After only two months of college, I have already identified what I know will be my biggest challenge over the course of these next four years: time management.  With homework constantly piling up around me, exciting social opportunities literally every night of the week, intramural sports, too many different clubs to count, and a time-consuming (yet spiritually rewarding) church calling, I haven’t had a moment to catch my breath since I’ve been here.  This past week, our lecture was about time-management, and our speaker, Tamara Gray, offered some great insight and useful ideas.  She outlined four “to-do list” items that we should focus on in order to make the most of our time and find a healthy balance:

1) Change your attitude: She emphasized that our life should be like an orchestra, and we should strive to find a harmony between all the different aspects of our lives. 

2) Check your motives: This tied in to the lecture from a couple weeks ago about vision and goals—everything that we spend time doing should have a purpose, and should bring you closer to reaching your overarching vision. 

3) Simplify: There are so many “good” uses of our time, but we need to seek only the “better” and “best” uses of our time, and remember “not to get caught in the thick of thin things.”

4) Be intentional and accountable: It’s important to schedule things out and when you make mistakes, instead of finding excuses and avoiding blame, you should honestly reflect on your actions and even pray over your goals.

      One of the ideas that really stuck with me from the lab on Monday is that “it's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you put in the hours.”  I think that I do a good job at blocking out plenty of time to get my schoolwork done, but I know that I could be more efficient and save myself a lot of time.  First of all, I have a really sporadic sleep schedule; I’ve already pulled a few all-nighters and I procrastinate often, so I’m usually up very late and take naps throughout the day.  I’ll often get so tired when doing homework in the late hours of the night that I take twice as long to read a passage, or I’m not able to write as well as I could if I had lots of energy.  I also get distracted very easily.  And while Facebook is one obvious time-sucking distraction, I get distracted by tons of other things as well, even if t’s just my mind trailing off topic.  I think that to fix this problem, I need to start going to bed earlier and maybe waking up earlier if I have a lot of homework.  I also need to make a solid effort to stay focused, perhaps by setting mini-goals and rewarding myself when I meet them.

      On Monday, we also filled out a worksheet called the “Wheel of Life Reflection”, where we gauged how much time we spend on these categories: friends/social, family, schoolwork, health/exercise, church/spiritual, ourselves, work, and improving our physical environment.  It created a strong visual that represented how we used our time.  Of course, the top use of my time was schoolwork, which is okay for a college student.  However, I realized that while I am spending lots of time on friends and church, I’ve neglected to spend enough time on my family.  My family is more important to me than anything else on that wheel, so I really need to adjust how much of my time I give them.  Time really is the most precious commodity; we can’t create more of it, we can’t slow it down or speed it up, and we can’t control it.  It’s so important to prioritize the uses of your time and consistently evaluate how you’re managing your time so that not a single minute is wasted.