Time Management Tip – Dartmouth

There are several documents here with some good time management tips for college students.  Things like planning your week, creating a master plan, even a  4 year plan.   From the document on a  personal schedule:

“Schedule your intensive study/ review time for each class. Try to schedule some study time  each day for each

class. Learning is more effectively and efficiently accomplished in  shorter regular sessions than in longer irregular

sessions. Also, use more of the day (i.e. morning, afternoon) for studying. Evening is often an ineffective time to      study. When you schedule study time, be task-oriented rather than time-oriented. Think in terms of “blocks of

time” and what specifically needs to be accomplished, not hours of study time…”

A lot of the tips are very useful.  Not your usual “just expect to study 30 hours a week per class” junk advice.

Review of Time Management Strategies

This is a good review of some of the most widely used time management strategies.  For simplicity, I don’t think you can beat the pomodoro technique.   I do something similar to that with the  running clock idea  but I didn’t know that there was a system for what I was doing…  Just being aware of time helps me stay focused and motivated.

My time management for school is much better than my time management at work.  I need to implement one of these strategies there.

Strategy for Reading

 
 

Read through the assigned reading as quickly as possible. (Speed-read if you can). Don’t take any notes, just catch the highlights or overall concept of what you’re reading. The first reading should take much less than half of the time it would normally take you to read through the assigned reading. If not, speed it up!

 
 

On the second read-through, read the assignment more slowly and take notes. Specifically slow down on the more complex portions and try to get a grasp, but your overall speed should still remain well above your typical reading speed.

 
 

Finally, read through the assignment a third time. All told, you try to keep the total time spent very close to what you would have spent reading it in a typical setting.

 
 

I’ve used this method several times and it works very well for material that you want to hold on to. The point of the exercise is that you have seen the material 3 times instead of one. The first reading also helps qualify the second and third passes with a better idea of the overall picture. However, this method takes discipline and if you don’t make a conscious effort to read fast, you can spend much more time than you normally would reading.

Study Tip – Backup Your Important Work

 

There is only one thing worse than forgetting to do a big assignment that counts for 25% of your grade: doing the assignment and losing it to some kind of computer failure. Sadly, the “my computer crashed” excuse gets about as much sympathy as the “my dog ate my homework” excuse anymore. Which puts legitimate homework loss a real travesty. The most time I’ve lost was on a research paper. I had done all of my research, compiled my works cited entries, and was about 3 pages into a 7 page paper when my home PC died. Although I had a copy saved on my flash drive, it was from that morning, and I had been working on the paper the entire Saturday. Very depressing!

 

Thankfully, or maybe retrospectively, there isn’t any real reason to lose schoolwork. I try to safeguard against lost work by doing the following:

1. Organizing my work into folders on my computer and flash drive. Even if you just create one folder per semester and put all your work in there, it makes finding school-related items (and thus backing up school-related items) much easier.

    

2. Backing up to a flash drive periodically. I do this whenever I think of it, but as in the case I discussed, it’s easy to get into your work and forget to backup what you’re currently working on.

    

3. Backing up to an online drive. There are a couple sites that allow you to upload individual files. Although this can get rather unwieldy to try and backup all of your work, it is useful for big projects or presentations. One instance that I used it specifically for was my speech class PowerPoint presentations. Just in case I would have an issue with the flash drive, I would go ahead and upload that to the site, which I could easily access anywhere from the internet. One good thing about these sites is the amount of storage. Free sites(amount of storage in parentheses):
   1. www.Skydrive.live.com (25GB Free)
   2. www.adrive.com (50 GB Free)

 

1. Automatically Backing up online. This is the easiest and most reliable method. There are several free
   backup sites that permit free storage of up to 2 GB worth of data. This is more than enough to store an entire college career’s worth of word documents and notes. Some of the free sites include:
   
   1. www.ibackup.com
      
   2. www.mozy
      

 

There really is no reason to leave your hard work with a single point of failure. It only takes one mishap to change a grade for an entire course.

Wi-fi at school

Most colleges have wireless internet coverage over the entire campus. The convenience of internet access is great for studying wherever you are; instead of being stuck in locations like a library or classroom. However, because most campuses do not require authentication or security of any kind, it poses a real problem that one time you forget and log in to your student financial account or personal email

To be perfectly honest, I have completely forgotten several times. I’ve logged into personal email, this blog, my student email, and my student school account on separate occasions. Plainly put, it’s stupid. I’m pleading partial ignorance here, because although I knew it was possible to intercept wi-fi traffic, I didn’t know how easy. The movies you see with these guys stealing information are the 35 year old skinny dude living in his mom’s basement hacking around in black-screened GUI-less DOS prompts (probably lost you there). To put it in plain terms: I thought it was a job for a real hacker that required a lot of know-how. Sadly, that’s just not the case anymore. Here’s how easy it is to steal information passed over a typical unsecured college wi-fi network.

1. Download a packet analyzer with a simple search phrase like “packet analyzer” or “capture wifi traffic”
2. Sit in a cafeteria or library where people congregate
3. Turn on the downloaded tool

   Seriously, it’s that simple. The usernames and passwords, along with the websites they belong to, are passed over the wi-fi network in readable text. There are no other steps that a malicious person needs to take to figure out your information.

