Do you often feel like there just isn’t enough time in the day? It can be easy to feel overwhelmed with the pressures of the fast paced world we live in. You have demands coming from many different directions. You are overloaded with information and things to read and do. Plus, you have many distractions taking you away from what it is important. Often, this can cause stress and a feeling of loss of control over your time. But, it doesn’t have to be that way!
Everyone has the same number of hours in a day and has a choice about how to spend those hours. You can teach your students how to focus and prioritize in order to spend time on what actually matters. Teaching them time management will allow them to accomplish their goals.
Here are four topics about time management to teach your students:
- Set goals
- Analyze how you spend your time
- Figure out what needs to get done
- Prioritize in order of importance
Set goals
The first thing to teach your students about time management is to set goals. After all, they cannot manage their time until they know what needs to be accomplished. Goals are things you want to accomplish in a given amount of time. Teaching your students to know what they want to accomplish by when will help them determine what they need to do in order to accomplish their goals. Then, they can manage their time to accomplish these goals. Without goals, it is easy to spend time on things that have no purpose or don’t matter. Goals should answer all of these questions: who, what, where, when, and why. Ask your students to be specific about what they want to accomplish and by when.
Analyze how you spend your time
In order for your students to manage their time effectively, they need to first analyze what they are currently doing with their time. To do this, they should track and analyze how they spend their time. Ask your students to keep a log of their day so they can see how they spend their time. Then, they can change their behavior to use their time more efficiently.
Figure out what needs to get done
The next step for your students to take control of their time is for them to figure out what actually needs to get done. Have them practice breaking up a goal into a series of manageable activities that will contribute to the accomplishment of the goal. Once these smaller tasks are identified, they can create a schedule of all the tasks that are necessary to accomplish the goal. Small steps do add up. Instead of thinking of the goal as one big thing to accomplish, teach your students to complete one small task at a time, following the schedule, and they will ultimately reach their goal.
Prioritize
People who know what they want and how to get it have a much better chance of getting things done than those who don’t. A great deal of time can be wasted when you can’t decide what the important things are that need to get done. We can’t do everything we might want to do. We need to decide on which activities we should be spending our valuable time. This is called prioritizing. Setting priorities is essential to managing time. It is easy to get sidetracked by things that are not important or aren’t getting us closer to meeting our goals. This is especially common when priorities are not clear. Teach your students to rank their goals in list of their priority. This will help them avoid unproductive activity.
Thanks for tuning into our series on teaching time management to your students. If you want to learn more about developing or teaching soft skills, sign up for a free soft skills webinar here.
