For me, learning to set personal time management goals has been incredibly important during distance learning.

With this year’s reduced extracurriculars and lightened workloads, I thought I would have as long as I wanted for homework and still have time for relaxation.

Instead, I found myself working on homework all afternoon and late into the night.

Despite going up a grade level, the time I was spending on school was clearly extreme. One day, after realizing that I had just spent three hours on a simple 300-word English assignment, I knew something had to be fixed. 

My experiences can be described using Parkinson’s law, the idea that work expands to fill the amount of time given. The more time we feel like we have, the more we allow ourselves to slow down, according to the book “How to Succeed in Professional Services.” 

Since I felt like I had the entire afternoon for my English assignment, I slowed down my work pace and ended up filling the entirety of that time.

Math homework, however, had the opposite result. My teacher requires me to record the time it takes to complete my assignments, so that in the end I know whether to do extra problems. 

Simply being more aware time was passing made me want to work as efficiently and focused as possible, and by the end I would feel satisfied at the completeness of the work I had just put in. 

One night, in continuing to explore how time awareness affected my work habits, I gave myself a set amount of notes to finish, and a time I wanted to be in bed by. I ended up finishing a large section of my chemistry notes in just forty minutes.

I realized that by setting a time for when I wanted things done, or even just being more aware of the minutes ticking by, I had an achievable end goal to work toward, instead of aimlessly hacking away at a never-ending pile of assignments.