Saturdays with Shal, Hang in There

"Danny Danny Danny…." “oui oui oui.” I hope that gets stuck in your head for the rest of your Saturday, here with me for Saturdays with Shal. As promised from a couple weeks back I wanted to talk about healthy time management. Time management was definitely my personal success from 1st year to 2nd year university. My overall GPA between those years jumped more than 15% as a result! So yes, first years that may or may not be struggling, there is still hope for you.

The very first step in successful time management is the most obvious, make a plan to make plans. What do I mean by this? Take some time at the start or end of your week and actually plan out your weekly schedule. All of the experts from top universities in North America (i.e. Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, University of Chicago, and the list goes on), say the same thing: effective time management starts with weekly planning. Decide your priorities in terms of due dates and tests. My personal rule is studying for a midterm a week in advance (if my test is on Thursday, I start studying the Thursday before and do about one chapter, etc. per day.) 

Next is work smarter, not harder. Even though you may tell yourself you did good by putting 20 hours into your studio project (jeepers I hope not at once), this isn’t always a good thing. Maybe your workflow isn’t as efficient or effective as you think it is, so you could try assessing this to see ways you might improve. I get a lot of 1st years ask me if studio gets harder, and I say yes it does… but you get better at studio, so it feels like it stays the same (upper years don’t kill me if you disagree). 

And my final piece of advice (again, I’m being backed up by all the below resources), is TAKE TIME FOR YOURSELF. That probably didn’t need to be in caps, but yes it’s true. When you make your weekly planner, leave open the possibility for friends and family. 

​And finally, slightly off topic but I need to stress this for everyone here at Daniels, but mostly at my first years… "Almost 90 per cent of students say they feel overwhelmed by their workload, more than 50 per cent say they feel hopeless and 63 per cent say they feel very lonely.” This was taken from a University of Calgary survey of almost 40,000 students. What I’m trying to iterate is that YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS! University can be so overwhelming, and if you get to that point where you can’t take it anymore and really need to talk to someone, please check out my previous post on our availability of Health & Wellness resources. Or you can contact me at shalice.coutu@mail.utoronto.ca and I’ll let you know which resources are available. Take care out there Daniels, have a good rest of your weekend. Keep it classy friends.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/success/time.html http://web.stanford.edu/dept/CTL/Student/studyskills/time_manage.pdf http://wellness.uchicago.edu/page/smart-tips http://cw.huhs.harvard.edu/tools/index.html http://www.nbcmontana.com/news/keci/students-report-stress-is-hurting-academic-performance/149517477