By Katherine Jones & Lia Johnson
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
The Problem
School days consist of Zoom classes and a plethora of assignments. Virtual learning leaves you feeling the busiest you’ve ever felt while being the least productive. Assignments are incomplete or forgotten. You’re frequently stressed and overwhelmed. Does this sound familiar? You’re probably struggling with time management.
And you’re not alone.
People across the world spent more time than usual at home over the last year with the COVID-19 pandemic. Time management became an issue for many people for a multitude of reasons. Lack of organizational structure. Internal and external distractions. Static work spaces. Lots and lots of e-mail. For students, learning at home often requires making your own routine. Some students struggle with focusing and adhering to their virtual routines without a change of location.
While in a virtual environment, you’re prone to more distractions: a doorbell ringing, parents also working at home or your dog crying to go outside. Students also face emotional distractions resulting from the pandemic. Staying in one place all day makes it harder to stay focused. Days can blend into each other, and it’s difficult to separate work from personal life.
Online classes aren’t new; they debuted about 30 years ago at the University of Phoenix. So what’s changed? Abruptly converting in-person courses to a virtual format led to lots of problems. A Frontiers in Public Health study found 64.5 percent of Georgia State University public health students felt their academic workload increased since converting to online learning. The forced and unplanned approach to distance learning leaves many students struggling to acquire time management skills.
According to an article in EducationWeek, distance learning removed in-person physical indicators like teacher reminders, routines and check-ins. Students who manage their time well in person were deeply affected by the removal of in-person physical indicators.
The Miami Student reported students in a virtual environment lack personal connections between their professors and classmates. Some students experienced decreased motivation to attend synchronous courses. Other students often forgot to complete their assignments in their asynchronous courses. Many teachers have reduced class meetings to avoid Zoom fatigue. However, this allows students more free time. With more free time, students are more likely to get distracted.
Students start to feel overwhelmed in a distracted virtual environment and end up staying up late to finish assignments. They may forget to eat, their moods may change and things can spiral out of control. Dr. Christa Schmidt, a psychology professor at Towson University, broke down how our brain functions under high-stress situations, such as these times.
Some students feel there isn’t enough time in the day to complete all their tasks. As Imani Daiyaan, a Towson senior, said, “the planning, the anxiety that goes with it, and just not having enough time in the day is my biggest issue [with time management].”
The Solution
Ashleigh Alves is a graduating senior at Towson. She maintained a cumulative grade point average of 3.9 throughout college. How did she keep her grades up during a pandemic? One way: Alves is highly organized and has strong time management skills.
Alves primarily uses a free application, iStudiez Pro Legendary Planner, to track all her assignments for courses. Alves spent about two hours at the start of the semester looking through her syllabi and inputting the assignments, tests, discussion boards and projects for each of her classes.
Alves also utilizes a monthly planner that reflects her iStudiez calendar. She said visualizing tasks makes it easier to create a plan to execute the tasks. Alves executes her tasks for the week by creating weekly to-do lists on Sundays. To-do lists prioritize your most important tasks to your least important tasks. She tends to start and complete assignments well before the due date. Alves begins as early as one to two weeks before an assignment is due.
“I like to see everything planned out,” Alves said. “Being able to check things off helped, and to see I’ve been making progress on the work for the week or the work for the semester kept me more motivated to get things done.”
iStudiez helps students by creating a unique schedule. iStudiez helps manage time effectively by providing weekly and daily overviews of assignments. Students who struggle with managing their time can benefit from iStudiez. In an environment where students tend to lose track of time, iStudiez helps students map out their daily tasks and incorporate time blocks to complete their assignments.
Insights
At the beginning of the pandemic, Alves felt that professors were assigning a lot more busy work than normal. This required her to sit down and really focus more on what was due.
To ensure all her tasks were completed, Alves would take about 10 minutes every Sunday to sit down with her monthly planner and write out her week’s work on a weekly planner. For each day, Alves wrote out her tasks in most to least important by class and due date.
Some days, to-do lists didn’t quite work for Alves, especially when she wasn’t as motivated. Instead of writing out what needed to be done, Alves would block out sections of time to work on her assignments.
Setting time blocks associated with your prioritized tasks help manage your time. Start working your way through your to-do lists, starting with the A priority tasks, then the B tasks, then the C tasks, and so on. For example, you can spend 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. completing your A priority tasks.
Time blocking or making to-do lists doesn’t work for everyone. For this reason, Dr. Schmidt recommends that students should set timers for themselves to get work done.
Applications like Google Calendar and iStudiez create schedules that can help visualize your time throughout the day. Both applications are effective in setting the importance of tasks and setting up reminder notifications to your phone.
Evidence of Effectiveness
While small assignments continued to build up over the course of the semester, Alves felt as if she was falling behind. To feel less stressed, she began not only using iStudiez, but also weekly to-do lists along with a monthly planner.
It’s not just students who need to stay organized. When Schmidt moved to working at home rather than in her on-campus office, she found herself typically spacing out and not getting small tasks done that she needed to. To combat this, she created a broken-down to-do list to help her achieve her at-home and work goals.
By creating these separate to-do lists, Dr. Schmidt said she felt as if she could get more done with these smaller, separated goals and has also felt less stressed.
As for Alves, she has still managed to keep her high GPA throughout the semester. When she turns in assignments, she typically turns them in a day or two before the deadline. She said doing so made her feel more at ease about the rest of the day.
Limitations
While these tactics worked for Schmidt and Alves, they may not work for everyone. Some students don’t like the idea of to-do lists or time blocking. When it comes to brain functions and treatment, every person is different. What may work for one individual may not work for another.
In a Harvard Business Review article from 2012, the author discusses the paradox of choice. It is a study of the effects of having too many choices at once. The author concluded too many choices, such as too many choices in a to-do list or within the week, may overwhelm and paralyze people from getting anything done.
Another limitation students may encounter is the inability to obtain access to resources, such as iStudiez and other applications on a phone. If they don’t have the means of using technology to their advantage, they may easily fall behind.
For those who don’t like to-do lists or don’t have access to the resources like iStudiez, students and at-home workers could instead use their calendars to plan out what they can do in advance.
The Harvard Business Review article suggests that you put your tasks in a calendar to see what you have ahead of you visually. By doing so, it is easier to determine whether or not you have time to complete specific tasks.
If that doesn’t work, Kirstin O’Donovan, a certified life and productivity coach, suggested in a recent article that you could write down an “anti to-do list” that consists of everything you have accomplished that day.
“By implementing this method, you end your workday with a list of all of the things you accomplished,” O’Donovan said in the article. “Rather than a daunting roster of all of the things that are still left to do.”
By doing so, you can celebrate small wins and still feel accomplished with what you were able to get done that day.
As online learning continues, students are encouraged to find what tactics work best for them to achieve their goals.