Throughout the average week, time management is essential to how most people plan out their daily lives. Even though time is what runs our lives, time management hasn’t been a crucial skill we often use. Last Thursday, Jan. 24, the event Timeboxing: New Ideas for Time Management, helped to give out tips, tricks and ideas for managing your time better.

Holly Sullenger, the assistant director of Technology Training Solutions, spoke at the event and presented some of her time management skills.

“I actually started researching time management options and methods in anticipation,” Sullenger said. “Being able to share them with my corporate audiences’ years ago, and I’ve kind of kept up on them since then.”

By implementing these time management skills in her life, she was able to share her experiences with them.

Meghan Teten, the director of NC State’s EcoVillage, attended the event.

“I came to this event because I work very closely with students,” Teten said. “Especially first-year students that are transitioning and having to, a lot of times, figure out how to build structure into their study time and their days and nights because they never had to in high school.”

Everyone has trouble finding ways to manage their time. By attending this event, audience members were able to learn ways to use simple, yet effective, time management tasks in their daily lives.

“I also have some new obstacles in my personal life,” Teten said. “I just had a child, which has severely impacted my own time management, and I’m having to reframe my personal time and my work-life balance. So I figured that anything that I can collect that would be new information for me at the workshop would be helpful for both me and the students that I work with.”

Many students have found that time management can be one of the most difficult parts of college, and having the skills to properly manage it can greatly help.

“Well, as we discussed in the workshop, not very many students know where they can go to get time management or study skill information,” Teten said. “Sometimes they don’t even know that’s something that they should pursue themselves.”

Other than the new environment, there are many other reasons that first-years find it challenging to use time management to their advantage.

“I think that our public school system falls short of delivering that,” Sullenger said, “So I think a lot of students end up in college never having had to study or manage their time the way that they really need to be successful.”

At the event, Sullenger shares ways to avoid time wasters and improve time management skills.

“Use a calendar and live by the calendar,” Sullenger said.

By using a calendar daily, one can increase organization instead of wasting time trying to figure out what to do next.

Another time management skill Sullenger presented was the Pomodoro technique. This technique includes working for 25 minutes and then taking a five-minute break. This technique includes doing the 25-5 minute round four times until having a 15-30 minute break which can lead to two hours of deep work. 

Learning new time management skills, and possibly passing those skills on to others, can be highly beneficial, as mentioned by Teten.

“I also believe that for myself that ongoing professional development, always trying to learn new things that will help both me and my students,” Teten said. “So, doing things every now and then to better yourself in some way is something that I try to do.”

This event showed many examples for everyone to learn how to make more use of their time. Many of the audience members come out of the event hoping to apply the newly acquired time management technique to their lives.

“It’s given me some ideas for planning workshops for my students and hopefully, it will help me make better use of my time that I do spend,” Teten said.

Even though using new time management skills at first can be rough, it makes everyone’s lives easier and more fun.

“It’s a discipline thing like anything else in life,” Sullenger said. “You just have to choose to do it. The individuals who decide that they really want to succeed in school and want to learn just a few, simple time management tools that are going to be much more able to achieve that success than those who don’t.”