In general, humans are not fantastic at time management. Personally, I spent the entirety of spring break watching YouTube and making memes out of my friends’ pictures. Unfortunately, in my case and many others, this led to the massive amount of work that was left for the last day of spring break. At this point, I’m wondering what would become of my grades if I didn’t watch my science videos, write my argument for a class trial, or write my synthesis essay.

I do tend to waste an enormous amount of time compiling lists of wonders, which aren’t particularly beneficial to my academic life. This is essentially the common cold of the school world. It doesn’t look too bad at the beginning. Then, as the hours progress, everything begins to look worse, and all of a sudden, you have a headache, and then you can’t breathe.

We tend to think that we have enough time. For example, you might think to yourself, “I have enough time to watch a couple of videos of Gordon Ramsay scaring the lights out of small children.” Shortly after this, “Oh no. I don’t have time to finish my math homework before practice.” This is a bit of an issue.

One way to stop the lack of time management is to make everything specific. Instead of watching “a couple of videos”, perhaps try “two videos”. Instead of spending “a few minutes” eating, try “exactly nine minutes”.

Another method is to force yourself to do all the important things first. That way, everything that you are required to do is already done, and you have all of your leftover time to do what you want to do.

Inevitably, if you do end up being a little too general with your timing terms, or if you, under any circumstances, can not do the important things, then try to do everything as fast as you possibly can.

Use your time productively, do not get distracted too easily, and do as much as you can in the time you have. After all, that is all we can do with our lives.