organise.pdf

8/13/2019 organise.pdf

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BJECTIVES

ONTENTS

By the end of this section you should be able to;

Identify your main activities

Break these down into tasks

Prioritise effectively

Relate tasks to time

Make action plans

Organising yourself Key stages in managing your time

Be aware Be realistic Making plans Setting priorities Multiple tasks Motivation Organising yourself Time management checklist Time planning sheets (Week/Day)

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Organising

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Organisi ng Yoursel f 2

Time management is an essential skill to develop foruniversity learning as students are increasinglyencouraged to take responsibility for their own work.

Through the discussion of simple time managementtechniques this section will help you to optimiseyour output and use time effectively.

Effective time management can be very broadlydefined, but in this section we will particularly focuson the need to manage individual tasks arising fromyour studies.

Time management revolves around one essentialrule: that time is not allocated randomly. You must

actively distribute time amongst your activities.

Organising yourself

Key stages inmanaging time

The following key stages will help you manageyour time:

Be aware

... of all of your commitments(study, social, family)

Be realistic... What time demands do these make?... What order of priority are they in?

Make plans... What actually needs to be done?... When does it need to be done by?... When will you do it?

... How will you do it?

Evaluate your progress... How are you getting along?... Are you on schedule?... What can you do swiftly and efficiently to get you back on schedule?


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Organising Yoursel f 3

What broad activities take up your time?One key to successful time management is to beaware of all the demands upon your time. Only thencan you plan time around them. When consideringsuch demands you should include course require-ments, spare time activities, work and family com-mitments as well as time for eating, sleeping, shop-ping and so on.

Make a list of your key activities. Try to expressthese activities in seven or eight key areas. Thiswill help keep the list manageable.

What do these activities involve?Once you have identified all of your 'demands' orkey areas, try breaking them down into smaller tasks.For example, when planning a presentation the mainact iv i ty can be broken down into clearly distincttasks as follows:

Think - time to develop an overview ofthe presentation as a whole, developing

aims and objectives.

Plan - time to draft an outline of the pres-entation, what to say at the start, what tosay at the end.

Write - fleshing out the plan, putting inthe detail.

Check - reviewing and revising the draft.

Obviously, these tasks can then be subdivided intosmaller tasks, such as preparing your notes andphotocopying handouts.

You can begin to develop an effective planningstrategy based upon this simple identification ofkey activities and the subsequent division intotasks.

Breaking activities down into tasks presents youwith a more realistic approach to allocating your

time.

Be aware


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Time management is essentially the process ofallocating tasks to the time periods available.

You will need to estimate how much time any onetask will demand in order to slot it into an availabletime period.

Writing the first draft of an essay is bestdone in a longer time period with short

breaks to help concentration but with fewdistractions to break continuity.

Note taking for seminar preparation maytake some time to explore a topic.

Re-reading lecture notes can be done in

the odd 5 - 10 minutes.

Reading, for a variety of reasons, can alsobe fitted into shorter amounts of time.

You may also like to think about where you need tobe to carry out tasks. Whilst it is convenient to carryout research in the library and an essay might be bestwritten at your study desk, not every study taskneeds to occur in a particular environment. If you

think that you are going to have ten minutes spare atthe launderette this might be an ideal time to reviewlecture notes.

Be realistic

When identifying tasks, you will need to ask:

What type of task is it?

Where do I need to be to effectively carry outthis activity?

However, there are different sorts of activitieswhich demand different sorts of time. We need toconsider the type of workwhich needs to be doneand the amount of consecutive timeneeded to doit. In other words:


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Plans can be an essential tool in structuring yourwork. However, they should be used to help get

work done, rather than dominate your work time.Plans can take many forms and should ideally besuited to your working preferences.

The photocopiable work sheets at the end of thissection are suggested formats that might help youwith your planning.

Week Plan (page 11) - Complete one master copydisplaying all of your regular weekly commit-

ments, e.g. every Wednesday morning you have atutorial, every Thursday a workshop session. Thismight also indicate a preferred time for goingshopping and other spare time/non-work activi-ties.

These regular, or core commi tment s form t he

skel et on around w hi ch you can plan your non-

fi xed w ork

Daily Plan(page 12) - A more detailed plan foreach day, stating exactly what youll be doing andwhen. Use the checklist to tick tasks off once theyhave been completed. Do this at the start of eachday.

Plans should be as realistic as possible. As yourexperience of studying at university grows you will

have a greater understanding of how long eachparticular task will need.

Where possible try and complete your daily andweekly work plans. Avoid letting too much carryover from one day to the next. This creates backlogswhich may be rather difficult to resolve.

Making plans

Sticking to them


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Some tasks can appear too trivial to timetable as theyare. Small tasks can be handled in a variety of ways:

Some people bunch a few together andput aside some time each week to workthrough them all. This may be particularlyuseful when you can sit down for 30minutes and rattle off a whole series ofsmall tasks.

Other people prefer to tackle them inquick five minute breaks in larger areas ofwork. Even though you are taking a breakyou are still being productive.

