Time Management Secrets for College Students summary

Name: Time Management Secrets for College Students
Rating: 4.3 (36 reviews)
Author: Dennis Stemmle

Dennis Stemmle

The Underground Playbook for Managing School, Work, and Fun

4.3 (36 ratings)

16 mins

Topics

Procrastination

Table of Contents

Time Management Secrets for College Students
Summary of 7 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Avoid becoming a dropout statistic and excel in your first year of college.

College is an exciting time full of new freedoms and experiences. But it also comes with big challenges around time management, stress, motivation, and more. Without the right strategies, many freshmen find themselves struggling to keep up – in fact, 30 percent of freshmen drop out after just the first year!

Discover the reasons why even high-achieving high schoolers can falter that critical first year of college. It all comes down to a lack of preparation for the vast change in the academic environment. This Blink provides easy yet highly effective techniques to master time management, reduce stress, understand your brain, and stay focused on your goals.

Good goals and bad goals

One night at 3 a.m., Bradley called his parents in a panic. He’d been lying in bed thinking about the snowball effect of consequences that were coming his way, and it all started with one missed exam. One day a class was moved to a part of campus he wasn’t familiar with. He had trouble finding the new room and was fifteen minutes late, at which point the professor refused to let him take the exam.

After that, his grade dropped. He frantically tried to catch up, but he would have to complete everything perfectly in order to even pass the class. While he was trying to save his grade in that class, he lost time in keeping his other grades up. The effect was much like a juggler dropping one ball and then eventually dropping all of them.

Bradley’s case is far from unique. The fact is that, in the U.S., 30 percent of college freshmen drop out in the first year, and 60 percent of people who enter a four-year-college degree take six years to graduate.

As it turns out, there’s a simple and obvious problem. When students are in high school, they do 80 percent of their learning in class and 20 percent at home. In college, it’s the reverse. So, students need a completely new time management skill set pretty much overnight.

If you have a student or are a student entering college, the first thing you need to understand is the relationship between your goals and your results.

First you need to set yourself an actual goal. You don’t have to know exactly what you want to be when you grow up, but you need to have a general goal, for example keeping a GPA of at least 3.0.

But you can’t just sit with that goal because you won’t see results until the end of the semester, and by that time it may be too late to do any corrections. So you need to break that goal down into the day-by-day actions that will eventually lead you there. In the case of keeping your GPA up, your daily goal might be to take notes during every lecture. Now you can track your note-taking on a calendar or in a journal so you can start seeing daily successes adding up.

Where did the time go?

You’ve probably heard the Magic Penny scenario before. You have to choose between taking $3 million right now or a single penny that doubles in value every day for thirty-one days. Of course the magic penny is the better choice in the long run, but it's hard for us to wrap our heads around small, daily growth adding up to something huge down the road.

This is where time tracking comes in handy. Start tracking how you spend each hour in a day – whether it’s studying, social media, commuting, or other things. You'll quickly see where your time leaks away and where you can become more efficient. Then you can start to schedule your time purposefully based on your goals.

Is stress really bad?

Stress is an inevitable part of life, especially in college. But how you view stress makes a big difference. One study tracked 30,000 adults for eight years, asking how much stress they experienced and if they thought stress was harmful. Eight years later, researchers compared those adults with death data and found that the people who reported high stress levels and believed stress was harmful had a 43% higher risk of premature death. But this risk didn’t apply to those reporting stress who didn’t see it as harmful.

The takeaway? You might need to change your relationship with stress. The goal isn't to eliminate stress completely but to reframe how you think about it and respond.

Doing away with distractions

Staying motivated through the ups and downs of college life can be tricky. This is where it’s key to understand the salience network. This is a network in your brain that detects things that are exciting or novel and directs your attention to them. That's great when the novel thing is your studies, but not so great when it's a distraction like social media. This is a key factor in how we end up procrastinating on things that we should be prioritizing.

We have to get good at choosing when to listen to the impulse to dive into something and when to override it with conscious decisions aligned to our goals. It takes practice, but you can train your brain. When the salience network says "Check Instagram!", but you had planned to study, acknowledge the impulse but firmly tell yourself "No, I'm studying now."

Taking charge of your brain

Let's do a quick brain basics crash course. Your brain contains billions of neurons that communicate through neurotransmitters like cortisol and serotonin that impact your mood.

Cortisol is the main stress hormone. High levels make it hard to focus and may contribute to anxiety or depression. Serotonin is the "feel good" hormone that regulates happiness and wellbeing.

Budgeting your energy

Energy, like time, is finite. No matter how much you have to do, you only have so much fuel in the tank. So you need to spend your energy as wisely as your time.

When your energy is running low, you have two options – create more energy, or redirect the energy you do have toward what truly matters.

Balancing school, work, and fun

You likely have more going on in your college life than just studying. What if you have a job? If this is the case, you can communicate your class schedule and exam times with your manager so they can accommodate your student status. See if you can restrict your work hours to leave room for studies. Consider an on-campus work-study job that may offer more flexibility.

When it comes to partying, enjoy this time with friends, but keep it in moderation and aligned with your priorities. Set a drink limit for yourself on nights out and keep some days totally alcohol-free to focus on self-care. Manage your social life wisely like you manage your energy and time.

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What is Time Management Secrets for College Students about?

Time Management Secrets for College Students (2020) offers time management strategies for students to navigate the transition from high school to the unstructured college environment. It offers a potential solution to the troubling statistics that thirty percent of college freshmen drop out after their first year, and less than 60 percent of students finish a four-year degree within six years.

Time Management Secrets for College Students Review

Time Management Secrets for College Students (2022) is a practical guide that helps students optimize their time and maximize their productivity. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Packed with easy-to-implement strategies, it offers practical solutions to help students effectively manage their time and meet deadlines.
By providing real-life examples and success stories of college students, the book offers relatable insights and inspiration.
Its engaging and relatable tone keeps readers hooked, ensuring that the topic of time management remains interesting and far from boring.

Who should read Time Management Secrets for College Students?

Incoming or current college students
Parents of college students
Everyone who needs better time management skills

About the Author

Dennis Stemmle is a college professor, bestselling author, and founder of College Success Academy. After his own high-achieving son struggled to transition from high school to college, landing on academic probation, Stemmle set out to uncover why so many top students falter in college. He found time management to be a key factor and wrote Time Management Secrets for College Students to help students learn skills to juggle studies, work, and personal life.

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