Planning Your Work on a Degree Course

Planning your university degree work is essential in order to make the best use of your time and prioritize effectively. You will have to make decisions as to what to do when, it is important to get these decisions right. You will also need a degree of flexibility to deal with any problems that arise.

In order to work flexibly and prioritize properly you always need to know:

• Where you are in terms of skills / knowledge required to complete a university assignment
• What tasks have to be completed for your university degree
• How long you think it will take to complete each university assignment
• How much time you have left on each degree assignment

Get a single small wall calendar that shows the entire year at a glance.

• Mark all your university assignment deadlines
• Mark all your degree assignment deadlines again, this time one week early

Handing in university degree work one week early will save you time:

• If you get stuck, you have time to ask questions of university lecturers, or other degree students, which is quicker than trying to work it out on your own the night before the assignment deadline
• Getting university work proof read at an early stage saves time on corrections

Now would be a good time to get a Gmail account. Google have a free calendar utility which can help you plan your university degree work, on which you can plot all your degree assignment deadlines, as well as your weekly timetable of university lectures. Adding a university timetable is easy, as the calendar allow you to repeat weekly / daily events automatically, including your lunch and break times if you are determined to stick to your work schedule!

Over planning tasks up front is not effective on a degree course, there are too many variables, you need to be flexible in your approach. Spending hours on a detailed task based plan for university study is a waste of time, it will be obsolete within a few weeks.

The important thing is to constantly assess and re-assess (for the second time!):

• Where you are in terms of skills / knowledge required to complete a task at university
• What tasks have to be completed for your degree course
• How long you think it will take to complete each task at university
• How much time you have left on each degree assignment

Being constantly aware of these three things will allow you to effectively prioritize your work and put you one step closer to getting a first class degree!