Why is effectively managing your time important as a community college student? Because your ability to stay in school until you graduate significantly depends on it.
Our dreams and goals may take us years to achieve, but we work towards them through our daily actions. What focused, consistent actions are you willing to take to achieve your dreams and goals?
For me, managing my time effectively while a student at community college meant focusing on my top three priorities: family, school, and work. My life revolved around those priorities throughout my time at community college. Looking back, I see three qualities I had to strengthen in order to manage my time: I had to become more self-disciplined, more focused, and more organized.
Coming into community college, I already had many years of experience managing my family and work. But since college was a completely new experience for me, I didn’t know what adding higher education into my schedule would mean to my day-to-day life. So I had to learn how to better manage my time and to adjust as I went, becoming increasingly self-disciplined, focused, and organized, which in turn helped me manage my personal life, education, and work simultaneously.
To support you in staying on track with your learning, in this article, I discuss how to effectively manage your time as a community college student through becoming self-disciplined, focused, and organized.
#1 Strive to Become Self-Disciplined
Create a system that keeps you accountable, which could improve your self-discipline. First, identify your top three priorities, and don’t budge on them, no matter how tempted. Life is unpredictable, which means our plans don’t often work out as we wish. So it’s important to anticipate interruption in your learning and still stick with your academic commitments, no matter what. For me, I chose to anticipate interruption in my learning by keeping myself accountable to my responsibilities through using three tools for tracking my progress: notebooks, calendars, and long-term planning charts.
Using a notebook, one key way I anticipated interruption in my learning was by doing what I needed to do on any given day and not unnecessarily pushing tasks to the following day. In my notebooks, at night or early in the morning, I outlined the daily tasks that I needed to work on. For example, 1) drop my children at school, 2) go to work on campus for a few hours, 3) attend my English class, 4) go to an English tutoring session afterwards to start brainstorming my paper, 5) help my kids with their homework, 6) take my kids to their after-school activities, 7) do my class readings while waiting for the children, 8) cook dinner when I return home with the children, 9) have dinner with the family, 10) spend time with my husband to check in with each other on our days’ events, 11) read to my kids and put them to bed…
My to-do-lists only focused on one day and what I needed to accomplish on that day. Each of my days was full of activities and responsibilities, so I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with what I needed to do two days from now. I planned and lived according to one day’s demands at a time.
I also used a physical calendar to hold myself accountable. I always displayed a physical calendar in our kitchen, where I noted all of the deadlines of my courses’ assignments for the semester, my kids’ school events and appointments, their routine doctors’ appointments, and their weekly after-school activities. Every morning before I left the house, I would glance at my calendar to get a quick sense of the big picture of my week and month, though I only focused on that one day.
In addition, on my bedroom wall I displayed a long-term planning chart, where I outlined the courses I needed to take each semester based on my academic advisor’s guidance and checked them off the list once completed. Then I added the courses I needed to take for the following semester to that list and tracked those as well until they were completed. I continued this course-tracking practice until I graduated from community college. I ended up not dropping any course and graduating in two and half years as a part-time student.
Self-discipline may sound rigid, but there is freedom both short and long term that comes with doing what’s important on a daily basis and in a timely manner. Self-discipline could make the difference between remaining in a course or dropping out of it, scoring low grades or excellent ones, graduating in two to three years versus six.
- What are the top three priorities that you anticipate will remain unchanged throughout your time at community college?
- What tools are you going to use to keep yourself accountable to your high priorities?
- How do you specifically plan to use those tools to stay on track with your learning and other top priorities?
#2 Strive to Become Focused
Your ability or inability to focus as a college student can make or break your academic career. We live in a world of distractions, from our phones, computers, and social media, to family, community, and world events, among other things, all attempting to get our attention on any given day.
As a community college student, you have to decide what deserves your attention and what doesn’t and act accordingly. For me, I decided to spend no time on social media, almost no time on people who didn’t contribute to my life’s priorities, almost no time on community events, limited time on phone conversations, mostly speaking with my husband and children, and only watched TV in order to follow some important news developments. The activities that I was engaging in needed to support my priorities: family, school, and work. Otherwise, I simply couldn’t fit them into my tight schedule.
Because I adjusted my life to focus on my education, many people misunderstood me. Some questioned why I was returning to school as a married mother instead of simply working. Some used to ask me, are you still in school? When are you going to finish? I had to accept being misunderstood and still concentrate on my education, even though I had no guarantee that my learning outcome would be worthwhile. I decided to keep going even when people around me didn’t understand me, even when I myself didn’t know what I was doing. Because my goal was to lift myself and my family out of poverty, accomplishing that was much more important to me than worrying about what other people thought of my endeavor.
Focusing is an asset that prevents you from succumbing to distractions and keeps you thinking about and doing what’s critical for your life at any given moment. That means more time for your academic, personal, and work responsibilities and less time on non-essential activities and distractions.
