Introduction

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, Calif., when she was three years old. During her senior year of high school she participated in a “college connections” program, which meant taking all of 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 of the keys 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 of 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). I find places in my schedule to fit them in every week. All of 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 and 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 of your priorities. It definitely helped me ease into college life and balance my life.”

How do you approach time? You might find that you view this important resource differently from Emma or your classmates. Some of these differences might have to do with your personality and background. And often, these differences are so automatic and ingrained that you don’t even think about them. For example, if you’re a natural organizer, you probably enter all due dates for assignments on your calendar, cell phone, or computer as soon as you receive each syllabus. If you take a more laid-back approach to life, you might prefer to be more flexible and go with the flow rather than following a daily or weekly schedule. You might be good at dealing with the unexpected, but you also might be a procrastinator.

Most fundamentally, how you manage time reflects what you value— what is most important to you and what consequences you are willing to accept when you make certain choices. For instance, when you value friendships above everything else, your academic work can take a back seat to social activities. What you value most and how that relates to the way you spend your time often change in college. How you manage this resource corresponds to how successful you will be in college and throughout life.

Time management involves: