extend past 8:00 p.m.!³ In college you will have more control over how many hours you spend on your education and when you will schedule those hours. How you manage those hours corresponds to how successful you will be in college and throughout life.