Between seminars, lectures, preparing presentations, part-time jobs and leisure activities, it’s often difficult to manage your time. But there are some strategies that can help.

It can often seem that you have all the time in the world to write a seminar paper: the deadline isn’t until the end of the semester or after the holidays. Then it turns out that researching and writing it take more time than you originally anticipated. And unexpected things that are outside our control can happen – falling ill, for example. That’s why it’s important to structure, protect and adapt our work to changing conditions. That’s what time management is all about.

We structure our work by using a schedule, a planner or other tool that represents time in a systematic way. This is related to questions such as “Do I have a daily routine?”, or “Are my activities coordinated throughout the day?”
We protect our work by setting time limits to prevent intrusions. This includes, for example, rejecting time-consuming requests from colleagues or logging off our work email and switching off our work phone when we’re having a meal with family. In relation to protection, one question you might ask yourself is: “Do I often do things that interfere with my work just because I don’t like saying no?”
Adapting work to changing conditions simply means being able to structure time flexibly when necessary. Examples of questions to ask in this case include: “Do I factor in waiting times?”, or “Do I regularly check my daily schedule?”

Alongside these guiding principles, there are a wide variety of strategies that make time management easier and better. In academia, nine of them in particular have proven to be effective.

Nine time management strategies

1. Regular working hours
   Keeping regular working hours helps ensure our work is not impacted by other competing tasks and that we keep on top of things.
2. Short blocks of time
   Blocks of 30 to 60 minutes are ideal. Breaking time up into blocks also encourages us to set intermediate goals we want to reach in each block. Mini tools can help with this. The Pomodoro method which alternates blocks of 25 minutes work with a five-minute break is particularly popular.
3. Take breaks
   It’s important to take breaks of five to ten minutes between time blocks to maintain motivation and concentration.
4. Specific goals
   Within the individual time blocks, rather than general goals, it’s also helpful to set goals that are as specific as possible (analogously to the planning step). For example, “I’ll write one page” instead of “I’ll write as much as possible.”
5. Switch between topics
   With longer time blocks, it’s often easier to motivate ourselves if we occasionally change which topic we’re working on and don’t work on just one until we get tired.
6. Reality check
   Using this strategy can improve our time management skills over the long term. First we estimate the time we think we’ll need for a task, and then afterwards we compare this with the time it actually took. Over time we’ll then get better and better at estimating how long a particular task will take us.
7. Prioritizing
   On one hand, it can help to sequence tasks according to urgency, while on the other hand, it often makes sense to tackle more unpleasant tasks first. There is a simple reason for doing unpleasant tasks first: our concentration is usually best at the start of a new work phase. Then later, when we can turn our attention to the more pleasant tasks, thinking about a postponed unpleasant task will not interfere with our workflow.
8. Look ahead
   We should try to stay a bit ahead of our schedule whenever possible. This creates a buffer in case, for example, taking a week off might mess up the schedule.
9. Use a calendar
   As trivial as it sounds, it helps to write down all deadlines directly in analog or digital form, to set up reminders, and to create systematic visual schedules. One useful tool for this is the open-source email and calendar program Thunderbird. Google Calendar is also a well-known popular tool. At the University of Basel, Outlook offers calendar functions as well as email services.