In addition to telling my students to use their time wisely, I also emphasized how important it was that they learn to set priorities, both with their time in general and with their schoolwork in particular. The younger you are, the more you depend on parents and teachers to set priorities for you, but as you move through the grades and take on more independent work, as well as more extracurricular activities and more of a social life, learning to set your own priorities becomes more and more important. Yes, your teachers and parents will still have expectations, and yes, you should still honor them to the best of your ability, but the more you learn to set your own priorities, the more you will be able to expect things of yourself, and the more you expect things of yourself, the more you will feel that the success you achieve is truly your own.
Obviously, if school is challenging for you, and sometimes even when it’s not, it is very tempting to want to put a lot of other things before your studies. The reason I like to focus on how important it is to set priorities in life as well as with your work is that a lot of your non-work priorities are important, and no matter how much improvement you make with your study skills, that won’t and shouldn’t change. No matter how strict the homework policy is at your school, no teachers or administrators want you to spend all your time outside of school on your studies. If you truly feel you are doing that, you should speak up, but before you do, you should take a very careful look at what you are doing to make sure you really are working the entire time you claim you are. Brief breaks are certainly acceptable, but if you are extending them because you just can’t put down your phone or your video game, that time should not count as study time. Taking breaks from your studies for things that can certainly be seen as priorities, such as extracurricular activities or planned social events, shouldn’t count as study time, either, but making them priorities means finding other times to prioritize your studies, which might in turn leave you even less time for social media or video games. Before you think I sound like one of those teachers who says you should severely limit or even avoid activities such as these during the school week, let me be clear: I was usually one of the last of my colleagues to ever make those types of statements. However, there is a huge gap between strict limits and no limits, and part of learning to set your own priorities is learning to figure out what is reasonable. If you are not far enough along on your study skills journey to be able to set reasonable limits on these types of activities, then you need someone else to set them, and they need to be strict. Over time, as you become better at making your schoolwork a priority and balancing it with your other priorities, you might just be able to find or increase time for these other activities, and if you can do that without losing sight of your other priorities, then I am one of the first teachers who would say that the time you spend on them is well deserved.
As important as it is to set priorities with your schoolwork by recognizing its proper place among your other priorities, it is just as important to set priorities within your study time. As tempting as it is to always do work in your favorite subjects first, or always do written work before preparing for tests, or always do anything you find easy before anything you find hard, one of the most important aspects of learning to set your own priorities is learning that often, the more challenging choices are the better ones. If you need to do one easier thing as a warmup, or you need breaks from the more challenging things along the way, that’s not only reasonable; it’s also advisable, because if you do it right, it might just motivate you to return to your more challenging work more determined to follow through than you were before. The one exception I always make to this rule is if you have missing or make-up work to do, or if your teacher has made it a point to prioritize something. If you keep putting things off that you’ve been specifically told to prioritize, it can have a snowball effect, and all the good work you’re doing to try to improve your study skills will be undermined by the adverse effects on your grades that ignoring these types of priorities can have.
Though it is important to honor teachers’ priorities when they specifically express them, another important thing about learning to set your own priorities is that when you have many teachers, it is possible that they might make it seem like everything should be a priority, or, more to the point, that each and every one of their individual subjects should be your top priority, or your only priority. If you are just starting to set your own priorities, this can seem overwhelming, but over time, you should be able to increase your ability to determine which subjects are priorities because they really do have something happening that is major or pressing, like the science fair or a unit test, and which subjects always seem to be priorities just because teachers truly believe that their subject is the most important one. With the increase in cooperation among teachers, including their shared use of a calendar so they can better help you balance what is important when, you should not find yourself with too many priorities at once, but if you do, you can certainly ask if anything can be changed to make things more manageable. Bear in mind, however, that you will probably have a better chance at success if it is clear that you are trying not just to set priorities, but also to plan ahead. If you ask for a change at the last minute, and it is obvious that you have not been making a good faith effort to keep up with your work, your request for assistance with the schedule is much less likely to be honored. The better you become at setting your own priorities, the more you will come to realize that most teachers really are doing the best they can to help you, and the better you will become at making their priorities your own.
Setting priorities is crucial to the development of your study skills because it is another way for you to think about what you are doing, so you can choose what works for you. Teachers and parents will set priorities for you, and sometimes, it might be necessary for you to let them do it. The more able you are to set your own priorities, though, the more of an independent learner you will become. The more able you are to see your studies as something you want to do and choose to do, instead of what you are being told to do, the more successful you will become, and the more your success will truly be your own.