Time Management for Students

Online students need to manage their time even more productively than in-seat students, as the flexible environment with online learning can lead to procrastination.

Time management can cover everything from how to manage emails and other communications, to developing strategies to maximize time with important tasks and minimizing time with those tasks that have less value. This essential video will help you as a student learn to prioritize life’s responsibilities as an online student.

The time management video provided below will help you to consider ways to prioritize your time as the speaker delivers practical advice for how to not only save time, but to ultimately be more productive in accomplishing your goals. You can review as much material as you feel necessary.

Check out the Lynda.com video Time Management for Students to learn more about this topic.

2.2. Time Management for Writers

The key to successful writing is to plan ahead. The first step in planning ahead is to decide what work has to be done and when. Planning with your calendar is a great first step. Many writing experts recommend dividing your deadline in half. Have your first draft done at the halfway point and spend the other half of your time revising.

Working through the entire writing process requires you to use both spheres of your brain, the right and the left. The right side of the brain is normally associated with creative thinking and relies on the subconscious to develop ideas. The left side of the brain is often associated with reasoning and critical thinking and relies on the highly conscious mind to find errors in thinking and writing. It takes both sides of the brain to develop a paper through the writing process.

Most students do not plan their writing process carefully enough, so they end up turning in unfinished work because they only used the right side of the brain. Many students are merely turning in drafts instead of fully completed papers, revised by the left side of the brain as well.

Learning to write is a skill-based process. Therefore, being a successful writer requires making time to write regularly. Practice makes perfect, especially in writing. To ensure regular and adequate writing and revising time, managing one’s daily schedule is important. A writing schedule should involve time for pre-writing and reference search, writing, editing and proofreading.

The helpful instructions found in Effective Time Management in Writing take you through all phases of the writing process. This website also gives you specific advice on time management for writing among the different academic and professional disciplines.

3. Critical Reading

As you read the content and complete the exercises for Module 1, pay close attention to the ways of marking a text and remembering the information you learned. These strategies will serve you well in this and other courses you complete at CSU-Global. So take a closer look at the importance of reading critically and watch the video How and Why We Read: Crash Course English Literature #1 (below). As you watch this video, consider the following elements and applications to your academic and professional work as related to critical reading skills:

· Critical reading skills provide a fuller understanding of lives other than your own . This can make you more worldly.

· Critical reading skills will allow you to make insightful inferences for action at work. You might be able to convince your boss to move in a novel way he/she has never considered.

· Critical reading skills connect us to each other. You can better relate to others through the shared experience of reading.

· 3.1. Classify and Structure

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· In developing any reading skill, it is paramount first to determine what an author is particularly trying to convey in his or her writing. For example, one should first ask if the writing is stating an opinion, or is the writing meant to be factual, or anecdotal. Being able to determine what an author intends to do —either by the structure of the passage or by determining key phrases in the writing—can indicate the author’s ultimate purpose.

· This critical reading expert leads you to learning to read more deeply for comprehensive exams or any other type of academic writing situation. Active reading. You can review this video in as much detail as you feel necessary.

· Check out the Lynda.com video Read Critically to learn more about this topic.

· 3.2. Critical Reading Strategies

· It takes active engagement with your sources to really start understanding the issues in your topic. You have to read actively in order to engage and remember the important issues of your sources, especially when you start drafting your paper. So to engage in active reading, you must have a clear strategy that involves previewing, contextualizing, questioning to understand and remember, reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values, outlining and summarizing, evaluating an argument, and comparing and contrasting related reading.

· The Salisbury’s Seven Critical Reading Strategies covers all of these keys elements to critical reading. If you would like to get more out of your reading process, go to this Web site from the Salisbury University’s Counseling Center. This handout will explain in specific details how to accomplish these steps in both learning to read critically and preparing your sources to draft your paper.