Three Ways to Avoid Letting Your Time Manage You

In our world today, the greatest asset you have in your circle of control is time. How you allocate and invest your time will determine the trajectory of your day or week and the following months and years of your life.

By Carter Thompson — August 4, 2022

Tags: college life, high school, time management, tips

Three Ways to Avoid Letting Your Time Manage You

In our world today, the greatest asset you have in your circle of control is time. If you are reading this article, you likely also have food, clothes, shelter, a bed, and some spare change, making you automatically richer and better off than at least ninety—two percent of the world. (SOURCE 1) Everyone mostly has control over the direction their lives will take. If you do not wake up wondering if any of these basic needs will be met, you have even greater control than you may currently believe. How you allocate and invest your time will determine the trajectory of your day or week and the following months and years of your life. If you fail to plan, then you are surely planning to fail. Block scheduling, showing up early, and focusing on your sleep are three ways you can allocate your time better to succeed in your respective classes and athletic endeavors and your relationships and hobbies. Success is won one day at a time.

Block Scheduling

Scheduling your day is the best way to ensure you get the most out of every hour you are given. Everyone gets the same twenty-four hours in a day—how you spend them matters. Blocking out my day into thirty-minute increments has improved my quality of life. Blocking provides enough rigidity in each hour of your day for structure but still allows enough flexibility in your schedule so that if something takes a bit longer than you planned, you aren’t behind for the rest of your day. The most obvious waste of our time is extra screen time through social media, video games, TV shows, YouTube, etc. If you’re a college student, you may work at least eight hours and (should) sleep eight hours. How are you spending the other four to eight-ish hours of your day?

Add Exercise

A way to spend one of those extra hours is through exercise. Everyone has time for one hour of their preferred form of activity. That’s only four percent of your day, and the life-changing benefits creating the exercise habit will have for you goes without saying. You need to make the time, and that’s where blocking up your day becomes very handy. You can see how you spend your day. Maybe you don’t have time after work, but if you cut out the Netflix, go to bed an hour earlier, and wake up an hour sooner to exercise, then you have successfully added more productive hours to your day as well as many more years of good health to your life. (SOURCE 2)

Furthermore, blocking up your schedule allows you to see the empty hours in your days, nights, and weekends which you should maximize with family, friends, God, nature, hobbies, or even a nap! Call someone you love and let them know, reach out to the person you have wanted to but have "not had the time to," or cultivate your hobby into a possibly profitable side job in your future. Make your schedule, fill out your schedule with valuable hours, and watch yourself become the person you have always wanted to be but never found the time for.

Show Up Early

Scheduling your time and knowing where you should be and when is important, but being present for each moment is also just as important. Showing up five to fifteen minutes early to everything scheduled allows time for you to show others that you value their time. It also helps lower stress, breathe through tedious tasks, and avoid anger towards inevitable traffic. Being busy is an external fact of our lives today. Being stressed is an internal response mitigated by avoiding the feeling of being "behind," which undoubtedly elevates two major stress indicators: he art rate and blood pressure.

Sacrificing a stressful moment to "get there" can appear dismissible at the moment, but humans are creatures of habit. Since we know it takes twenty-one days to build a habit, maintaining that habit over ninety days creates a lifestyle. It’s easy to see how stress has become a part of our everyday lives. Unmanaged stress has a massive impact on "depression, anxiety, heart disease, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal trouble, and other problems," according to the American Heart Association. (SOURCE 3) Acute and chronic stress is catastrophic to your life, and one way to mitigate stress and start living is to plan for all of the things in your day to be five to fifteen minutes early. Absorb it, and make it a fact that if you’re early, you’re on time, and if you’re on time, you’re late, and nobody wants to be "falling behind."

