Time: Hard to Manage

Twenty-four hours; 1,440 minutes; 86,400 seconds; one day. Time can never be expandedno extra second will ever be slapped on, no additional hours squeezed in and after its gone we cant retrieve it. (Maes) Today, for college students, time is more precious than money. Between balancing classes, work, sports, social groups, and personal issues, students are at times running themselves ragged and feel as if their plate is getting way too full, way too fast. Each activity will require different commitments of time and energy. Each activity will persistently compete with one another for a students attention and energy, but giving too much time and energy to any one category can lead to disaster. With this being said, time management, without a doubt, is becoming one of the top challenges for college students worldwide. Students may have many reasons causing the struggle with managing their time. Linda Emma, author of Problems with Studying & Task Management for College Freshmen believes time management is a problem mostly for college freshmen simply due to the transition from their previous environment, high school. To prove this idea, Emma states, Most students come from academic settings with rigid classroom schedules, clearly plotted assignment deadlines, and frequent letter grade assessments. College is different. While academic standards are higher, classroom hours are fewer, and tangible assessments may be much different than what students have experienced in the past. (Emma) In making this statement, Emma emphasizes time management is difficult to achieve attributable to a students previous environment. She points out that these college students have a lack of ownership because of their past. While in high school, these students had solid resumes and high GPAs and found their way to the top through
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the pushing and prodding from mom and dad, teachers and coaches, but as soon as they reach college level and academic decisions are decided solely by themselves, they often choose unwisely. Kristen May, author of Why Managing Time in College is More Difficult Than in High School, claims that One of the reasons that high school seems so easy in comparison to college is that others manage time for you. In high school, both your teachers and your parents actively involved themselves in making sure your day was full, that you got where you needed to go, and that all your work was done on schedule. (May) In making this comment, May couldnt agree with Emma more. She further explains that because your high school workloads were lighter than those in college, and because of the work in high school involved simple memorization as opposed to true understanding of a subject, it was easy to cram the night before and still get a good grade. College is not like that; you cannot get by in college with only last minute efforts on assignments. On this same theory, Theodore Sizer, retired Professor of Education at Brown University and author of What High School Is sheds some light on the conception of high school, which is the uniformity of high schools across the country. He states, you start in the morning and end in the afternoon, five days a week. (Sizer) All of which does not apply to a student once they enter the college world. They may not have classes all week; most classes are two or three days a week and they do not necessarily have to have morning classes. With this being said, their time is not structured or based on a clock, which makes it harder on them. It can then be implied that Emma, May, and Sizer are of the same mind that college students find it difficult to manage their time because the people and expectations of high school. The problem with managing a students time can also be blamed on time, itself. Students are completely unaware on how much time they have to work with and how they can use this
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time to their advantage. It could be the ten minutes riding home on the bus, or waiting in line that a student could take advantage of to study, although the students feel as if they are busy while doing these tasks. The relationship among time, work, and learning is governed by specific goals and objectives. But even within specific sets of goals, time can be apportioned in various ways. Everything does not have to be done at the same time or even in parallel over time. (Hope) This quote by Samuel Hope, author of Time, Distance, Focus, Excellence suggests the undeniable struggle among college students; college students are unaware of how much time is really in a day and when to do their homework. According to May, many college students are shocked when they discover how much time they have on their hands to manage. This is because while attending college very little of your academic time is actually spent in the class, to which many students are thrilled about; what they dont realize is that they still have a lot of work to do outside of the classroom. College professors plan their curriculum with the expectation that as a full-time student they will devote forty hours per week to academic work, even if only ten of those hours are spent in the classroom. In other words, to understand the material in each of your courses at a level the professor considers adequate, you should plan on studying between two and three hours for every hour you spend in lecture. (May) May describes a very common theory that students have a hard time grasping and author of Time Management Can Mean College Success, Nancy Maes adds in by stating, In terms of time management, if anything, these people are unrealistic about how much they can cram in and need to be told to schedule in recreation time. (Maes) It can be said; therefore, that Hope, May, and Maes can all agree that students are unknowledgeable about their time. However, coursework is not the only cause of this new time managing shock college students are experiencing; its everything the student is involved in outside of the classroom that
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also gets in the way. Every student has experienced the common scenario where they finally sit down to begin a paper and everything begins to get in their way. As theyre bringing their paper up on their computer they notice a text message from their best friend, telling them to check out something on the internet. An hour has gone by and they still havent written a single thing on their paper. Next thing they know a friend or family shows up at their door with a personal crisis and they spend the rest of the night comforting them. Some of these things are out of the students control, but some are a natural result of poor planning and managing skills. Emma agrees when she writes, What truly gets in the way of success in college is all the stuff that has nothing to do with coursework at all. Roommates and romance; Facebook and Twitter; sports, parties and clubsare all elements of college life. (Emma) Emmas point is that there is more than the academic world of college and these activities combined, and even on their own, divert a students focus and ultimately cause the student to spend more time in these activities instead of their academics; and social media contributes to a lot of these issues. Marlee Shaulis, author of Facebook has Negative Effects on College Students agrees that this is definitely an issue for college students. Shaulis reports, Nearly 85 percent of college students log on to Facebook every day according to techrunch.com. The social networking site has become an addiction for many. Instead of students concentrating on their homework or studying for a big test the next day, they are spending hours looking through pictures, answering their page comments, and chatting with friends on the sites instant messenger. (Shaulis) In other words, social media is taking over. Students sit down to begin homework and studying, yet an hour later they look and realize that theyve been on Facebook the whole time, or text messaging their friends. These distractions, and every other form of media, are a distraction every college student is dealing with.

