If there’s one thing students are good at, it’s wasting time. Each of us wastes time: in unnecessary lectures, in the unproductive study, or through everyday distractions. We all have our construction sites and waste several hours every day. You are no exception.
The only problem is: that wasting time is not always obvious. We often don’t even notice when we’re doing unproductive nonsense and neglecting our good intentions. That’s why we’ve put together seven common time wasters for you in this article that are often overlooked and undermine your time management during your studies.
This Is How You Waste Time Without Realizing It
Wasting time is a big problem for many students and the #1 reason for bad grades and student dissatisfaction. If you want to use your time more wisely, avoid these seven things.
Superfluous Stuff
Stop cluttering up your time with unnecessary activities. If you’re wondering why you’re always falling short of your potential in your studies and don’t get much done otherwise, then it may be because you’re filling your time with superfluous things that don’t get you any closer to your goals.
For example, if you go to that one class every Wednesday morning that doesn’t do anything for you except put you in a bad mood, don’t. Make better use of your time and read the lecture notes or sit in the library instead. If you want to finish a module with an A but spend three hours updating your folder labels and Googling five little definitions, you’ll be inducted into the hall of fame for the most unproductive student of all time.
You have to learn to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Ask yourself: where do I want to go? And: What brings me closer to my goal? Superfluous stuff is for losers and needs to be eliminated.
Bad Planning
Without a plan, you just live and study to yourself. You let yourself drift and see what things will come your way over time. The problem with this is that at some point you lose control.
You then only save yourself from deadline to deadline and miss one important appointment after the other. Forgot the deadline here, missed registering for an exam there and you’re already studying a semester longer or getting bad grades.
The better you manage and plan your time, the more time you save when completing tasks. With just one minute of planning, you save an average of ten minutes of your working time. But still, if you need some time to get used to proper planning and you keep missing your deadlines on the important papers you can seek help from a paper writing service.
Wrong Priorities
You can never do everything. We never have enough time to do everything we need to do. We are literally flooded with work and new tasks. New personal goals are added every day and claim their place in our calendar.
So that this avalanche of work doesn’t overwhelm you, you have to make a smart pre-selection. You have to prioritize; weigh up which of the planned activities comes first and what is postponed. Do not concern yourself with the easy things but take on the tasks that will bring you forward in your studies. It’s uncomfortable at times, but it’s the only way to surpass yourself.
Multitask
Get in the habit of only worrying about one thing at a time. Multitasking has a very positive reputation, but it is dangerous: if you tackle too much at once, you can easily get bogged down and end up doing significantly less than someone who is focused on one task.
Multitasking reduces your concentration and the quality of your work decreases. As a result, you have to work longer on a single thing and make stupid mistakes. And mistakes take time. If there are many small tasks on your to-do list: Make a structured plan and work through your list one by one. Avoid parallel work.
Conclusion
You hardly learn anything about time management and productive learning at university. But don’t worry you can change it yourself.
Stop wasting your time and spending it on unnecessary things. You have to set the right priorities and develop an internal alarm system against wasting time. You have already got to know the biggest stumbling blocks in this article. Get smart and modern time management. This is the first step towards relaxed and successful studies.
