Chad Chisholm, CIFC Director

As college students, you know that one of the hardest challenges is finding “balance” in your daily life: balancing work, relationships, life, and assignments. What classes should you study for more? Should you focus more on learning the academic material in class, or on getting the grade regardless of content mastery?

Ultimately, it is a question of how to use and redeem your time. In the movie Dead Poets Society Robin Williams plays an English teacher at a traditional prep school: he always tells his students “carpe diem,” which is Latin for ‘seize the day.’

Make carpe diem your maxim for college, and you will spend these years developing lifelong skills that are crucial for success.

Let’s explore more.     

The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps information on the habits of full-time students, particularly with how they use their time during the week for study and other campus activities. According to the Bureau, the average student spends a 24 hour weekday doing the following things:

• 9 hours sleeping
• 4 hours on some sort of leisure or sporting activity
• 2 hours and 18 minutes working at a job of sorts
• 5 hours traveling
• 1 hour eating
• About 48 minutes grooming
• About 2 hours and 12 minutes on “other” activities

On average, this leaves about 3.5 hours for ‘educational activities’ such as attending class, doing homework, writing papers, and preparing for exams. You might wonder if 3.5 hours a day is enough time for college. The best ‘rule of thumb’ is to maximize your academic time at the onset of the semester, then reassess how much time should be allotted to each class as you get closer to midterm. By then, you should better understand the demands of each professor.

Some classes are more demanding than others, and the law of diminishing returns also applies to university courses as well. If you come to class feeling knowledgeable and engaged, then you have probably struck the right balance.

Do Not Skip Personal Enrichment

Human beings are preprogramed for routines and rituals. You can make exceptions for exam week or when a paper is due, but sacrificing your routines for short-term goals can lead to burn out. As the anecdote of the ‘empty pickle jar’ illustrates, college study should be adapted into your own unique individual patterning.

Your prayers, hobbies, friendships, creative pursuits, and physical activities are an important part of redeeming your time as a college student. Cultivating routines that balance your personal rituals with academic tasks will improve both areas, and it creates a state of mind that the writer Ray Bradbury calls ‘optimal behaviorism’:

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.  

The sense of hope that comes from performing your personal activities is often transferable to your academic work, so do not shelve these important routines. When possible, include them when the time for midterms and finals come.

Common Time Traps You Should Avoid

Most professors prefer that students increase their academic hours, but they might also say that much depends on your ability to honestly assess the quality of your study time. What is equally important is recognizing and circumventing common ‘traps’ for students. Let’s look at a handful of them.   

The Phone Trap

I once had a student who was in a panic. She told me she studied for tests and worked long hours on papers, only to receive Ds. She was sincere in her belief, but after 15 minutes I noticed other signs. We met in the library later that day, and I sat watching her ‘study’ for an hour. When it was over, she came to my table.

“See, I studied for an hour like I did before your test.” I replied, “No, you studied for 30 minutes at the most.” I showed her my timer. She argued that this was incorrect because she had studied since four-thirty. I told her, “I stopped the timer each time you picked up your phone for longer than 30 seconds.”   

Most professors have a similar story: students think they are ‘studying,’ but are taking unconscious breaks for calls, texting conversations, and aimless surfing on the web. This emphasizes the importance of making a clear and honest assessment of your use of time.

What other traps can college students fall into?

The Perfectionist Trap

One course I often teach is English Composition I, and many of the assignments are drafts that lead to a final project later in the semester. While I am disappointed with students who see ‘draft’ on an assignment and make a perfunctory effort, I’m also concerned when students submit well-polished drafts that took hours of preparation for an assignment that was only intended as a ‘first thoughts’ response on a topic.

While you should strive for high personal standards that are independent of class or university requirements, an idealized ‘perfection’ can sometimes result in the misuse of time. While I never discourage students from taking an extra interest in a particular assignment for their own sake, I sometimes find these students can feel overstretched as we get to midterm.  

The Activities Trap

One sad situation is the student who fails a class because, earlier in the semester, he or she was overextended with extracurricular activities. I believe that student organizations and college clubs and groups are important for supplementing your education. However, you must maintain a balance.

In most cases, the ‘trap’ was not the organization itself, but an individual (a student, professor, or another well-meaning person) that the student had trouble saying “no” to. Indeed, it is easy to ignore a dorm poster or a listserv email, but individuals who value your contribution are hard to turn down. Intrinsically, you want to say “yes,” which is why you need boundaries.

Carpe Diem

There are several strategies for organizing your time. Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People uses a system of quadrants that are designed to help you prioritize tasks and activities. Some colleges are pushing the DAPPS strategy (Dated, Achievable, Personal, Positive, Specific) for creating and fulfilling goals.  

However, these strategies might not be meant for you. Find your own or, better still, create a custom plan that will enable you to maximize your time for college activities. At the end of the day, all of this returns to the same question of how to use and redeem your time.

There is an old English proverb that says, “The time and tides wait for no man.” Anyone who has read the adventures of the old buccaneers, or has used a non-powered boat on an ocean for a brief time, understands the analogy between time and the tides: they come when they come, and so a sailor readies his craft to await the propitious moment.

The English mariner understood that time—like the tide—is a tool, though not one you can leave for convenience in a toolbox. No, time is like a tide—take it as it comes, when it comes.

Seize your day.