   For instance, say you sit down to eat your lunch at the school cafeteria. When you sit down, you remember that your parents were supposed to transfer money from into your student credit account today. Because you’re so excited about getting the money, you can’t wait to get back to the dorm, so you login to your account. As soon as you hit the login button, your username of jsmith and password of 1234567 are sent across the wireless network and right into the hands of anyone who downloaded the tool. Later, when the thief gets back to his/her dorm, they login to your account and transfer the money into some account of their choosing.

   Moral of the story: pay attention to what you do when on any wireless network, especially at school. Hopefully writing this helps imprint the danger in my brain.

Description of Class Format

I’ve taken courses in several different ways so far. Although I might have preferred to take all of my credits in the traditional lecture style, I haven’t had a choice because of the timeline I’m working under. Some of the course methods I’ve taken include:

• Online Textbook Based
• Traditional Lecture
• Online Lecture
• Online Lab-based
• Online-Lecture hybrid

I’ll start with the Online Textbook with this post and try to get into the others later in the week.

The online textbook based classes are pretty straightforward. At the beginning of the semester there is an orientation class that explains how to use the website through which you will be submitting all of your assignments. At every one of these orientations, the instructor has made sure to tell everyone that “although this is an online class, there are still deadlines for submitting work”. You would think that would be obvious, but there is some real confusion about this… Seriously. I’ve heard several complaints about the deadlines. I guess they were just expecting to not go to class and not turn in any work. The biggest benefit I’ve gotten out of these meetings a feel for the instructor. You can usually tell how much of a hard-liner you’re dealing with based on their attitude here.

But I digress… In the online textbook class the syllabus is a magna-carta of sorts. The instructors I’ve had put everything they find relevant in that document including assignments, major due dates, and a outline/schedule for the class. I always try to have the syllabus on my laptop or online where I can get to it. I also attempt to copy all of my assignments out of the syllabus into a task tracking tool (mentioned here). Being forgetful by default, this helps me keep track of what I have due and can also give me an idea of when I’m going to be busy with timelines like the one below:

(Note my cool censoring skills)

As far as learning goes; you’re going to learn pretty much everything from the book. If you’re not good at teaching yourself, this isn’t the format to take. I’ve struggled in some of these classes, but in subjects that I usually struggle in so I don’t know whether to blame the method or the subject. I’ve had several instructors who are good at helping you get ready for an exam, but they are the exception. The amount of information you usually receive is something like “read chapters 1, 2, and 3. The midterm will cover chapters 1, 2, and 3″. The lack of student-instructor interaction about the tests is probably the most difficult thing about this type of class. For a typical class you can rule out a large part of the material in the chapters and focus on what the instructor has gone over. Unless you have an instructor who is proactive, you’ll be studying the entire breadth of the material covered.

Finally, the online textbook-based class is going to require you to have self-discipline. Without an instructor or classmates to remind you, it’s very easy to forget or procrastinate when it comes to projects or exams. Cramming at the last second is never good. Pacing yourself and being aware of when your big assignments are due will help alleviate this.

That’s it for this one.  While they are fresh in my mind, I’d like to get descriptions of these put up here.  This will give me a point of reference when I’m trying to decide how/where to take my masters…

Task Tracking Update

For anyone who doesn’t have the money (or maybe not the will) to pay for the Microsoft Office suite to get Outlook for task management, you can go here <http://download.mozilla.org/?product=sunbird-0.9&os=win&lang=en-US> and get an independent FREE calendar/task management tool.

Tracking Tasks

For a while I tried a paper list on which I would write each of my assignments on.  Although this gave me a decent list, it was annoying when a professor would change a date or requirement.  It was also tedious to write notes about the task. So something else that I’ve started using heavily is Microsoft Outlook.  At the beginning of the summer 2009 semester I put a few of my courses into Outlook as Tasks with scheduled reminders.  I’ve take that a step further this semester.  (I actually started this at work based on the suggestion of a coworker and I liked it.)  For this semester I’m trying to enter every assignment as a task with a reminder that goes off.  Smaller assignments like reading or homework I might set for a couple days before it’s due, a larger project or research paper might get two weeks.

Entering all of the assignments has taken some time, but so far it has worked very well.  Having one list for everything is a huge upgrade over having a list per class.  Benefits include:

• I can use the outlook calendar/task views to see which parts of the semester are going to be heavy.
• It’s much more difficult for tasks to jump up on me with a reminder that pops up.
• Not carrying a paper list around and physically writing and erasing dates for assignments
• Most instructors will physically email syllabi upon request.  Typically the syllabus or course outline will contain the dates and descriptions for major assignments.  A simple copy paste into the assignment and you have an editable task list.
• A sense of accomplishment.  Checking off assignments is a great feeling  accomplishment (besides getting a decent grade of course) and you will have the historical list of every assignment for the semester.
• Changes to the description or due date are simple and easy to make.  This part was very tedious with a paper list and I often ended rewriting the assignment at the end of the list.