How to Prioritize the New Subjects: 5 Tips for College Students
Studies require students’ full attention, especially if you are a freshman and just getting used to college obligations. But sometimes, students misuse this rule. By tending to choose as many subjects as possible, they have problems staying focused and can fail all their tasks. Instead of being bad at multitasking, it’s better to be good at selecting priorities.
That is why it’s highly recommended to evaluate the new classes and then put them in order by importance. In this article, you will find five tips that help you determine college priorities and deal with various tasks as a professional.
Delegate the Tasks If It’s Possible
Unfortunately, students are not superheroes. They are not that powerful to write a brilliant paper without any mistakes and professionally proofread it afterwards. Your priority is to have the best result. So, delegate some of your to-dos to those who can help.
For instance, before admitting your final essay, ask somebody to read it. You can use such services as proofread my paper or just ask your friend. It’s important that somebody takes a fresh look and tells you what you should improve.
Just allow yourself to stop controlling every part of the task. This kind of attitude can cause burnout and surely won’t help you with your studies. Instead, it’s always better to ask professionals for help. That’s also a way to learn something new from others.
It’s Always About Motivation
People can’t be focused long on the things that don’t mean anything to them. Therefore, choose the subjects that matter. You should select the courses that can teach you the skills you need in your life and career.
To check if this is a course worth most of your time, you should ask yourself, why did you choose it in the first place? What are the more essential skills you will get after completing this course? To better understand your learning motivation, you can write down for each subject the reasons why you chose it and count the bullet points.
The logic is pretty clear: the one having the most reasons will have the best score. It means you should focus your efforts on the one which will bring you more benefits in your future.
In the Beginning, Was the List
List-making is the core of every decision. That’s why if you want to prioritize the new subject, you should start by writing down the bullet points, the main ideas of the class. Breaking your studies into a list helps you to be more organized and make your lessons more structured.
Fortunately, there are a lot of free applications for list creation to help you. You can continue making notes even when you don’t have your laptop near you. Sometimes, it’s very convenient because you never know when you hear something important.
Writing down every idea you have about the course helps you understand your priorities better and be informed. It’s also an excellent technique to develop your creativity.
Use Pros and Cons Lists For Choosing the Priority
As soon as prioritizing means determining the order of the subject’s tasks according to their importance, it would help if you first understood which one will be the most important for your future education.
To make sure you don’t forget anything, you can use the pros and cons lists to think about the new subjects’ advantages and disadvantages. After using this method, you can look at the list and focus on the things you need the most. For that matter, you can use any blank paper.
For digital geeks, there is an online version of this tool. Here, you can also put the bullets in order of importance for your decision.
Project Management Tools Every Student Should Use
The critical skill of a good project manager is prioritizing the tasks. As a student, you work as a project manager all the time. You deal with deadlines, try to be multitasking with different subjects, and implement your education project. To stay focused and not forget a thing, try to use simple management tools to make your student life a lot easier.
- One of them is Trello. It is a perfect tool for organizing your studies. Apart from being very convenient for tracking your tasks, it’s suitable for prioritizing your new subjects. Just create the category for each of the issues and write down the class tasks in separate cards. In a while, you will see which course needs your attention more.
- Use The Eisenhower Decision Matrix. This famous method can help you understand which tasks are urgent and important, which means you should do them first. And which one can wait some time because you shouldn’t do them as soon as possible.
- Don’t forget about time management. There are a lot of different techniques, which help to fight your procrastination. Some of them can also be used as a prioritising tool. For example, the Pomodoro method helps to set time limits for a task that you can’t focus on for a long time and still have some results.
Summary
There is too much information around us, and it’s easy to get lost. That is why prioritizing is an essential skill in today’s life that can show you the path. As a student, you have an excellent opportunity to improve this skill and find the classes that can change your life direction.
Sometimes, it is hard to choose between two courses. However, it would be best if you never forgot that you can’t learn everything you want, no matter how hard you try. To say yes to your priorities, you have to be willing to say no to something else.
