Making Time Work for You
Time can feel out of control when you first arrive at university. Trying to juggle lectures, tutorials, study-time and a social life, sometimes on top of a part-time job or family duties can be incredibly overwhelming.
University is often the first time that people are fully responsible for managing their own time so it can be easy to overload your days, especially when deadlines start looming on the horizon.
Even if you’re coming to university from college or a full-time job, juggling all of the responsibilities and expectations of university isn’t easy.
Hopefully, we can ease that stress with our list of resources and time-management methods to help you feel more in control of your own time!
First, let’s talk about podcasts. One good thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them while you’re doing something else, so taking the time to listen to them won’t end up costing you more time in the long run.
Our first recommendation is For Whom the Alarm Clock Tolls, by The Happiness Lab. This podcast episode is a great introduction to a concept that is quite important - time-famine. Understanding time-famine - the overwhelm that comes from always feeling too busy - can help you reduce how time-famished you feel when planning out your own schedule.
“These feelings of time stress, this time-famine, comes at a cost of happiness.”
While some of the solutions proposed in this episode are out of reach for the typical university student, the ideas behind them are easy to apply to more reachable solutions.
We also recommend The Science of Motivation, from A Slight Change of Plans, which is all about motivation and setting goals. The goals that we set for ourselves are very important in deciding which of the things on our to-do list serve us best, making them very important when trying to manage your time well.
This podcast is a great place to start figuring out what your goals actually are, and making decisions about how you want to pursue them. It can also help you avoid setting goals that are inevitably going to lead to heartbreak.
“We think that this future person that we are going to be is going to wake up at 6AM, start working at 7AM and work until they get dinner and go to sleep […] the problem is that that person is going to be us.”
This will help you make a realistic plan for your day when it comes time to get organised!
There are a few good books mentioned in the above podcasts, written by the guests who appeared on them. They each go into depth on the topics discussed in the podcasts.
How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson
Time Smart: How to reclaim your time and live a happier life by Ashley Whillans
Get it Done: Surprising lessons from the science of motivation by Ayelet Fishback
If you’re interested in learning more about time-famine and the effects it can have on us as people, we’ve also put together a few articles that you might be interested in:
Hurry Sickness and Time Famine
This article covers a few different things when it comes to time-famine and another, similar concept - hurry sickness. It highlights why we feel like we can’t stop and smell the roses, and exactly why we should!
While it discusses some of this in the context of overfilling your young child’s schedules, we are all guilty of overfilling our own, so it’s a good read nonetheless!
It suggests some things that can make you feel ‘time-rich’ - when you feel like you have plenty of time, and are using it well - including volunteering, or ‘giving time away’, and appreciating the small things in life!
Time, Money and Subjective Well-being
This is an article that goes deeper into the topics covered in The Happiness Lab episode that we recommended above. It investigates the subjectivity of well-being - it really is all about the mindset that you have when it comes to time-famine!
This article also discusses the idea of ‘buying your time back’ - the thought that spending money on services that make your life easier, gives you time back that would have been spent on maintaining yourself and your surroundings.
From Jerusalem to Jericho: a study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behaviour
This final article is for any of you that are curious about the correlation between time-famine and kindness. It wonders whether the amount of time pressure that someone feels affects their willingness to do the right thing - and it does! If you don’t want to manage your time to make yourself happy, maybe it’s worth it to make other people happy!
In Part 2 of our post about time management, we will be looking at a few methods that will hopefully help you feel a little bit more in control of your time and a lot less time-hungry!
