Time management in online learning
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Vijay Garg
Regardless of your age, gender, working status, or otherwise, time is one of the most important resources you have. Everything you ever hope to do or accomplish in your lifetime will take some amount of time. This is something that’s especially relevant to those hoping to study online. Because you’re in control of your own learning and pace, you need to understand how to manage your time well to make enough room for your online courses and the rest of your responsibilities.
Why do online learners need time management?
It’s easy not the take online learning seriously. With regular classroom learning, you have a specific place you need to be at a specific time. But, learning online requires you to set aside some time on your own to study and go through the lessons. This requires discipline and a real understanding about how to wisely use your time throughout the day.
The truth is that time is just like any other finite resource. If you don’t learn how to manage your time wisely, you won’t be able to get things done as efficiently as possible. You may miss out on meeting your goals, fail to study often enough, and get too far behind on your lessons. Even if you don’t have those specific problems, time management is also about helping you avoid stress while juggling everything.
If you’re always wishing you had more hours in the day, you don’t know where all your time went, or you feel stressed by everything you need to do, learning time management might be a solution to all of those problems.
Can anyone learn to manage time?
While some people may be naturally gifted in organizing themselves, time management is a skill that can be taught and learned. It’s the same as any other resource management. You’ll put a little time investment in at the beginning to plan and strategize how to use your time efficiently. If you’re diligent to learn this skill well, your little investment will help you reap enormous benefits in your online learning by making you more efficient and less stressed.
It’s useful to learn time management sooner rather than later. Take this skill seriously. Learning time management can keep you on top of your classwork, help you stay ahead of assignment deadlines, and free up some extra time you didn’t know you had for extra studying or relaxing. It’s something anyone anywhere can learn at any point in their life, even if you’ve never been good at it before.
Learning simple time management
If time management is a skill, how is it learned? The basic concepts of time management are easy to grasp, but difficult to put into practice consistently in your life. You’ll need these intrinsic resources if you want to succeed:
Persistence
You need to be consistent in your use of time. It will take persistence to force yourself to use your time as you had planned rather than reverting to old habits.
Dedication
Without a strong dedication to learning time management principles, you can’t hope to train yourself in this skill. Time management isn’t something you can learn a little bit about and move on. You need to be willing to practice it constantly until it becomes second-nature to you.
Motivation
Set a goal in your mind that’s pushing you towards better time management practices. Use success and completion of your online learning to motivate you forward, because accomplishments in learning can be a very strong motivator.
One issue many people encounter is trying to do too much at once. Because time management is a very basic concept that’s easy to grasp intellectually, it’s easy to assume that you can just start practicing it immediately. You may reorganize your entire schedule, set your alarm for earlier, and plan every detail of when you’re going to go through coursework or study in the coming days. But, taking such a large step at one time is unlikely to end well if it’s too different from how you normally do things. By trying to do too much at once, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s better to start small and work your way up, as you would with any other skill you’re learning.
Your commute may not seem long, but it’s an extra 30 minutes – 1 hour daily that’s otherwise empty. If you’re driving, you can put on a podcast form your professor or listen to an audio textbook covering your topic. When others are commuting with you, you may be able to ask them to quiz you on the materials you’ve been learning to help you stay on top of new information.
Online students who use public transit have more of an advantage, because you can use that time to do a lot more. Bring a device that has access to data and knock out some of your online coursework on your way to and from work or other daily activities. Or, bring a text book and keep yourself refreshed on whatever you’re learning.
The point of managing your time to include activities during your commute is to not waste any of your free time. Commuting is a daily activity for most people, and instead of wasting it staring at a phone screen or listening to music on the radio, you can harness that time to improve your e -Learning experience and become a better student with one simple change.
Conclusion
We can’t stop or control time. But, if you want to take control of your online learning and make the best of it, you need to learn how to properly manage the time you have. Time management is something that every student can and should learn; it’s not just for those who are naturally gifted at planning and arranging. Take the simple step of utilizing your commuting time to start on your way to learning time management skills as soon as possible!
(The author is a Retired Principal and is based at Malout Punjab)