Final Score: Time Management 1, Procrastination 0

Posted by Jeff Davis on January 28th, 2009

Time management is probably the biggest challenge you will ever face while learning online. Trying to balance school, work, and family along with whatever else is occurring in your daily life takes a lot of dedication, self-motivation, and prioritizing.

Often it seems that there are just not enough hours in the day to fulfill all of our personal and work-related obligations. Many times it seems that we are too busy to even analyze how we are really managing our time. It can also take way too long to develop a plan of action, especially when this time could be better spent on finishing assignments, studying, or even catching up on lost sleep.

In my opinion, an online course requires even more work than a traditional course and therefore, managing one’s time should probably be considered as the most important skill needed for success in this online learning environment. Often times, many deadlines for school work will occur at the same time, and unless you plan ahead carefully, you will find yourself in a bad situation.

For me, prioritizing my tasks was the first step I knew that I had to take in order to manage my time more effectively. Believe it or not, this was not easy for me, as I am the world’s greatest procrastinator! In my first few weeks of online classes, I did find it a little tricky to manage my time, but through trial and error, I managed to find a nice balance.

I believe that learning time management skills is one of the most important things that you can do in order to improve yourself both personally and professionally and is also necessary in reaching all of your goals and being successful not only in school, but in life. In turn, effective time management will free up your quality time so that you can spend it with family and friends. After all, isn’t it activities such as these that make us the happiest?