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Time Management

**This content is excerpted from the Guerilla Manual for Adult College Students. To learn more about the book or author visit AdultStudents.com .

"I think the biggest problem was time. Just having a family, working, and then going to school. Time has probably been my biggest problem."
Jason B., 27, had four small children, a full time job, a part time job, and went to school full time.

Time.
None of us has enough of it.

We're only allotted so much of it, then life itself is over. Unfortunately, we never know exactly how much time we have on Earth. So we're never sure about what activities should be given priority. Will we still have time to do Activity A tomorrow if we do Activity B today? We just don't know.

What is certain is that if you decide to go to college as an adult you are going to have to learn to manage your time much more efficiently than the average person. You are going to have to juggle an activity - school - that will absorb large amounts of time, while still fitting in all of the other things that are currently in your schedule: work, your family, social life, etc.

This is not an easy assignment. But how well you succeed at this juggling act is going to have a great effect on how well you do in school.

If you are not already a fairly well organized person, you are going to have to learn to be. Or you will probably fail at going to college. That is the simple fact. You have to find ways to make time for attending classes, studying, trips to the library, researching and writing papers, etc. If other activities continually get in the way of those, the critical school projects won't get done. Soon you'll be earning Ds and Fs instead of As and Bs. And shortly after that you'll be out of school, hundreds or thousands of dollars poorer. And no closer to the degree.

Let's get started...

Start by learning what you're spending time on now

Begin finding the time to go to school by finding out what you are spending your time on now. The Daily Time Analysis Form in this chapter can help.

Start keeping track of your activities, a day at a time. Recording time spent in ten minute increments will give you a good snapshot of what you are doing currently. Because most people's schedules vary somewhat week to week, you may find it helpful to track more than one week's worth of activities.

At the end of a week or two or three, you'll have a detailed record of where all of your time has gone. This is valuable information, because now we're going hunting, and our quarry is minutes that add up to hours. We're looking for time wasters or time spent doing activities that could now be used for school.

Finding the time wasters

All of us waste time. We spend too much of it watching TV, playing computer games, polishing the car, tending the garden, or just goofing off. Spend too much time in these non-essential activities and there is no time left for the more important things, like working on a college education.

Look at your form. Is there a lot of TV watching on it, say more than a couple of hours a week? Kill your TV set! Are you spending hours reading trashy romance novels? Trash 'em! Is your car always so clean that it's ready for display in a museum? Hide the polish! Is your lawn so manicured that professional golfers beg to practice on it? Plant some weeds!

Squeezing time out of essential activities

Although all of us waste some time, most of our busy adult lives are full of activities that simply have to be done. Someone expects us to do them. Life itself expects them. For most of us, work is pretty much a given: there's not a lot of slack there. It would be difficult for most of us to save any significant amount of time from work every day.

So if we are to save any more time, we need to look in other areas, at other activities that are still required, but may have the potential of being handled in shorter periods of time.

The Daily Time Analysis Form has a number of them, including sleeping/napping, eating, personal grooming, housework and laundry, attending kids' activities, cooking, shopping, house/lawn maintenance, managing money, paying bills, auto maintenance, miscellaneous chores, running errands, etc.

Some of these are probably not up for modification. As one example, you probably shouldn't try to cut back on attending your kids' school and recreational activities - your college load is going to cut into the amount of time you can spend with your kids anyway, and you probably don't want to reduce that any more.

But there are certainly some things which can be done more efficiently, or done less often. Maybe you don't need to cut the grass once a week. Maybe three times a month is adequate. And that half hour or hour you save can be redirected toward school work. Combining errands can often be a big time saver. A few minutes spent planning routes and activities can usually pay big time dividends.

Maybe some things don't even have to be done by you any longer. Perhaps your partner or one of the older kids can learn to do laundry or make simple meals. Maybe someone else should be in charge of running the vacuum cleaner or changing bed linen or raking leaves or picking up the dry cleaning on Thursday. Every household is different, of course, but the point is that if you spend all of your available time in the service of other family members, you will never find the time for yourself and school.

"When I really, really have to have the time, my family is very supportive."
Patrick A., 46 and the father of two small children, worked about 20+ hours a week and managed to go to school full time.

Learn to do two (or more) things at once

Many years ago, right after I was discharged from the U.S. Navy, I got a job working as a barboy in a very busy bar at a famous Southern California tourist attraction. The day I started, the lead bartender who was my boss chastised me for walking from one end of the bar to the other. Why? Because I didn't have anything in my hands. I had made the 30 foot trip and not taken anything with me. I had only done one thing - walked the length of the bar - when I could have done two - walked the length of the bar and carried something at the same time.

It was a lesson I never forgot.

It is possible to do two things at once. And although one of those things will usually be something small and relatively unimportant, it is something that would still absorb time, whether it is done by itself or in concert with something else. And because it is small, it can be done with no real expenditure of mental energy.

Fit the small jobs into small time spaces

Our lives as adults are filled with chores and tasks and things that need to be done. Some are very important: our jobs, as one example. Others are not so important, and can be moved around in our schedules quite a bit. A trip to the grocery store might fit into this category. And some chores are just very small. They can be shoehorned in almost anywhere: wiping down the countertop, folding the laundry, picking up the living room.

Buy a scheduler or personal calendar

Successful time managers, whether students or busy executives, almost all use some written form of scheduling. Any office supplies store will have several different types on their shelves. Some of them are desk-sized, while others hang on a wall or fit in your pocket. Choose one that seems right for your circumstances. Most of the students interviewed for this book Ð and many that I see either in classes or in my school's Advising Center - use pocket sized versions combined with a wall calendar-type that they keep at home.

Some used as many as three, keeping one at work as well as one at home and one in their pocket or purse. This might present coordination problems, making sure that all versions had the same information, but it didn't seem to bother the students interviewed.

The key to success here is to make sure you write everything down on the planner. Everything! Class meeting times are obvious, but there are a lot more activities associated with going to school that will also absorb time.

And if you are a typically frantic adult trying to sandwich college into an already busy life, you need to be religious about writing down all of your school activities: library and research sessions, study times, tests, reading assignments, due dates for papers and projects, team meetings and so forth.

"I have an appointment book that I live by. I used to be really kind of helter skelter with sticky notes all over the place. But now I've got this appointment book and I just live by it. I write all my classes down. ...I write everything down whether it's school, work or personal life. And I keep it with me. I have a briefcase and it goes with me to lunch, it goes with me to home, and it's on my desk while I'm at work. It's always there."
Kevin R., 34 with two children, worked a full time job and took two classes a semester. He started at a community college in 1988, transferred in to a four year state university in 1993 as a Junior, and got his Bachelor's degree in the Summer of 1998. He went on for a Master's.

Time management will be the most critical skill you learn as an adult student. If you learn it well - if you can develop the strategies required to fit college into your already-very-busy schedule - you will probably do very well. The students interviewed for this book, the hundreds of students described by the adult counselors I talked with, and the many hundreds more I've seen in classes and my Advising Center, all had one thing in common: they were all good time managers. Every single one of them.

And oh yeah. They all had one other thing in common: they were all successful college students. Is there a connection? What do you think?

"What problems do most adult students face when they decide to return to school and how do they solve them? Juggling is the short answer. All of the responsibilities: work and family and church and civic organizations, or whatever, and school on top of that. It's a common thread for any adult student anywhere. How to make it happen. Where do you get the time to study?"
Sharon Grigsby recruits adult students for Empire State College, the State University of NY's non-traditional, non-residential college.

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