Task management is at least as important as time management. The following suggestions can help your students to sort out the respective priorities of the various tasks that they need to carry out in the course of their studies:
Explain how useful 'to do' lists can be: It's much more efficient than trying to carry round in one's mind all that needs to be done.
Get students to prioritise their tasks: Five categories can be useful: 'must be done today', 'should be done today', 'may be done today', 'could be done today', and 'not necessary today'. This can be done, for example, using Post-it notes for the tasks, and a wallchart. Items can be moved up the wall as they become more urgent. Point out the value of choosing tasks from more than one category on each day. In other words, just doing 'must be done today' tasks does not help to prevent a backlog building up, whereas doing (or starting) one or two low-priority tasks each day has the long-term benefit of preventing an accumulation of urgent tasks.
Suggest that students make an 'urgency/ importance' grid, and decide which tasks go in which box. The titles of the boxes being (1) urgent but not important, (2) urgent and important, (3) neither urgent nor important, and (4) important but not urgent.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment