Five Time-Management Skills to Make Earning Your Online Degree Easier

The spread of the coronavirus made students all over the world turn to online education. The dramatic change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed additional challenges on students practicing distant learning, since virtual classes require high levels of self-organization and time-management. Let's dig deeper and find out how to develop them.

Essential time-management skills

Setting goals

Setting objectives is a great way to motivate yourself for studying. But unfortunately, most people do it completely wrong. They typically define a goal as the end result, which is not really helpful because they don't think about how exactly they will achieve it.

Instead of viewing the goal as the thing that you will eventually get, see it as a set of tasks that need to be done. Ask yourself what you have to do every day in order to get the desired result. It means that you should focus on completing routines that will drive you to the endpoint. What's more, regular activities leading you to the goal must be measurable, so you can understand how much work is left.

Planning

Successful students know how to organize their time and space for the day and week ahead. The best way to do it is to create a calendar that includes the dates of assignment submissions, program-related activities or events, and virtual office hours with instructors.

While making a plan, you should be aware of so-called "planning fallacy." Psychologists define this term as being overly optimistic about how much you can get done. Planning fallacy is really harmful to your time-management because you might take on too many courses, mess up your schedule, and get stressed when the tasks take more time than you expected.

Prioritizing

The ability to prioritize your workload means that you can distinguish urgent and important tasks. Note that urgent things are those that require prompt actions but they are not necessarily important. Working on urgent but insignificant tasks can cost you a lot of time.

To become better at prioritizing, you can use a priority matrix that helps to divide your issues into a few categories:

1. Urgent and important
2. Not urgent but important
3. Urgent but not important
4. Neither urgent nor important

Always keep your focus on the first category as it is essential for your success. Once you've completed all urgent and important duties, move to the second group of tasks. Things that belong to the third category should be delegated or postponed. The last type of issue should be completely ignored if you want to save your time.

Meeting the deadlines

The research conducted by Keith Wilcox at Columbia University showed that people who changed the deadline for a task in their schedule needed approximately 16 more days to complete it. So eventually, those who don't stick to their schedule spend much more time to finish their work. Sounds impressive, doesn't it?

As you might understand, missing deadlines diminishes productivity. That is why you should try to study in accordance with the schedule you've created. To make the most out of your online learning, don't neglect your original plan.

Using energy efficiently

All people have natural energy highs and lows. At some points, we are more alert and energetic than usually because our body rhythms change. So one could use such periods to work on the most difficult tasks.

It's impossible to fight against natural rhythms, but you can learn how your body functions and use this knowledge for better productivity. Once you understand what kind of work you manage more efficiently at a particular time, organize your tasks accordingly.

Learn more about time-management from essay examples

Managing your time in the right way allows being more productive and efficient. This ability is essential to get all the necessary things done. Sometimes, time-management is taught in academic settings. School teachers and university professors may provide students with information on this topic and set some tasks, like doing a project or writing a paper. Those who lack knowledge on this can check completely free essay samples on time management at the service offering academic help for students: WritingBros. On this website, students can get information about time-management strategies and struggles as well as the impact of stressful time-management on their health. But in case you want to learn more key skills needed for managing your time, keep reading this article!

Final thoughts

Obtaining a degree online means learning in a new environment where you need to organize the time on your own. Managing your time might be quite hard, especially when studying in untypical settings. But if you want to be a successful student, you should work on developing time-management skills explained above, no matter how difficult it can be.

Author's BIO

Michael Turner is an academic writer and study skills coach. He helps students develop their learning skills as well as emotional intelligence and leadership. As a writer, Michael works on completing assignments, research papers, and dissertations for students.