Daily Time Management and Efficiency
Brian Friday, May 28, 2010 at 9:57AM Hey everyone, my name is Brian and I’m one of the new writers discussing the neurosis here at PMH. I’m a 4th year biophysiology major slowly gridding my teeth all the way up to 7 years. Why the lucky number? I’ve dived into a couple of majors including computer science and nursing and right before I was about to take full semesters in the colleges, I switched. If anyone has any questions with those requirements as well I’ll be more than happy to help. I like long walks on the beach, movies, music, learning, and medical TV shows (did you guys see the Grey’s Anatomy season finale?). My favorites are cyan, jellyfish, Trauma: Life in the ER, Green Day, and Ten Things I Hate About You. I’ve worked in a hospital for three years now, I’ve been in school for 40 straight weeks, and I’m trying to charter my school for Tri-Beta. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell. I’m honored to be a part of the team and I hope I can give you helpful information to get you into your medical schools. Let’s get to learning.
This post is a follow up to Mohammad's post monitoring his internet usage, I decided to apply it to my daily life and monitor my time for the whole day, the results were fairly surprising.
Studying
Studying is pretty self-explanatory, it basically is anytime that I hit the books, reading for biology, chemistry, organizing or studying notes, and doing chemistry problems at the back of the book. I was a little shocked to see the average at nine.
Playing
I actually asked my girlfriend what I should name this section and she couldn’t think of a better name either; kind of cutesy, huh? This section was reserved for any time that I was doing something not related to school (but still productive); most of the time I was watching YouTube videos or spending time on Facebook trying to redefine the privacy policy. Although, it’s hard to say it was all fun and games; on the twelfth day, the two hours of play was calling 911 for a loud scream I heard at the school a hundred feet away from us.
To/From School
Basically, the time that it took getting to school, walking to my class, and then walking to my car from class and going home. The mornings always included the time it took to shove breakfast down my throat after sleeping in for what seemed to be only five minutes.
At School
This included the time that I was in lecture or lab and also club meetings
Eating
The time I take out of the day to eat, usually I take a half an hour to watch an episode of Scrubs. Sometimes, this is the only time out of the day I take to break, occurs more during midterms and finals.
Sleeping:
Any time I take to sleep at night or pass out during the day. I was a little surprised to see the averages between 5 and 7.
Exercising
Any activity that involves doing cardio or lifting weights to relieve stress; usually during the semester I run on the treadmill at my house. Obviously, in these two weeks it didn’t happen, but in a perfect day I try and exercise thirty minutes with ten minutes of stretching.
Working
Time that it took getting to and from work and working itself. I thought it might be nice to see the hours it took to do everything related to working for a day, averaging about 14 ½ hours.
What was learned overall?
I knew I studied a lot but it was still a little shocking to see the average on paper at about ten hours with maximums of twelve and a half hours. However, this is consistent with the totals because I spend about 20 hours a week in lecture and about 60 to 65 hours a week studying (one hour of lecture to three hours of studying ratio); the second week is higher because finals week.
Another shocking revelation was how long it took just to get to and from school. The averages are a little off because some days I didn’t drive to school but it took roughly 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours going to and from the university, a necessary evil.
A different way to look at the data is to take out the hours sleeping and playing and I spend about a 110 hours a week trying to get into medical school, roughly three full time jobs.
Take Home Message
Log your hours. Know where you are at every second of the day. It’s a little tedious at first but practice makes perfect. Practicing time management is your key to short term goals (pressing the snooze button a few more times) and long term goals (medical school). Knowing where you need to add and where you need to slice and dice will help every aspect of your life. So, take the five minutes to write down what you did for the day and take a few minutes at the end of the week to analyze and adjust.
If you have any questions or comments about me, the post or anything in general, please don’t be shy or afraid to email me. I will be more than happy to answer questions or help with any issues you’re having.
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Reader Comments (9)
Great post Brian! It is amazing to see where time goes, and how it disappears so fast. Hope to see many more great posts from you.
sad reality...
It was interesting reading your post to review how your schedule is broken down. After finishing, I started to think about my own schedule. It was interesting. :)
Instead of "Playing" I think you could have called it "Free time?" I think "playing" works fine, though. Haha.
