In my previous post about setting priorities, I focused on the importance of setting reasonable limits on how you spend your time, so that you will be better able to balance your studies with your extracurricular activities and your social life. In this post, I will focus on setting priorities within your study time, so you will be better able to set reasonable limits on certain aspects of your studies in order to make time and space for others. 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 everything 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. The better you become at making challenging choices when it comes to your study time, the more progress you will see across all subject areas.
The first thing you need to set reasonable limits on during your study time is the amount of time you spend on your favorite class or classes. Though it is still important to keep up with your assignments and prepare for your tests in those classes, it is just as important to make sure you are not doing so at your other classes’ expense. Finding work in certain classes more interesting and enjoyable often leads to it being easier to complete assignments and prepare for tests in those classes. If you find that to be the case, you should be able to reduce the amount of time you spend on those classes to make more time for the classes you don’t like as much. It should go without saying that this is especially true if you need to make improvements to your grades in those classes, but since the work in those classes is usually more difficult for you to complete, it is understandable that it is also difficult to commit to spending more time on it. This is why most teachers will tell you to start every homework session with your most difficult assignments, no matter how tempted you are to avoid them. They will tell you to do all your most difficult work while you are fresh, so you will be less tempted to claim you are too tired to do it at the end of the session or when you should be heading to bed, and thus end up avoiding it completely and falling even further behind in the class than you already were. Though I certainly see the point they are trying to make, I have never been quite that strict about it. As I said in my previous post, doing one easier thing as a warmup before tackling your more difficult assignments, or taking breaks from more challenging work to complete easier assignments, is perfectly reasonable, as long as you commit to returning to the more challenging work and getting it done. I am in complete agreement with other teachers that putting off all your more challenging work until the end of your study session each night is the last thing you should do, since doing so will only make it more likely that the work will not get done or be done poorly. As hard as it might be to do, making improvements to your study skills often means prioritizing challenging things and doing things you don’t really like to do. Finding ways to balance your more challenging work with your less challenging work while setting reasonable limits on both is the best way to make the most of your study sessions, as well as to continue to develop your study skills.
If you are someone who consistently prioritizes written work over test preparation, whether out of fear that the work won’t get done, lack of discipline when you study, or a combination of both, warming up by completing one assignment, then alternating between test preparation and assignment completion through the rest of your study session, is a good way to ensure that you put more effort into test preparation without compromising your need to get assignments done, but it is far from the only suggestion I have. As I have stated numerous times before, an even better way to improve test preparation is to study well in advance of the test date, so you can learn the material a little at a time, employ a variety of test preparation methods, and avoid cramming for the test at the last minute. If you have taken the time to plan out your test preparation, you should be able to spend the night before the test reviewing everything you have already studied, and/or putting your main focus on the material you have found yourself struggling to remember in previous sessions. Not needing to start your test preparation from scratch on the night before the test is a great way to ensure that the time you spend on it is reasonable and productive, thereby leaving you time to complete your assignments as well.
Though I have already mentioned the temptation to do everything you find easy before you do anything you find hard in the paragraph about the temptation to put your favorite class or classes ahead of those you don’t like as much, that is not the only time when the need to set reasonable limits on easier assignments applies. No matter the class or the assignment, the difficulty level of the work you need to accomplish will vary, and the temptation to put off more challenging assignments, especially long-term ones, even in your favorite classes, is very real. Just as with test preparation, finding a way to spend a reasonable amount of time on long-term assignments throughout the time you are given to complete them is a great way to avoid having too much to do at the last minute, and planning out when you will do this increases the chance that you will follow through on it without compromising your need to spend reasonable amounts of time on more immediate assignments and test preparation. Many teachers will provide guidance on how to do this, and some will also include dates when intermediate parts of the assignment are due, in order to keep you on track. Whenever that information and/or those required steps are provided, setting reasonable limits on easier assignments will free up time you can spend on the more challenging long-term assignments so you will not be overwhelmed by them right before they are due. If teachers do not provide such guidelines or intermediate due dates, create your own, or use a previous project where guidelines were given as a guide to completing a more open-ended project in a timely manner.
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. This is important not just so you can balance your study time with the other priorities in your life, but also so you can set reasonable limits within your study time. Whether you are tempted to prioritize classes you like over ones you don’t, written work over test preparation, or immediate assignments over long-term ones, setting reasonable limits on the amount of time you spend on various tasks within individual study sessions increases your ability not only to set your own priorities, but also to see increased success with your work over time.