Get Sleep

Your waking hours matter a lot to your success, but one of the most overlooked ways to schedule more success into your day is by setting aside more time for sleep. It’s not just about your sleep quantity but also your sleep quality. Improving sleep quality requires good sleep hygiene. Matthew Walker gave a masterclass on sleep on the Rich Roll Podcast, and I highly recommend listening to it to le arn about the biological necessity for good sleep. One of the most striking parts of the interview was when he spoke about REM sleep, which is restorative sleep. He says cutting just two hours from your night’s rest, for example, from eight to six hours of sleep, can remove fifty to eighty percent of your restorative REM sleep. You should be at your college or university of choice because you want to specialize in your talents and learn more about your trade each day, but you can’t retain or "absorb" any of it without a night filled with rest.

Screen time before bed also damages your REM sleep and avoiding all screens and bright lights an hour before bed is a must for restorative sleep. Instead, reading a book, especially short stories and fiction, is a fantastic way to avoid your phone before bed. Other great alternatives include prayer, meditation, stretching, etc., for the one hour before the time you should be in bed. See Figure 1 below for how many hours this should be for your age, according to the National Sleep Institute. (SOURCE 4) As you can see, the "rise and grind" 4:00 am or even 6:00 am club that claims to thrive off sleep deprivation is far from good. They are no better at studying or working out at 5:00 am versus 5:00 pm versus 1:00 am. Studies show that students and athletes who get a full night of sleep help them "stay focused, improve concentration, improve academic performance," and "higher risks for many health problems...poor mental health, and injury," according to the CDC.

Well-rested students and athletes set themselves up for long-term success because they avoid the temptations for more 'productivity.' In reality, trading sleep for 'productivity' is just doing more, getting less, and all in a haze. Sleep is the best medicine and is truly your body’s superpower, and listening to Matthew Walker’s interview will leave no doubt in your mind about this fact. Consistently adequate nights of sleep are not a luxury but a biological necessity. In our culture, we view sleep as the one thing to sacrifice in our daily lives to "do more," whether for work, studying, or exercise. Still, this mindset of cutting off even an hour of sleep for other endeavors is equivalent to "stepping over $100 bills to pick up nickels," as Stan Efferding puts it. (SOURCE 5)

Time is your greatest asset. How you spend your time matters exponentially for success in all areas of your life. You can use it for good to cultivate life-giving habits and routines, or you can continue to waste your time in ignorant bliss to the potential for greatness in you right now! Tap into this greatness by managing your time, so you can accomplish what needs to be done and nurture what you desire to improve. Life is a constant war pulling you in all directions, but if you can focus on consistently winningeach day through a well-executed plan, you will surely come out on top.

Lastly, some students’ problems with the Writing Center are "user issues" stemming from incorrect expectations rather than inherent flaws in the system. For example, students who arrive expecting the tutor to write their paper for them will inevitably be disappointed. Similarly, students who believe that just taking a paper to the Writing Center will guarantee an "A" may be in for a surprise when their professor begins to upload grades. To avoid this frustration and ensure a productive session, go to the Writing Center with one or two specific goals and communicate them clearly to your tutor at the start of your meeting.

In the Balance:

The Writing Center is a potentially fantastic resource but not necessarily a one—size—fits—all solution for every student essay.

The Writing Center delights in helping you steadily improve as a writer; it isn’t an essay writing service. Similarly, the tutors who work there aren’t just a replacement for spellcheck. They are coaches whose goal is to help students develop improved writing and editing strategies over time. As a result, just going to the Writing Center won’t fix a paper right away or make you a better writer instantly. However, tutors’ resources and mentorship can be irreplaceably valuable to the students who view the Writing Center as a training area, almost like a gym, where they’ll gain strength as writers over their time at university.

Figure 1

Carter Thompson

Carter is currently seeking his undergraduate degree in Exercise Science under the Pre-Physical Therapy Program at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He will go on to complete his Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree at an accredited university with the end goal of applying industry-leading recovery treatments as a Physical Therapist for either Division I or professional athletic teams.

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