When you are faced with many different demandson your time it is essential that you are able toprioritise your workload.

There are many different factors affecting individual

priorities, including:

Personal motivation / interest

Oncoming deadlines

Confidence with the task / skill

Difficulty of the task

Prioritising your time involves juggling each ofthese, relating individual tasks to each other andputting these in the wider focus of all your commit-ments and responsibilities. Ask such questions as:

What is urgent?

What is routine?

What can be prepared in advance?

Coping with small tasks

Setting priorities


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In other words, you need to be aware that:

some things demand immediate attention

some things can be predicted androutinely planned for

some things can be prepared in advance

It may help to gauge your activities and tasks on atable such as the urgency / important grid below.

Where does each task fit? Is it urgent and importantor important but not urgent?

Now apply this to your work plans, tackling urgentand important things first and allocating time aheadfor important but non-urgent work.

If you make every step of an activity explicit youwill get an overview of all of your commitments

and be better able to prioritise these accordingly.

You will rarely have the space and time to focus onone particular area of work. You will therefore needto juggle multiple tasks and activities within a con-strained time table.

If you have effectively highlighted all of the tasksdemanding your time and planned for each andevery one of these you are less likely to become

overwhelmed by the amount of work you need todo.

Multiple tasks

Important

Non urgentUrgent

Non Important


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A clear barrier to motivation is a lack of certainty or

focus. How can you be motivated if you are unclearas to exactly what you will be doing?

A clear focus is important for yourmotivation, as is some indication of whenyou will be finishing. The thought ofstarting a task that seems endless may betoo daunting for words.

Take real breaks. Leave your work area

completely, have a stroll outside, make acup of coffee. However, avoid beingdrawn into something on the television ora conversation that you will find difficultto break away from. Save these for the endof the work period when you can breakyour concentration completely.

Variety also needs to be introduced so youare not always doing the same activity.Vary the types of task that you are doing.Intersperse small tasks with larger ones.Also change an area of work completely,to re-stimulate your mind.

Occasionally it is hard to be motivated to completesome of the tasks we are asked to undertake: Theyare just not interesting. However, these may also betasks that we have to handle for our courseworkrequirements. It may be useful to set aside some timeat the start of a work period to tackle these tasks,

rewarding your mind with more interesting worklater on.

It can be helpful when planning your work to con-sider your level of interest in each task. Do you wantto spend three hours tackling 'boring' work? Orwould a mixture of tasks be more productive interms of the quality of your output, alternating the'boring' with the 'interesting'?

Motivation


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Try and avoid distraction if at all possible. When youhave settled down to work, agree that this is actualwork time. Often many possible distractions can beleft until later.

If you really find yourself losing interest, reassessyour work plan. If you are tackling a task that isparticularly uninteresting, reward yourself after-wards.

Time spent planning your learning will pay off in thelong run, on two basic levels. Firstly, you are morelikely to avoid last minute rushes if you have dividedwork into smaller tasks. This avoids treating theimpending essay as one unmanageable task that youmay never feel able to tackle.

Secondly, taking some time to plan a piece of workwill give you a chance to develop an overview of theactivity which is likely to produce an improvementin the quality of your work.

The planning sheets at the end of this section can be usedto help plan your working weeks and days.

WEEK PLANFill in your regular commitments and plan otheractivities around these.

DAILY JOB SHEETAn opportunity to plan each day in detail. Use thetick boxes to record which tasks you have completed.

Please photocopy as many of these sheets as youneed.

Use the time management checklist on the followingpage to help organise your learning.

Completing a task

Time management checklist

Planning Sheets

Organisingyourself


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Time ManagementChecklist

WHAT ACTIVITIES ARE YOU INVOLVED IN?

Study? Spare time? Eating, sleeping, shopping?

WHAT TASKS ARE INVOLVED?

Break down the major activities into theirconstituent parts.

ESTABLISH PRIORITIES

What is urgent? What can be done over time? What is routine?

RELATE TASKS TO TIME

What types of tasks are they? Do they need consecutive time? Can they be done in small breaks? Where do you need to be to complete the task?

MAKE WORK PLANS

Plan each week - be prepared, get an overview. Plan each day - be active, use checklists.

STICK TO THESE PLANS

Make sure theyre realistic. Try not to develop a backlog.

GET MOTIVATED

Be focused - always know what you want toachieve.

STAY MOTIVATED

Introduce variety - dont slog away at one thing Take real breaks but avoid distractions.

COMPLETE TASKS

Youll feel better in the end.

REWARD PRODUCTIVITY Youve earned it!


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WeeklyPlanningSheet

Monday

Tuesday

W

ednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

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10-11

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12-13

13-14

14-15

15-16

16-17

17-18

18-19

19-20

20-21

21-22

22-23

Notes:


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Daily Job Sheet

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10-11

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12-13

13-14

14-15

15-16

16-17

17-18

18-19

19-20

20-21

21-22

22-23

Day

Small Tasks:

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