Are you the kind of student with an eight page paper, forty pages of reading, and two sets of calculus problems due by Monday? Let’s not forget about that exam in your Intro to Psychology class on Tuesday, that you haven’t even thought about studying for. On top of all of that schoolwork, you got invited by a few of your friends to go to Letchworth this weekend and that cute student you met at freshmen orientation weekend is going to be there; you can’t miss out on that opportunity! There’s also church on Sunday and choir rehearsal Saturday night. It looks like quite the busy weekend and you only have so much time. How do you plan to juggle all of this?
College is stressful. It is hard to juggle our academic lives, work, our social lives, and our spiritual lives. Depression and anxiety have been on the rise on campuses across the nation since 2009, according to a study recently performed by Cindy Liu, PhD, a psychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and her colleagues. Schoolwork can seem endless, but you don’t want to spend your entire weekend stuck in your dorm room pulling your hair out over some calculus problems. How do you manage your time and alleviate some of this stress?
One of the biggest problems that many students face is that they don’t accurately give themselves enough time to perform a task. In social psychology this is referred to as the “planning fallacy”. This is the tendency to optimistically give yourself too little time to complete a task, not realizing your own role in your failure to complete it. How many times have you told yourself that it would only take two hours to complete an assignment and then that assignment took 3 hours to finish?
Instead of realizing that we didn’t give ourselves enough time, we blame it on the distractions that we didn’t account for, or that we’re tired or hungry. Sometimes this inability to complete an assignment on time can make us angry, we blame the professor. “He is expecting too much from his students!” We extrinsically evaluate the situation, rather than putting the blame where it really belongs: on ourselves. How do we remedy this situation?
An article by Heidi Halvorson outlined a few ways to prevent the planning fallacy. The first is to be aware of our own role in how long it takes for us to complete a task. This awareness allows us to consciously plan extra time. Secondly, it helps to remember how long it took to complete tasks similar to the one at hand. We should also plan for distractions, and in doing so take steps to help prevent those. You will probably face more distractions if you are doing work where you are closer to the general public, than if you were working in a study room. Lastly, we should take into account what could go wrong while we are working. While this can often be difficult to assess, even giving yourself a small amount of extra time can be extremely helpful.
Stress is common for everyone, and there are many ways to remedy it. Sometimes it just takes a different perspective to properly act on our stress. By taking these steps, we can prevent some of the stress associated with college, more accurately balance our time between school and friends, and feel better about ourselves and our ability to complete our work.