Students Should Use Time Management as a Competitive Advantage

Productivity gurus often promote the critical skill of time management. But students usually aren’t aware of how important time management is to their success. 

School, at every level of education, can be broken into units of time. Individual class periods run for some specified length of time, such as 45 minutes per lecture. In university, each course is worth some number of credit hours. There are due dates and deadlines. The midterm and final exams are scheduled to take place on specific dates, and a semester is a discrete number of days long. 

Realistically, you can only devote a limited number of hours to school and homework each day. Maybe you have outside employment or family obligations that take a certain number of hours each week, and you must perform them on specific days. Undoubtedly, you have other life obligations that consume time out of each day.

If you sit down and look at your academic and non-school obligations, you can easily calculate the number of days and working hours you have available to fight the war of the current semester. Calculate how many hours are at your disposal to win each course's battle. Once you recognize these real-world time constraints, you will appreciate the importance of working efficiently to tackle the challenges that lie ahead within the available time.

students should change the way they study to achieve a loftier goal of mastering the material from each course AND developing long-term recallability of the content

Serious students have goals for each course and subject. For many students, their goal may be to ace the class and add another A to their transcript. They have future aspirations that depend on graduating with a high GPA. 

But, very often, students are shortsighted. As a result, they study in a manner that they perceive will maximize their chances of getting that prized grade while leaving them likely to forget more than half the course learnings as soon as a few weeks or months after the final exam. They resort to activities such as cramming because a lifetime of experience has taught them that cramming works. At least, for remembering for a few hours, until they can take the exam. But cramming doesn’t create a lasting memory.

When they graduate, they may need to perform well in a standardized exam, such as the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, or MCAT, to proceed to the next level of their academic career. Suddenly they are forced to take a prep course to prepare for that exam. In effect, they need to temporarily relearn, all over again, everything from the past four years. These prep courses have some value, such as offering the opportunity to take practice exams based on actual questions that have appeared in past versions of the real McCoy. But, the level of relearning that many students have to endure is a direct result of how much forgetting they’ve experienced because of their their deficient study techniques.

So I propose that students should change the way they study to achieve a loftier goal of mastering the material from each course AND developing long-term recallability of the content. Don’t just add another A to your transcript. Use each course to contribute an enormous dose of permanent learnings to your knowledge base. Why not shoot for genuine and durable learning and capture the excellent grade as icing on the cake? The final grade should be a side effect and byproduct of mastering the course material and logging it into long-term memory. That’s effective learning.

To recap, real success in school comes from efficiently using the available time to maximize the amount of learning you can accomplish. But effective learning is only achieved when it leaves an enduring contribution to your knowledge base. You must learn how to learn so that you walk out of every final exam with acquired learnings that will stay with you for a long time.

I graduated #1 in my class, and in fact, I achieved the top score in every exam. But, as a rule, I didn’t attend my classes!

Your future successful self demands a broad and deep set of learnings coming from many domains so that you can face life as a creative and intelligent contributor to society. 

It is difficult to appreciate when you are young that you have to be prepared to reinvent yourself many times over your lifetime. At this moment, whatever you think you will do with yourself, I can promise you those plans will be flipped on their heads many times. So develop your mind into that of a ninja polyglot, and position yourself to conquer the universe.

I have a few tips for efficient time management and making your learning more effective and permanent.

Don’t attend class if it isn’t necessary! 

Alright, that may be a shocker, and this policy can’t be applied to every course. Some profs require attendance to pass. Some courses are unlearnable without being present in the classroom. But, there are many courses nowadays where attendance is not required and in fact, sitting in class is a huge time sink. 

As a result of Covid, many courses have become virtual, and a lot of lecture material is available as online videos. Flipped classrooms were among the first pedagogies to disambiguate lecturing from teaching by allowing students to consume the recorded lectures on their own time and then attend classes for the express purpose of gaining clarification and having their questions answered.

Sitting down in a physical classroom forces you to consume the content in real-time. When you watch a video, you can watch it 1.5X if you want. And by staying home, you get the kill lots of wasted time: parking, walking, chitchatting, and waiting for the following lecture to start.

When I was a medical student, most of our didactic lectures were delivered in an auditorium to all 200 of us. My fellow students created a note-taking service that produces a verbatim transcript. I graduated #1 in my class, and in fact, I achieved the top score in every exam. But, as a rule, I didn’t attend my classes! As a commuting student, I would have to devote nearly 40 hours a week to travel and sit in class, just so I could walk away with a set of personal notes that were inferior to the verbatim note-taking service’s notes. 

Get in the habit of adding a hefty dose of metacognition to everything you do in your studies. Think about your thinking. Don’t passively go along for the ride.

So, I sat home, except for the two times a week when I came to school and retrieved the latest packet of class transcripts. Otherwise, I studied all day long, read the class notes, created and practiced flashcards, read the class text, and read alternative texts and journal articles. I broadened my knowledge beyond the sources my classmates used. I learned much more than the others. They didn’t have the time I had to learn because they spent the day in class.

Whenever possible, read things only once

It’s SOP for students to read and reread their learning materials. They hold the mass delusion that the more times you consume the content, the more likely it will be indelibly burned into your mental ROM. But nothing could be further from the truth. 

When you reread academic content, you gain little more from the second or third pass than you gained from the first. The secret to learning is to make your one and only consumption of a piece of learning content a profound exercise of comprehension and curation. During this single in-depth pass, reread within that session as many times as required to fully grasp the concepts. Abstract the essential facts, ideas, formulas, and other nuggets of knowledge that you want to remember forever. Convert your curation into flashcards so that you can perform memory retrieval practice using spaced repetition. When processed in this manner, that single reading (watching or listening) is all that your need. The transformation of your learnings into flashcards ensures that you will have the opportunity to remember what you’ve learned forever if you so choose.

You may be thinking, what about marginalia and highlighting the text? Don’t they work? 

Marginalia may help you as your read and sort out your comprehension. Perhaps highlighting the text may help you think as you read. But neither will help you remember what you’ve learned, even if you reread your notes and highlights several times. Rereading and highlighting are passive processes. The most effective active process for creating robust, long-term memory is memory retrieval practice. And doing these practices structured in a regimen of spaced repetition supercharges the effect.

Also, get in the habit of adding a hefty dose of metacognition to everything you do in your studies. Think about your thinking. Don’t passively go along for the ride. Quality control how well you comprehend the material. Ask yourself if you need to check another source. Compare and contrast new concepts with the knowledge that you already possess. Where do these new ideas fit within the worldview that you already hold on that subject domain, and do they relate to other fields of knowledge? Be an active participant in your thinking, studying, and learning.

Key takeaways

Every course that you will take comes with real-world time constraints. The better you manage that time and respect the boundaries, the better positioned you’ll be to focus your energies on the activities that yield the most significant return on investment. 

Optimize for consuming the course content efficiently. Skip attending class if it’s allowed. Watch a lecture by video if possible. If you have access to a transcript of the lecture, eliminate the travel time and avoid sitting in class. 

Read the class materials once. When you read, watch, or listen, curate the essential points and transform your curation into spaced repetition flashcards. You’ll never have to return and re-consume the original source. Use the flashcards for memory retrieval practice, and if you wish, you’ll remember your learnings forever.