Be a better time manager

We know that when you study with the CIH Housing Academy it’s likely that you’re probably juggling work and your personal life alongside your studies. Time management isn’t everyone’s forte and so we’ve put together a few tips to help you get on top of your time management to help make your studying journey a success. 

Understand your motivation 

There’s lots of tips for planning which we go on to outline below, but one of the most important to start with is to make sure you are clear why you are doing this qualification. If you always have this objective in your mind, you’ll remain focussed on what you are trying to achieve. 

Consider creating some sort of small mood board, or even just a sticky note that gives you a visual cue of why you’re doing it. 

Plan out your hours 

There are only 24 hours in a day – time is limited. Make sure from the very start you know what hours you’ll be spending on work, family and studying. Each qualification has an estimated study time, so you can count up exactly how many hours you need to account for. If it helps, block out time in your diary so you know exactly how many hours you need to commit to.  

If you aren’t good at sticking to a schedule, why not try and be strict with yourself just for a week, to monitor how much time you spend on different activities and how much time you procrastinate with doing other things. You’ll soon be surprised how much time you wasted scrolling your phone when you could have been reading or listening to something important. 

Create daily to do lists 

If you only have a few limited hours a day available, you don’t want to waste 10 minutes of that working out what you need to do that day. Ideally you should pre-plan your activity in advance, if you know you have a certain number of sessions to complete, or a certain number of pages to read, work out what you need to do and when to really plan out in plenty of time. If you can, use some of your other time to create that list so when you sit down to study you already have the list ready to go. 

Most importantly, don’t try and multi-task in short periods. Focus on one specific task before moving onto the next, switching between tasks can be more time consuming than just focussing on one at a time. 

Make the most of your commute and housework 

The daily grind continues when you commit to studying, but you can make more of this time by writing those to do lists while on the train or listening to audio books or podcasts while doing the dishes. Pick activities that don’t need much brain power, like dishes, hoovering or dusting to make sure you can listen in and focus on whatever you’re listening to at the same time. If you haven’t already read our blog on some study tips which might also help! 

Break down big projects and tasks 

If you know you’ll only get an hour a day to work on your studies, but the next task on your list in three hours, break it down so you know exactly what point you need to get to before the end of each day. This will help you make the most of your time and avoid putting off the time heavy tasks when you can only dedicate short periods. 

Learn to prioritise 

We know you may not get chance to take on every recommended learning material provided, so before you start when you are planning out your hours, go through everything you have to do and prioritise what is most important, what has to be done after that, and then what are the ‘should do’ tasks that you know you should get to, but if an emergency crops up you shouldn’t be too impacted. 

Don’t clock watch 

We know this sounds like it contradicts the time management point if you can’t watch the clock, but actually we mean don’t watch the clock during your study period. Hide all distractions like clocks, phones, smart watches so you can focus just on the work you’re supposed to be doing. If you know you’re on a time limit to finish on time set an alarm to go off when you need to finish, let the clocks do the watching! 

Hopefully this helps give you some guidance on how to best plan out your study time, if you haven’t yet committed to your study, why not check out the CIH Housing Academy’s qualification offer and make your commitment today!