Organization and Time Management Part 1: Plan Ahead!
By Chelsea Wicks & Kimberly England, Graduate Assistants in Intensive English Programs
Developing effective time management and organization skills isn’t just beneficial for English language learners; it’s helpful for anyone who wants to use his or her time smarter. While researching this topic, previous IEP graduate assistants have found that there are 6 key steps to staying organized. We’ve listed each of the six with advice and resources for each step.
Plan ahead
But first, plan last week.
It takes time to do anything, especially learn a language or finish your assignments for tomorrow’s reading class. Before planning out your next week, we recommend getting a calendar of the past week and writing down everything you did for each hour of each day. By looking at where you spent your time in the past, you’ll be able to see where you can save time for the future. Look at the figure below for an example:
| Time | Activity | Location |
| 12-7 AM | Slept | House |
| 7-9 AM | Woke up, showered, ate, walked to work | House |
| 9-10 AM | Planned 1 PM class, met with co-teacher | Office |
| 10-12 PM | Went to class, bought lunch at 11:50 AM | Classroom |
| 12-1 PM | Working lunch, finished plans for 1 PM class | Office |
| 1-3 PM | Taught class, graded late assignments, prepared for workshop | Kinnoull House |
| 3-5 PM | Collected workshop materials, led workshop, tutored 2 students, cleaned up work study office | Kinnoull House |
| 5-6 PM | Prioritized evening homework assignments, wrote out to-do list for each assignment, ate dinner | Holland Student Center |
| 6-7:30 PM | Researched for essay | Library 2nd floor |
| 7:30-8 PM | Read for fun, went on social media | Library 2nd floor |
| 8-9 PM | Created outline for essay | Library 2nd floor |
| 9-11 PM | Wrote essay, emailed essay draft to friend for review, checked email | Library 2nd floor |
| 11-12 AM | Watched some TV, planned next day’s outfit, packed back pack for class, went to bed | House |
Look at how you spent your time.
After writing out exactly what I did for the entire day, I can see where I spent my time.
“There are 86,400 seconds in a day… But this means nothing to you if you don’t know how to use it. Make it count!” –Joel Brown
I like to keep this quote in mind when I plan my day. Time is like money in that you can spend it. Unlike time, you can get more money to replace the money you spent. You can never get back the time you lose.
Going back to my list of what I did yesterday, I can see that I made fairly good use of my time but I did make some mistakes. One of the mistakes was that I didn’t take any breaks: I worked through lunch, I attended class, I taught class, I prepared and led workshops, I planned homework, I did my homework, and finally relaxed for about one hour before bed. A smarter use of my time would be to add some short breaks, even if they are only 10 minutes long every 2-3 hours.
A second mistake I made, which is related to the first mistake, is that I stayed in the library during my 30 minute break from 7:30 – 8 PM. I should have moved away from my study spot and went downstairs to get a change of scenery. Everyone is different, but it helps if you keep your work space (or study space) separate from your relaxing space. I spend most of my time studying in the library at night, so relaxing there doesn’t help me focus or get back to work when it’s time to get back to work.
Doing things like looking at how you spent your time before this moment is good practice in order to see when you spent time wisely and unwisely. I know that I could have used my time smarter if I had prepared my 1 PM class before 10AM so that I could just relax during my lunch break from 12-12:45 PM.
In order to be able to plan ahead, you need to know when and where you are the most efficient. Similar to my comment above, I know that I am the best at studying right after dinner from 6 – 11 PM. I work really hard to make sure I can keep this time to do my most difficult mental tasks like research and essay writing. On the other hand, I know that I don’t always have time to move from place to place for each task, so I know that I can come into the office early (8 AM early) and begin checking my email before my 9 AM co-teacher meeting because this is an easy mental task. If you experiment and try doing different tasks in different places, you’ll start to see where and how you are most effective too.
Plan the future
After you have a sense of how you spend your time most, start planning for the future. Start with a short-term schedule, like the next few hours, and slowly build up to longer periods of time.
When you’re planning the future, you need to know what is a “non-negotiable,” these are things that absolutely must be done at that time, like class or a meeting with a teacher. Put those into your schedule first. If you need to do any preparation for those non-negotiable commitments, schedule that next.
Write in some longer periods of time to relax. For me, this is Saturday. I don’t do anything related to work or school on Saturdays, if I can help it. Saturdays are my reward for working so hard Sunday through Friday. You should look at these longer periods of time as a reward and use it to keep yourself focused. If you see that you need more than one day a week to relax (for example, Wednesday evening and all day Saturday) then schedule it in and work hard to save that time for anything that you want to do.
After you schedule the big breaks, add in a few small breaks. As I’ve said before, everyone is different, so you might find that you need more breaks than one 10-minute break every 3 hours. Just be careful that you’re not spending more of your scheduled time on a break than working.
The last step is scheduling in task time. This is time that you’ll spend just working on that one activity or problem. Laundry is a good example of this. I have to do laundry every two weeks and I set aside Friday mornings to do it.
Thanks for reading– we’ll post Part 2 soon!
