Study Kit – Time Management: diaries & planners

Why should I use a diary / planner?

It seems as though many people nowadays like to keep all their appointments in their head.

What you will find, as you progress through University, is that your head gets very crowded with ideas and information, and there is little room for appointments (let alone complex and changing timetables, meetings, and more and more deadlines).

David Allen (time management guru, and author of Getting Things Done) describes your mind as having ‘limited psychic RAM’, and if it’s full of appointments and random bits of information – this will stop you thinking and doing your work.

Therefore one of the best tools you can get is a diary (and it doesn’t matter if it’s on your phone, on paper, on a computer – as long as you use it).

Diaries can be used to:

• hold your timetabled commitments

• remind you of Deadlines, and to allow you to set your own intermediate deadlines to make sure the work is done.

• block out times when you will work

• make space in your life for all the fun stuff you want to do

Also see the related points on Planning.

Study Kit navigation: Home; Exams; Studying together; Problems; Curriculum; Assessment; Planning; Diaries.