Key 8 : MANAGE YOUR TIME WELL

How do you organise your time in the most effective manner?

• Guard your time or it will simply slip away! It is by far the most valuable resource you have.


• If you are tired or find you are being ineffective, take a break.


• Remember you are not studying to please anybody else but to gain marks.


• There are 168 hours in a week, of which you can put in about 50 hours (7 hours per day or so) of solid work and not 100 hours of ineffective work.


• A four hour cycle of solid sleep is the absolute minimum a person needs and ideally you will sleep 6-8 hours every night to be effective. A short siesta in the afternoons will boost your capacity at night.


• Start study at a time when you are most alert and most relaxed.


• When you are feeling tired, take on easier tasks, for example, just reading and re-reading those portions marked in your textbook which you need to commit to your memory for exam day.


• Use both your left and right brain by switching between subjects that use left or right brain more, from science to language, for example, so that you can work for longer without being tired.


• Do not waste you time watching TV. It strains your eyes, even though you think you are relaxing. Also quit worrying as it lowers your energy. Take a walk in fresh air or simply close your eyes, meditate and listen to relaxing high octane classical music such as Swan Lake.

How do you organize your time for most effective output?

Time is the most valuable resource which must be planned and used efficiently.

Doing a few tasks each day is far better than cramming in for a whole long day and running out of steam the next day. Watch how effective you are in the use of your available time.

There is no point in going through the motions of studying and pretending to yourself and to the others that you are studying, when in fact, your thoughts are wandering and you are not earning your marks towards the examination.

Every moment, you should be evaluating whether the work I am doing now will gain me marks or is there a better activity I can do in this same time that will earn me marks.

Managing your time well means being efficient in the use of your precious time. In essence it means all the activities that you do must add up to marks.

• If you are tired or find that you are not being effective in your studies, take a break. Fresh air is needed to boost your energy and perk up your brain.


• Remember you are not studying to please anybody, but rather to be effective and complete a set task.


• There are 168 hours in a week, plenty of hours to find about 50 hours (7 hours per day or so) of solid and effective working time instead of 100 hours of ineffective studies.


• Be realistic in your planning. Do not be over ambitious and make plans which you cannot meet. For example, do not set the alarm for 3 am, knowing full well you will only disturb your sleep. Neither will you study well in a sleepy state.


• One hour of sleep in the afternoon, a siesta (Spanish word), makes your evenings last longer. new research conducted by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates that taking an afternoon nap is very useful for it may enhance as well as reinstate the power of your brain. The researches have said that in addition to invigorating the mind, a sleep schedule that is biphasic or has two phases also makes one more intelligent. The researchers discovered that individuals who took a nap for about 90 minutes during afternoon felt an increase of about 20 per cent in the working of their brain in comparison to people who did not take a nap.


• A six hour cycle of solid sleep is important at night and four hours is the absolute minimum. Ideally, you should sleep up to eight hours a night and take a short siesta in the afternoons as well. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, has shown that our memory of newly learned stuff improves only after sleeping at least six hours. If you want to do well on exam day, sleep at least six hours every night.


• Sleeping three or four hours during the week and crashing for twelve hours on weekends does not work. After a few days, all the facts you will memorize during many of your "all-nighters" will all fade away. They do not get the time to integrate properly into the memory circuits.


• The last two hours of a night's uninterrupted sleep are spent in rapid-eye-movement (rem) sleep, when dreams occur. The brain runs through the data it has stored over the previous hours. This process is also important to learning, as it reinforces and strengthens the many connections between nerve cells that make up the new memory. Like a child repeating a refrain to memorize it, the brain goes over what it has learned, till practice makes perfect.