The new semester begins. It will be the semester in which you will finally prepare for your courses in a structured manner, regularly recapitulate the most important material and create a learning plan for yourself early on. A semester in which you'll have time to absorb all the exam-relevant content over a longer period of time in consumable morsels, so that you don't have to rush through everything at once just before the end of the semester.

You know the key to all this: Time management. And you are fully aware that there are an infinite number of methods to become a manager of your time. Methods that are supposed to be your tool for no longer being a slave to deadlines, but to be ahead of them. After a short research on the Internet you will have everything you need for an effective schedule.

For example, you can start with the 18-minute rule, so named because it only takes 18 minutes: Plan your day for five minutes in the morning, then reflect for one minute after every hour (eight times in total) during working hours on what went well and what went badly, then finish by reviewing the day for another five minutes, even furtively looking ahead to the next day. That's it.

Of course, you can condense this rough framework with eat-the-frog-first. Which means nothing else than always eat the frog first. Which means to always do the most important task first. And to know what your frog is, you simply create the Eisenhower Matrix. Strange name? Doesn't matter. Eisenhower Matrix simply means you rank all your pending tasks according to the two parameters of importance and urgency. Important AND Urgent = Frog! Eat it. Now.

Can't get into the work? No problem. You just create a Pomodoro time grid for yourself, which is a clear time grid of 25 minutes eating frogs and five minutes taking a break. The trick: All the things that fall under the category of time robbers, i.e. "surfing the Internet", "cleaning" or "chatting with friends", you simply do in the respective five-minute break. That way you can focus on your work for 25 minutes at a time.

For longer-term tasks you also need SMART goals. With this you create intermediate goals for yourself that are Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic and Timed. With the help of tangible intermediate goals, you have already broken down your big tasks, which means nothing other than that you are more likely to tackle them.

I could go on forever and end all this with a nice quote from Studienscheiss.de: "[P]roductive studying can be learned. If you work efficiently and regularly integrate the most important productivity techniques into your everyday life, you will automatically become more successful in your studies - without investing an extra second of time. "¹

That may be so.

I don't want to deny that at all. Everything you need for good planning is included in the methods I mentioned: self-reflection in the 18-minute rule, prioritization in eat-the-frog-first and the Eisenhower matrix, break management in the Pomodoro time grid, and creating intermediate goals with SMART.

Now, given all these great methods, it can quickly happen that you feel really stupid if you know them all and still get lost in the chaos.

Therefore, you should never forget that these "productivity techniques" can't solve all the difficulties that come up in your studies. Sometimes you can use them well to plan an intense period of studying or writing. Sometimes, however, not a single one of them helps and instead you just need a fellow student next to you. Sometimes you need to really bum away for three evenings to get productive again, and sometimes you sit down at your desk and get going. Just like that.

Phases of unproductivity, of doubt, of chaos are part of the game in your studies. Maybe after four semesters all motivation has suddenly disappeared; maybe you've overheard a certain phrase that suddenly makes you doubt your own path in life; maybe you wake up one morning with the resolution never to read a scientific text again or immediately want to live in the forest under a waterfall. All this and much more is possible.

Probably the most lasting piece of advice for me is actually unsurpassable in banality - and yet it was a moment when it clicked for me. A few years ago, I read the first part of Barack Obama's autobiography, and in it, at one point, he writes in passing that he always tells young people that he has "practiced over time how to plan for the long term, and how important it is to focus on your goals rather than worrying about the daily ups and downs."²

I know the ups and downs, we all know them. But if you train yourself to take a long-term view, you can better accept the small and larger crises of everyday life. The same applies to surprises or things that take you by surprise, which can reach you again and again, to falling behind and catching up again in your own plans and goals.

My tip: Just accept the chaos and consider it a genuine part of your training. Use productivity techniques. For some phases. They don't always help. If they don't help, do something else. The long-term view, to the extent that it is possible, is above both the 18-minute rule and the sudden desire to live in the woods.

Sources:

1: https://www.studienscheiss.de/zeitmanagement-studenten-tipps/
2: Barack Obama: A Promised Land. Penguin Verlag 2020, p. 169.

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This post appeared on the occasion of the October 2023 Writing Center Newsletter. This and other newsletter issues are linked in the Writing Center Newsletter Archive.

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The Writing Center of the TU Dresden (SZD) supports students and lecturers with offers for planning and writing various texts in studies such as vouchers, protocols, seminar papers and theses and for teaching academic writing in teaching and supervision. All information about offers and possibilities of support can be found in the areas for students and teachers.