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A lot of people blame this balancing act upon those more obvious reasons, but this struggle can be rooted to a student, personally. Problems can come arise from a student, because of their learning types, how they interpret and deliver information, and simply what kind of person they are. Hope claims, The relationship among time, work, and learning is governed by specific goals and objectives. But even within specific sets of goals, time can be apportioned in various ways. (Hope) However, these so called sets of goals can potentially be the cause of students poor time management skills. Maes quotes Ruta Baltrukenas, a counseling psychologist in the Counseling and Testing Service at Roosevelt University, when she says, Whatever they do has to be perfect, but they know theyre human and not perfect and therefore cant be produce perfection, so they put things off, (Maes) explaining students who are perfectionists. These students put off producing because theyre afraid of failing. Others procrastinate out of fear of success, because it may carry negative consequences with it. Either way, students find themselves putting off their schoolwork because of themselves personally; their goals of being a perfectionist or actually being successful holds the student back academically, and leave themselves very little time to actually do their work. In short, Maes believes time managing troubles are coming from the students themselves, depending on their personalities and how they work. In conclusion, there are many perspectives when it comes to the reason for poor time management skills among college students, none of which are considered right or wrong. Every student is different; the cause for one student could come from all of these perspectives put together, one or a couple, or simply none. What is a known fact though, is that either way students are finding themselves struggling with managing their time properly. Whatever the reason may be, if students continue to fail at managing their time; if they continue to
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procrastinate or put other needs first; if they do not take advantage of prioritizing, then these students will continue to not do as good as theyd like to and could potentially cause dropouts. Ultimately, time management is an issue many college students are scrambling to figure out, but with many tips and a little prioritizing, students can find a way to tame it.

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Works Cited:
Emma, Linda. Problems with Studying and Task Management for College Freshmen Demand Media Hope, Samuel. Time Distance, Focus, Excellence Arts Education; July/August (1999): 2-11 Maes, Nancy. Time Management Can Mean College Success August (1986) May, Kristen. Why Managing Time in College is More Difficult Than High School November (2008) Sizer, Theodore. What high School is Horaces Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School; (1984): 259-267 Shaulis, Marlee. Facebook has negative effects on college students Cal Times; November (2011)

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