The Benefits of Time Management
A very unfortunate but all-too-common situation in higher education is the danger students face from poor time management. Many college administrators who work directly with students are aware that a single mishap or a case of poor time management can set into motion a series of events that can jeopardize a student’s success.
To better understand how one instance of poor time management can trigger a cascading situation with disastrous results, imagine that a student has an assignment due in a business course. They know that they should be working on it, but they aren’t quite in the mood. Instead, they convince themselves that they should think a little more about what they need in order to complete the assignment and decide to do so while looking at social media or maybe playing a couple more rounds of a game on their phone. In a little while, they suddenly realize that they have become distracted and the evening has slipped away. They have little time left to work on the assignment. They stay up later than usual trying to complete the assignment but cannot finish it. Exhausted, they decide that they will work on it in the morning during the hour they had planned to study for their math quiz. They know there will not be enough time in the morning to do a good job on the assignment, so they decide that they will put together what they have and hope they will at least receive a passing grade.
At this point in our story, an evening of procrastination has not only resulted in a poorly done business assignment, but now they are going to take a math quiz that they have not studied for while tired from staying up too late the night before. Their lack of time management has now raised potential issues in two courses. Imagine that each of these issues also causes additional problems, such as earning low scores on both the assignment and the quiz. They will now have to work harder in both courses to bring their grades up. Any other problems they have with future assignments in either course could cause a domino effect of circumstances that begins to overwhelm them.
In our imagined situation, you can see how events set into motion by a little procrastination can quickly spiral out of control. You can probably think of similar experiences in your own life, when one instance of poor time management set off a chain of events that threatened to cause big problems.
