Tip of the Week

From the MCTC Student Planner:

Make a schedule that shows your typical week's obligations.

My addition: okay, so then what?

We often underestimate how long it takes to do some of the regular tasks in our lives. We think, oh, it will take me two minutes to do that. Well, maybe it DOES take two minutes to actually do something, but there's 10 minutes of start-up and clean-up involved as well and the two minute activity really takes 12.

I live in a suburb; I nearly always forget it can take up to 10 minutes to get to the freeway from my house when I'm thinking about how long it will take me to get there.

I have two young children; they're 10 and 6 (and a half, I've been recently reminded - 6 1/2, MOM!). To get out the door with young kids, I read somewhere to give yourself 15 minutes per kid. So, if you want to leave at 7, for two kids you would need to start getting ready to go at 6:30. I thought, "no way." Well, I've learned: "Yes, way." As an adult, it takes me about 5 minutes to get out the door. Gotta get my coffee, make sure I have my cell phone, and oh yeah, get the lunch out of the fridge... I've found that it reliably takes about 7 minutes per kid to get out the door in the morning during the winter. So that means that if I want to be in the car, driving away, at a certain time we need to start leaving at least 15 minutes ahead of time to not be scrambling.

So, what does this mean to you? When you're planning your studying schedule, we forget to plan for how long "life" will take. How long does grocery shopping REALLY take on the weekends? Maybe the actual store time is under an hour, but what about getting there, and then putting away the wretched groceries after you get home? How about that Target run? You THINK you can get in and out in 15 minutes; can you really? Heck, I can't. So, the next thing you know, your morning errands took 3 hours and you now have to leave for work in less than an hour. Or whatever.

The "now what?" part of this week's tip is to think through how long your regular tasks really take you, and to plan for that. How much of your week is spent working? How much sleeping? After you subtract 8 hours for working and 8 hours for sleeping (you can't shortchange sleep without hurting your body), you have 8 hours left. Maybe it takes you an hour each way to work and back - that's two hours total each work day; now you're down to 6 hours left over. Have to eat, right? It takes about 30 minutes minimum for each meal x 3 so that's an hour and a half. Now we're down to 4.5 hours. You need to bathe and care for yourself, so that's another hour out of your day. 3.5 hours left.

And, we haven't read stories to our babies, gone for coffee with our friends, screwed around on Facebook, cleaned our bathrooms, walked our pets, helped our older kids with their homework... all those other things we like to and need to do to make our lives richer.

How many classes are you taking this semester? Did you know that most instructors think you should be spending roughly 3 hours outside of class time for every credit hour of the course each week? For a 3 credit face-to-face class, that means your instructor expect you to spend 9 hours outside of class on readings, homework, etc. In an online class, that means about 12 hours of study per week for that 3-credit class. That works out to about 2 hours a day, with one day off (I'm a math wiz, I know. :-)). Per class. How many credits are you enrolled in? How much time do you have available?