Time Management 101: Advice from an MBA Student

Before sitting down to write this month's blog post, I did an extensive Google search for "well-known proverbs and quotes about time management". Why you ask? Because Father Time has essentially picked me up by my very thin and boring bootstraps, smacked me in the face, and shaken me up whether I was ready or not and has left me wondering to myself everyday how I'm going to pull my life off.

When I decided to go back for my MBA I had been out of college for a little over three years and my once young and lively energy has been drowned out by my overall acceptance of a mundane and routine lifestyle. I realized quickly that I was not prepared and I might add that I'm still not prepared to be a student again.

I searched on Google for a while sifting through the hits and the results yielded a mecca of famous quotes from celebrated artists and writers and even then I couldn't pick just one to summarize my exact feelings in this moment. The best 8 words I can come up with are "There are not enough hours in one day."

So what do you do when you go from working a corporate 9-5 job to balancing a social life while living in a foreign country, working multiple jobs and getting a masters degree? Well, besides going completely insane and finding a happy hobby to keep you motived at the same time, I find that being organized is my savoir. I'm an old fashioned lady in this rapidly growing world of technology. Since I was born in Generation Y, I should be relatively computer savvy. Personally, I prefer to go the traditional route with a pen and paper and write things down. I'd like to add that electronics get lost, stolen, and sometimes don't work. It's more reasonable to replace paper than a phone.

My advice is to get a planner. I have a beautiful planner that I bought from a store called Paperblanks because they are well organized, there is ample writing space and they are aesthetically pleasing. You can typically find them on Amazon for a discounted rate. Normally, my OCD kicks in about once a week and I write down exactly what I have to do every day, where I need to be, and when and what homework I have. I cannot say how most people function, but I can only focus on period of one to two weeks at a time to complete all of my detailed tasks. If I try to attempt more than this, I generally have an overload moment, fry out and then I just forget everything and take a nap.

I'd like to consider myself a pretty organized person, so some helpful advice to a new MBA student would be to get a planner, write in it everyday, make lists, write down your assignments, important due dates, etc. and look at it everyday. If you are terrible and looking at your planner and prefer to do this in your phone, then set an alarm to check it everyday. Not only will being organized help you to stay on top of your game, but it will also give you some peace of mind when you're out living your normal day-to-day life. If you're someone like me and you worry constantly, carrying around a small book to remind you what you're working towards is a small burden to pay for the greater picture.