Time and Money Management

Time and money management are integral parts of being a college student. With class, homework, and extracurricular activities, many students struggle to find enough time in the day to do everything they need to and still get enough sleep. Also, many college students are unable to manage their money while buying food and other luxuries.

After reviewing the articles posted on these topics, some key ideas jumped out to help make me a more effective person. The first topic that was researched was time management.This is very important for a student to be more effective throughout their day and waste less time. Many college students have a tendency to be lethargic throughout the day and then cram their work into the night. After reading the articles on time management, the main tip to help solve this tendency is to plan your day. This will cut down on the dead time you have and will also prevent you from ever getting bored. The tips however were based upon knowing yourself including your tendencies and personality.

The first step was to analyze yourself and what your goals are. By determining your goals, a person can decide how strict they want their daily routine to be and how much free time they want to allocate themself. Another tip is to identify possible time-wasters. These will change for each person but is a very helpful hint. If a person knows what their time-wasters are, they can avoid situations where they come up and also escape them easier when they are faced with a time-waster. These time-wasters include procrastination, interruptions, and lack of planning.These are all things that plague me and knowing my potential time-wasters has helped me find places to do my work that will limit my distractions.

The second topic that was researched was money management. This is important for college because kids are on their own and cannot depend on their parents to track their money for them. Keeping money management tips in mind will help college students keep money in their bank account and feel safe monetarily. The first tip in the article is to track your spending.This is important because many people lose track of how much they have spent and do not realize it until it is too late. The next step in managing money is getting a plan to budget your money and decide how much money will be allotted for different things. Money should be allotted for food, clothes, and hobbies or relaxing purchases such as a cd or a videogame.

Another tip is to limit the use of credit cards when making purchases. Many students get in the habit of using their credit cards losing track of much they have spent.The next tips focus on realizing that you may not be able to purchase everything you want. This is tough for many people and the article suggests that even if you do make a mistake and blow your budget, just make up for it the next week. Looking ahead and saving money for bills or purchases in the future can help with money management a lot as well. The last and one of the most useful tips the article gives is recognizing how you can utilize your roommate in managing your money. You can delegate responsibilities and split expenses with your roommate as much as possible, making college much easier and cheaper.

The articles posted on time and money management were very helpful. The best tip I got from the time-management article was “The 4 D’s of Time Management. ” The four D’s include, “do it”, “delegate it”, “dump it”, “defer it”. Each D applies to a different situation you might encounter while trying to do work and provides a solution for dealing with it. The four D’s are easy to remember and give you basic principles to fall back on when you are faced with a distraction. The best tip I got from money management was to limit how much I use my credit card and to try and use cash more often.Studies show students spend 30% more when using a credit card because there is no sense of a limit like there would be if they used cash.

All of these tips reminded me of the time I went out to dinner with a girl and when I tried to pay the check with my credit card, my card cancelled because I had spent all of the money in my account without knowing it. This was embarrassing and luckily I had some cash with me to pay but I learned my lesson. Now with the money management tips I have learned, this will not happen again.After reading the money and time management articles, I am more prepared to navigate through college by myself. They each gave easy tips to remember and make you a more effective manager. I would suggest these articles to all of my friends because they were helpful to me and they came from reliable sources. Most articles I came across had similar ideas but there are specific ideas that will stick to me from both articles I chose.

For me, knowing my time-wasters and limiting the use of my credit card were the biggest tips I got from each article.