A Guide to the Best Time Management Techniques for a Successful College Student |
A Guide to the Best Time Management Techniques for a Successful College Student
So how do you build good habits in college? That’s the question I asked myself when I started at my first job, and it was one of the most important things I learned over the years that shaped my career path.
As a student, you need to be thinking about what you want to do next, and how you want to do it. But the fact is, if you want to get a good job, there are a lot of opportunities that will not be open to you until after college. There are no guarantees. And if your goal for college is simply getting into an excellent graduate school program or even into a very good job in an excellent company, then pursuing those goals will take a lot of time and effort that may not be practical.
The key here is striking just right — there are times when being too early, too late or missing out on opportunities are going to hurt more than they help. So as much as possible, try to strike when all options are still open.
Table Of Content(toc)
1. The Chemistry of Building Better Habits
The more you can write down what you do and why, the easier it will be to stay on top of your rituals. Your new habits can become atomic habits where they are triggered automatically by certain situations.
“Do this many times a day” is an atomic habit. “Do this once a week” is an atomic habit. “Do this every day” is an atomic habit.
If you follow these rules, they will become atomic habits automatically, without your knowing it.
2. Activation Energy
Caloric burning is the process of transferring energy from one molecule to another.
It is a very simple metabolic process which enables all life on Earth to exist.
The result of this is that every molecule in our bodies has a certain amount of energy stored within it. The molecules are then forced to exchange these energy molecules with other molecules.
The process by which this exchange takes place, called metabolism, can be described as a chemical reaction:
…[a] chemical reaction occurs between an oxidizing agent (or an electron donor) and a reducing agent (or electron acceptor), for example water (H2O) and glucose (CH3OH). If the oxidizing agent and reducing agent have opposite charge, the reaction will take place at an equal potential difference; if they have the same charge, the reaction will take place at slightly higher potentials. The chemicals involved in this reaction are called oxidants or acids and the chemicals involved in this reaction are called alkalis or bases. In addition, we might call these substances water-solvents, because water is considered to be a solvent for many types of molecules.
Let’s say we have two chemicals — one acid (H+), one alkali (Na+), one electron-acceptor (Na+) and one electron-donor (H+) — in a particular ratio: 1:1:1:1:1 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1… (where I ‘include’ Na+, H+ and CO2; since each molecule in CO2 has 2 protons). Now, let’s say that if we add more H+ to our mixture from above, it will tend to combine with Na+ more readily than H+. If we add more Na+, it will tend to combine more readily than H+. This is known as disproportionation and unless there are other factors at work — such as differences in pressure or temperature — it leads to a disorderly mixture of gases instead of a neat mixture of gases that mix easily with each other. And so on! It really doesn’t matter how much H+ you put into your mixture. Each step amounts to adding exactly zero hydrogen ions into your mixture; so why bother?
Now consider what happens if you were able to remove all oxygen atoms from your mixture by heating it up until it reached the temperature at which all oxygen atoms were lost from the mixture essentially by burning them up (“
3. How Activation Energy Affects Your Marketing Efforts
How many times do you say the words “I’m going to do x”? How many times have you started doing x and then stopped? And then, what changed?
A great deal of effort is spent on perfecting habits. A habit is a set of actions that you perform in a certain way over and over again. A habit is not something you can actually change (unless, perhaps, some external force is at play). It’s a state that you are in at any given time when you perform those actions.
In fact, we often use the term “habit loop” to describe how the habits we form are influenced by the outside world. We are constantly looking for new ways of performing old actions, which means we may not be able to stick with what worked before (and vice versa).
And that’s where marketing comes into play — it can be used to make sure our habits are aligned with what others need. If they find us useful enough to repeat our behavior (e.g., they sign up for our newsletter), then we can use that as leverage to tweak the habits that will make our product better (i.e., encourage them to repeat their behavior).
4. How to Increase Your Business Appetite for Success
Learning how to increase your appetite for success is an important skill. In order to do so, you have to be willing to do the work necessary. At the end of the day, there are only two ways you can increase your appetite for success:
– Introducing new products that provide sub-optimal value
– Breaking well known habits and adopting new ones
What does this mean in practice? It means that if you want to improve your business, then the first step is understanding what makes a good product versus a great product — and then moving on from there. And in order to move on from there, you will have to search for new ways of creating value — whether that’s through improving on well-known practices (such as building better habits) or introducing novel ideas (such as using natural language processing).
In order to do any of these things, however, you need a constant flow of motivation — which is why we often hear it said that “A person who works hard will always make it big.”
You also need a constant flow of motivation because once you want something badly enough, when you get it — it’s really difficult not to want more. You see this nicely illustrated with the famous scene in The Matrix where Neo is struggling with his motivation after spending days searching for what he really wants. As he was walking along a path he came across a man who was having difficulty walking. Neo stopped and offered him a hand; he needed help getting up but didn’t know how much help he could provide. When Neo asked him if he wanted him to pull him up, the man replied:
“No problem! I’ve got just what you’re looking for…” “Thank-you” Neo replied, “I will never forget what I learned today.” – The Matrix
5. Conclusion
This is one of those concepts that needs to be taught as a child. It’s not something that can be taught, though. It’s also not something that can be learned, as it’s so ingrained in our structure that it takes years to unlearn it.
So how do you build habits? And why make them?
Because they’re so easy to do – if you want to get better at anything, start by making sure you never forget how to do it well (and then try and change yourself).
The best way to think about building habits is this: you want the behaviors the give you the best chances of success and satisfaction with your life. So in order for me to have a successful life, I need my writing habits to be solid and consistent. But I also need a good routine for waking up and getting ready for work every day. And having a good routine for getting ready every morning is important because it gives me confidence I won’t mess anything up and keeps me from wasting time sleepwalking through my days (which wastes my time when I don’t have enough hours in the day).
And here’s why: The more consistent (and thus effective) the routines are, the less time I will spend thinking about what else could go wrong with them or how things are going wrong even though they are working well. I just need to remember they work – which is very different than doing things because they feel right or because they feel like something that should be done – because if you start doing these things out of habit, you will tend to over-think and over-program what needs doing. The same goes for solving problems; this is why many people find it easier when solving problems than thinking about solutions and planning ahead – because there’s nothing left over from thinking about possible solutions after having considered them all when solving a problem.
The ability of our brains to change quickly, without much conscious thought or deliberation on our part, means we often fail at building habits because we think we have all these “good” ways of doing things but actually don’t know what works best in any situation or environment we encounter often enough that we don’t know where we can improve our routines without being wasteful or losing control of what works so well already!
And yet this knowledge isn’t really needed if you want your habits to be effective – all someone has to do is try different routines until they fit