Time Management: A Student Guide

Students are one of the busiest people in this world. We get you.

We mention about their hectic schedules in many of our articles but it’s a fact that needs to be emphasised often. With the increasing amount of competition for grades, placements and jobs, students from a very young age are being exposed to severe stress.

Everyone has only 24 hours in a day. So, do these young students. Yet, they must tackle homework, extracurriculars, exam prep sessions, tuitions, chores and what not. With their schedule filled up to the brim, they are in serious need of time management skills. While we cannot magically impart this skill onto students such as you, we will try to provide some useful tips and advice tailored for them in this article.

1) Priority-oriented Schedule

Before you even begin doing anything, we highly recommend that you create a to-do list that is is ordered according to priority. DO NOT use your brain to remember the tasks, you will need it for other crucial things. Just use any other medium that you like for the list i.e., on paper or in an app. When you have decided what needs to be done urgently and what can be put on the back burner, you are off to a good start.

2) Not hours, use blocks.

We came across this tip on Jordan Page’s blog and we think it can be very useful not just for moms but also for students. Her advice is to think of a day not in terms of hours but in terms of blocks. Divide your day in couple of blocks and use a particular block only for certain tasks. We recommend that you watch her video on this to see how you could adapt this technique.

3) Breaks are Mandatory

No matter how much you need to accomplish in a day, never skip breaks. Because if you do, your mind then uses procrastination as a form of defence to step away from the tasks. As a result, you are behind schedule anyway and you have to deal with the guilt. So, it’s best to take voluntary short breaks between tasks or blocks (if you choose to use block scheduling). Not only can you return to your tasks with a refreshed mind but also enjoy the break without guilt while it lasts.

4) Timer for Distractions

Yep, we know your phone is screeching “check me, please. You need to see this!!”. You want to see who is texting you, who uploaded a new post on Instagram etc. Its fine, go ahead and use your phone. But….time yourself. Otherwise, before you realise, you have been scrolling for an hour and your tasks are still pending. Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes before you start using your phone and when time runs out, you should (absolutely should) get back to work.

In addition to the above tips, it’s a must that you maintain a healthy lifestyle. Only if you do justice to your body and mind, it can do justice back to you when you need it. Eat right, sleep well and relax from time to time.

Stay tuned for more such posts on productivity tips for students and drop us an email (info@tutor-science.co.uk) if you have any suggestions for us.

A Student’s Block: Is it real?

You might have heard of a writer’s block, a phase that even the most avid of writers go through several times in their career. A phase where they suffer from a lack of motivation to write, a lack of inspiration to come up with new works and a lack of self-confidence that undermines their past literary achievements.

But have you heard of a student’s block? A phase that pretty much every student goes through, at least once in a year. A phase where the student has little to no motivation to put effort into studying and has a lack of academic agenda on mind. Some might say that the student is just being lazy, which could be a part of the reason but not the only reason.

It is the time when exams are pretty much around the corner. The half term was meant to be a refreshment break for those who have already studied hard all year. And, it was meant to be a catch up break for those who have slacked until now.

Either way, it is a perfect time to scan yourself to detect any presence of a student’s block. Instead of just labeling yourself as lazy, why not dig deeper to find the root cause of your lack of motivation in studies? Ask yourself these following questions and the answers that arise might help you to address the issue.

1) Is the lack of motivation for all subjects or just one or two subjects in particular?

Most students dislike a certain subject due to several reasons. Their dislike often leads to their lack of motivation to study for the subject and hence, leads to poor grades. Ask yourself what is it about the subject you dislike and why is that the case. Get help from your teacher or tutor about addressing this issue.

2) Is your lack of motivation because of a long list of pending topics you have not revised yet?

Okay, so you procrastinated studying for a subject for some time and now, you have a long list of topics you are not familiar with. The list increases as the time passes and now, you panic just by thinking about catching up with the subject. Relax, it is not the end of the world. The damages are done, but your grades are not doomed yet. Make a list of all the topics you are not familiar with and mark them in the order of their relevance and revise them in that order only. Some minor topics can be left out to revise in the future when you have spare time.

3) Is the lack of motivation because of the lack of time?

Yes, it is entirely possible to freak out about how much studying you still have to do within the time that you have and….end up not studying at all. This is as real as a student’s life can get. If you are finding yourself procrastinating because of this, you need to break this cycle and prepare a sustainable study schedule.

Our next blog article will be about time management for students and be sure to check it out.

Meanwhile, drop us an email (info@tutor-science.co.uk) if you are having trouble with motivation to study or such similar queries and we’ll respond back to help you out! No strings attached.

Using Flashcards

Being a student is a challenging thing. One must remember so much information in such a short period of time. The information can be so varied as students need to master several subjects and topics in an academic year. It’s quite a struggle and we hear our students often complaining about it.

We always try to recommend a solution that might work best for them depending on their learning style and preferences. But we discovered that there was one solution that when used rightly, helped most of our students. The solution? Flashcards.

Flashcards can help you process a lot of trivial information in a short period of time in a fun and encouraging manner. They can be adapted to support gamified study sessions, which are one of the best ways to study.

With flashcards, the choice is up to you. You could go with paper flashcards or use an app on your preferred platform. We, as teaching professionals have tried several flashcard methods and we recommend the least time-consuming method i.e., using a flashcard app with an inbuilt database. This means that you necessarily do not have prepare every set manually and you do not have to type in a lot of information. There is another advantage with using apps as most of them use spaced repetition, a form of learning that is fast and efficient as flashcards are ordered according to how familiar you are with a card.

There are several apps available that you can choose from, but we highly recommend Quizlet, especially for GCSE students as it has a wide range of GCSE topics flashcards in its database. It is available as a web app and for mobile platforms as well, so that you can review them on the go.

Another great flashcard app with a huge database is Anki. It’s also full of features to boost your memory using algorithms. It shuffles the cards and repeats them based on how well you have been doing with each card. Anki is available for desktop, IOS and Android as well.

We look forward to reviewing more flashcard apps for our students soon. Have you tried a flashcard app? Email us your suggestions at info@tutor-science.co.uk.