The links below will help you set goals, plan your week, and talk yourself to success. But before you get started with your plan, you may want to take a few minutes to see how well you’re managing your available time.

You may often feel that you don’t have enough time to accomplish everything you want to accomplish. Is there really not enough time, though, or do you simply have trouble managing available time? Calculating your Don’t Delay Quotient is the first step to finding time to study.

Consider that most people work 40 hours a week. Let’s use that as a student’s work week, based on the idea that going to school is a student’s job. That doesn’t mean you should work eight hours a day, five days a week, because you usually work more days than five. But 40 hours is a good benchmark for working time.

Part of your work is going to class and part is studying. If you calculate the number of hours of class meeting time you have this term, and subtract that number from 40, the amount that’s left is your available study time. Here’s an example:

Your Don’t Delay Quotient is the percentage of available hours you spend studying. You calculate it by dividing your actual study time by the available study time and multiply the result by 100. The closer you can get to 100 percent, the better.

Using the example above, and assuming you studied 15 hours this week, here’s your Don’t Delay Quotient:

This means you didn’t delay studying 54 percent of the available time. The more time you spend studying, the higher your Don’t Delay Quotient will be. To help overcome procrastination, share your Don’t Delay Quotient at the start of each week and your end-of-week results.

Another tool to help you find time to study is a weekly time chart. Click here for a sample chart and details about this helpful procrastination buster.

These links will help you develop a plan. As you plan, think about what’s important to you and translate that into goals that will help you move ahead. Goals are specific actions or behaviors you can carry out, such as spending two hours a day studying. If they’re too general, such as doing well in school, they’re of no value since you haven’t identified specific steps you can take to achieve them. You can go on record with your goals by sharing them here. 

Setting goals

Talking yourself to success

Get more help in beating procrastination from the Academic Learning Lab, Room 250G of the Younkin Success Center, 1640 Neil Ave., Columbus, Ohio. Goal-setting strategies are also covered in EPL 259: Individual Learning and Motivation.