It's frightening to see where the time goes. I can't believe you were dedicated enough to do this. You're truly in pre-med hell. ;]
wow you're smart
Wow, you average more study time in a week than I do in a quarter for my major. Props to you man, you're a BAMF. Just don't have a psychotic episode and kill everybody, it will be detrimental to your admittance to medical school.
It is amazing to see how much time you study, you actually spend more time out of everyday studying than Sleeping and eating and if your were to add your class time that would total more than sleeping, eating, and play time. This is good preparation for med school.
Good post and something I was considering doing for myself. For your study sessions do you make a schedule of what you want to accomplish during your allotted times? If so, how to set it up? Also, I am curious as to how you organize your class notes. I jump around too much and need to find a constant way of taking and storing my information. Any suggestions?
@Post bacc student,I don't necessarily make a schedule every time I want to study. I probably should do something like that so I don't get off track but if I were to log it every time I would feel like I'm wasting my time. If that works for you and how you study then I would definitely recommend doing it. I'm usually pretty aware of what I need to do and how much I need to do per day to get the grades that I would like.
The thought process in my head though might be the same as when someone writes it down on paper. I'm trying to come up with a succinct example that won't make it look like I'm nuts. Let's take this week for example. I know I have lab tomorrow, ochem lecture tomorrow, bio lecture the next day, ochem lecture the day after with cecs class. I have bio lecture on Thursday and bio lab. I have a cecs exam and a bio lab exam in two weeks with a bio lecture exam 3 weeks and an ochem lecture exam in 4 weeks. I will study however much I need to get the ochem lab work done and enough to understand the ochem lecture. I'll do what I need to get through bio lecture on both days. All low maintenance studying though, enough to understand what I need to get by with good grades. Cecs class will do an hour here or there but the class doesn't require much so I might just do very low maintenance studying until possibly that day or the day before and bump it up to high maintenance studying to ace the exam. Bio lab is a little more intensive so that will get medium maintenance until 2 days at least before the exam. Once those are out of the way, I have more time for lecture finals. Bio lecture will get more per day than ochem because ochem is a week later. Once bio is done, bio goes back to low maintenance and ochem goes up to high maintenance until the exam.
I hope that made at least some sense. I also have a pretty detailed calendar of when my exams are, when extracurricular events are, when I work, so I know exactly what I have to do and when I need to do it. Another thing you may want to consider is keeping track of your grade in a spreadsheet. Just another device to help you know what you need to do.
But, to answer the question directly, I don't really do that. Every so often I do make a list of what I need to do but more often than not, I just dive right in. You may also want to take a psychology course and learn about information processing and memory storage. Knowing how you remember things helps you understand why you didn't know as much you wanted for a test even though you studied hard. This will play a role in what you study and when you study it.
As far as note-taking and organizing, all depends on how much you want. I've gotten so used to naming files and categorizing that it doesn't take me very long to do it. It would also depend on what you're trying to organize. For example, I have lecture audio. I categorize by lecture number and date and then on each audio file I give it a name to help me know what I'm listening too. For notes, we are given power points at least for biology. So, I just organize it in order of chapter and have a lecture notes folder on my computer.
As far as hard copy notes and such. I do it by separating everything into categories. Lecture notes, my notes, quizzes and exams, labs, lab notes, etc. Everything in those sections goes in order by date usually. Mohammad does it a different way by separating all of his notes by exam: exam 1, exam 2, etc. I've gotten used to my way so I've just kept doing it to save time.
If you're talking about taking notes. I probably don't follow the best method, I tend to write down everything I can in biology because I rely more on the notes and what they say in class. Most of the time their lectures are really important for the exams. For chemistry I'm a little more selective because it relies more on how to do the problems not necessarily what they say in lecture. In a perfect world though, I put headers with a line under them and put bullet points summarizing what the professor is saying. Anything really important off to the side. It rarely happens though because of power points and such.
Also note that science courses will always take more study time than any other GE or elective courses. So, maintenance levels do very. Low maintenance for science courses means something totally different than for my cecs course.
It all depends on your learning style and what you want to accomplish. If you have any more questions feel free to reply. I hope this helps.