Why time management
skills are so important

November 2011

Now that first marking period is over and grades are in, many students have realized that they need to step up their game if they want to reach the goals they set for themselves.

With fall sports just ending and winter sports beginning, many student athletes are either relishing the extra time they now have to study and work on homework or frantically trying to plan out every minute of their day so they can get the maximum amount of homework done and be as productive as their incredibly busy day allows.

Time management is an important skill many high school students have yet to learn. Being a student athlete myself, I know how hard it is to work up the motivation to start the five hours of homework that piled up in class after class. It’s always the days when you’re the busiest that teachers seem to assign all the work, and it’s really tempting to just put it aside and go to bed. With all the time practice and games take up, studying tends to be pushed to the back-burner by many students.

But that shouldn’t be happening. If you are consistently staying up to the early hours of the morning, you should re-think your study schedule. Ask yourself: Am I really being as productive as I need to be?

If you come home from school and immediately plop down on the couch for a three hour TV marathon before pulling out the book, that could change. If you come home from practice after it ran late and you tell yourself, ‘Oh I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll have plenty of time,’ and then decide to sleep or watch TV, that could change.

Sometimes making your homework load more manageable is an easy fix, and sometimes it may take a little more than cutting out TV and Facebook time. You just have to find what works best for you and try it out. It could get you an extra couple hours of sleep per night.

And I know as well as the next person how easy it is to sit down on the computer, planning just to pop onto Facebook and check your notifications, only to look at the clock after what seems like a couple minutes and find out it was actually an hour. The easy fix for that is to just not go on Facebook in the first place.

If homework is really getting you down, and you’re just too busy with sports, then ask your coach for a homework day. Ask any coach and they’ll tell you that school comes over athletics any day, and if the amount of homework is overwhelming you, they’ll let you spend practice time doing homework. You may miss an important day of practice, but the next one will go better because you won’t be stressed out and exhausted. It may seem hard to give up practice for homework, but it really is the right choice. No matter how important athletics are to you, school always comes first.