Яворовенко Э. В.

Kharkiv National University of Economics

THE IMPORTANCE OF TIME MANAGEMENT SKILLS IN LEARNING PROCESS

In the present fast-moving world time has become of a real value. If a person wants to achieve a success it is not sufficient to be smart and professional. Time management is a key factor in business life. It allows a manager to plan his activity effectively as well as to minimize the loss of time and avoid procrastination. Time management comprises a wide scope of activities, and these include planning, allocating, setting goals, delegating, analyzing the time spent, monitoring, organizing and prioritizing.

It is very necessary to obtain time management skills not only for managers or state employees but also for everybody. The process of studying at university will be more efficient and rapid if students learn how to manage the time. Thus the main goal of this article is to analyze students’ key losses of time and to develop recommendations how they can spend time effectively.

A lot of foreign and national scientists have been working at the problem of time management. They are Klaus Moeller, David Allen, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey, Natalia Alyushyna, etc.

Time management is defined as the act or process of planning and exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency or productivity. At the very beginning it was an attribute of business but recently time management has broadened to include personal activities as well. To obtain the information about the real level of time management skill among students a survey was conducted. Being informed how well students manage their time will help to elicit the main problems and obstacles on the way of self-improvement.

According to the survey only 28% of respondents are mainly satisfied with their self-organization and time spending, whereas the rest of the students are not satisfied (45%) or even can’t manage their time (27%) that leads to depression and stress. The problem of self-organizing is very serious among students. There are no courses dedicated to time management at universities or schools so that many of them can’t organize their life in the way they want. Thus students often face problems in studying such as low productivity, lack of time to finish work, poor quality of the work done. It is not a secret that a vast majority of students prepare their projects, reports and so on mostly at the eleventh hour. It is simply because they don’t know how to plan their learning activity effectively. According to the Pareto’s Principle [3] roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It means that only 20% of a person’s activity brings him 80% of the result. In our case 75% of respondents pointed out that they can’t separate important activities from non-related. Actually they simply don’t really follow the Pareto’s Principle and waste time on the remaining 80% of the causes that bring only 20% of the effects.

Among the factors that regularly draw students’ attention away from learning activity the survey showed the following main distractors: social networks (42%), the Internet surfing (27%) and useless phone talks (12%)). It is not a surprising statistics because social network and the Internet surfing have become popular among young people in recent years and it is considered as social disease. That’s why many a students prefer communicating via the Internet or playing a game rather than do something useful.

Having analyzed the results it is possible to draw the recommendations that allow to improve learning process and to educate qualified professionals graduating from universities and schools. In our opinion some particular steps should be done to develop studying activity. They are as are as follows:

1. According to the research only 31% of respondents schedule their time regularly so the first thing that should be implemented into learning process is to educate young people how to schedule their activity regularly including daily, weekly, monthly, yearly planning. The number of students who may improve their progress will grow steadily.

2. Many students (74%) know little or even nothing about time management tools and methods. Thus it will be a significant improvement if universities and schools provide a special course dedicated to time management that allows students to get acquainted with key principles as well as methods of time management art. Especially the survey shows that 69% percent of respondents believe that time management skills will help them to raise their productivity in times.

3. As for motivation there are plenty of various methods to increase the desire of students to be more sufficient. For example, it could be a special calendar where one should paint each day in green color if this day is efficient or cross if it is not.

In the end it needs to be said that time management is widely used among professionals and managers. Unfortunately, it is not popular with those who are studying at schools and universities although high productivity and self-efficiency are crucial factors to achieve significant results.

The list of references:

1. Brian Tracy. Eat that Frog: 21 Ways to stop Procrastination and get More Done in Less Time. – San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007. – 128 p.

2. Романець Д. Тайм-менеджмент. Час пішов [Електронний ресурс]. – Режим доступу: http://umoloda.kiev.ua/number/1128/203/40260/

3. F. John Reh. Pareto's Principle – The 80-20 Rule [Електронний ресурс]. – Режим доступу: http://management.about.com/cs/ generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm