I'm managing my time: Days 1 and 2

I am the ultimate time waster. Like grains of sand falling between my fingers, I lose minutes and hours with ease. When I sit down to do a project, I typically make an estimate of how much time it will take, but for some reason a four-hour project began at 6:00 p.m. does not get completed until 3:00 a.m. Where do these hours go?

It’s not like I don’t get my work done. Some of my best papers (4.0s!) have been written in the wee hours of the morning while under the influence of cheap coffee. Why do I allow myself to wait until such a late hour? Do I enjoy the pressure of the rising sun as a stop watch or is this simply part of college culture? I’d like to think I enjoy the privacy of a study lounge emptied at midnight.

How can I combat this unnecessary procrastination?

This week, I will attempt to do so by first monitoring my time wasting habits and then developing strict schedules of time usage and attempt to adhere to them.

One of my biggest foes is the internet. When researching for work or school, I too often find myself clicking on off-topic links and reading useless material. Often I attempt to legitimize this as “self-education.” If I’m working on an English paper, but read six articles on urban planning, I tell myself that I’m not wasting time, but actually learning more about my major.

Earlier this week I spent nearly an hour on Wikipedia.com reading about Central European history instead of writing a paper. Sure, I learned a lot about the development of Polish cavalry swords, but I did very little towards getting my work done.

Tomorrow I will begin to explore the causes for my lack of productivity by recording incidents in which I stray from the task at hand. The goal will be to find patterns in my time wasting. By better understanding this time wasting, I can learn to ways to be more efficient. With final exams only a week away, I hope to become a more focused student in time for the next week’s insane study periods.