- What does being focused mean to you?
- What tools / methods will you use to stay focused on your priorities and tasks each day?
- If you’re misunderstood by people around you, how will you deal with it?
#3 Strive to Become Organized
If you build or strengthen your organization skills, that could help you reduce stress related to your academic, personal, and professional lives and could allow you to carry out your responsibilities in a more predictable and systemic way. For example, if you’re taking an English 101 course at community college, look at the assignments you’re expected to complete throughout your semester, write them on your calendar with their deadlines. Then schedule one meeting after another with your professor and English tutors to go over each of your essay assignments with them to fully understand what is being asked of you and to clarify any questions you may have. As I discussed in the article 7 Tips to Excel as a First-Generation Student in Community College, part of being organized as a community college student is to make sure you fully understand what is being asked of you and resolve any of your questions.
For your schoolwork, think of every place you’re in as a classroom and a potential space to study. This means you have to learn to tune out noises, distractions, and activities around you. You could make sure you carry with you all the things you need to work on your different assignments, so that whenever and wherever you have 10 minutes in your day, you can study. You’ll be surprised how quickly those 10 minutes of study time here and there add up to an hour of substantive work. Before you know it, you’ll complete that English 101 essay with wiggle room to edit multiple drafts and still submit it on time. And you may earn a decent or even an excellent grade in the end! It’s the small, intentional, daily efforts that create the deepest and most lasting results, not cramming your work into a short period of time just before its due date.
For your responsibilities at home, you may need to start waking up thirty minutes earlier and going to bed thirty minutes later to complete important tasks for your family. For example, if you have children, you could organize their school clothes and yours at night so that in the morning you could all be ready faster. You could also pack your children’s snacks and yours at night so that in the morning all you have to do is pop them into their respective backpacks.
For your job, if you have the option to work on campus and if that suits your situation, do it. As a community college student, I worked part-time on campus, at one point as an assistant in the learning lab and at another as a Spanish tutor. Both jobs allowed me to study when I didn’t have any student to attend to, which helped me stay on track with my courses while earning some income. Consider taking jobs that would also allow you to study.
One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself as a student in community college is to simply stay on track with your learning. That means showing up for every class and on time, paying attention in class, submitting assignments on time, and remaining in the courses you’re enrolled in until their completion. It’s much easier to stay on track than to fall behind and try to catch up. How do I know? I was a high school dropout, and after earning my General Educational Diploma (GED) and enrolling at community college, all I was doing was trying to catch up, and that was constant heavy labor. Becoming more organized in the high-priority areas of your life, including your academics, will allow you to better manage your responsibilities and position you to excel in community college and beyond.
- How will you manage your time as a community college student?
- How will you organize your daily tasks so you can accomplish them in a timely manner?
- How do you plan to study regardless of where you are?
The Power of Time and Discipline
I hope that this discussion on effectively managing your time through becoming self-disciplined, focused, and organized can help you in your learning. These three qualities are interconnected; you can’t really be focused and well organized if you have no self-discipline, and it’s hard to be self-disciplined if you have no focus. These skills can be built over time and with practice can continue to improve throughout your life. No day of your life will ever come back. That’s why what you do with your time and how you do it becomes significant to every aspect of your life. Managing your time well will position you to stay on track with your learning and graduate quickly from community college.
What topic discussed in this article was of the most interest to you and why? Your feedback will help me further support you in your learning.
Reflection Exercise of the Month
Each of the three areas discussed above on how to manage your time through becoming self-disciplined, focused, and organized was followed by a series of questions. For each area, select two of those questions, get your notebook and pen, and reflect on those questions in the month to come.
Week 1
Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #1.
Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #1.
Week 2
Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip#2.
Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #2.
Week 3
Monday: Write a five-minute reflection on the first question you selected for tip #3.
Tuesday: Write a five-minute reflection on the second question you selected for tip #3.
Week 4
Monday: Building on your reflections, put together a plan for how you’ll better manage your time in community college.
Tuesday: Start implementing your time management plan for staying on track with your studies in community college.
Closing Thoughts
That’s it for this article on managing your time effectively at community college. Your commitment to improve your time management skills could not only allow you to earn your associate’s degree but also help you in your personal and professional lives long after you leave college.
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Do you want to know more about how I went from a high-school dropout to a master’s degree? Grab a copy of my memoir, Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, set for release in February 2025. I would appreciate your review of it when it appears on Amazon!
Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best.
Keep going!
Hi, I’m Aminata Sy. I’m the author of the memoir Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, in which I write about how I started out in America as a high-school dropout and non-English-speaking immigrant and yet went on to earn a high-school equivalency diploma and associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees and to land a dream career. All that time, I was a wife and mother too and had plenty of family responsibilities. Through my blog, I offer tips to community college students on how to excel in their education.
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