Time Management

Time Management

Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

Kicking around a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

(Mason, N., Waters, R., Wright, R., and Gilmour, D., 1973, Track 3)

The previous are lyrics to a song called Time. I originally heard this song in a college class. The class was a humanities course that studied our culture. For some reason this song always stayed with me and I would hear it in my mind whenever I procrastinated too much. As with most college students, procrastination and time management are one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. I had major problems with those concepts when I attended school while I was younger. Now that I am back in school, I have already battled this in four short weeks of this class.

So the problem is how to best manage my time. To begin my search for information on this subject, I began with what I usually use when I have a question. I went to Google. This search gave me all kind of responses. Anywhere from the definition, to sites concerning time management practices in business, pictures of clocks associated with time management, and ever a few school websites focusing on managing time from the student perspective. I tried to keep my results limited to either gov or edu sites. After receiving my results from the web search, I remembered reading about time management in my studies in week one. I went back and re-read the eBook from the classroom materials and found another good source of information. Finally, I went to the university library, There I found information in periodical about managing time from an IT perspective. I liked this since this is the field I will be going into. I also found a chapter in an eBook that spoke of about time management in an online learning environment.

Since I had my research in front of me, the next task would be to apply my critical thinking skills to evaluate what kind of information I had. I started with looking at all the references and how valid every resource was. I had a dictionary reference and a website from my Internet search. The dictionary reference was completely factual and should be valid. The other site was from an organization called Educasuse, which is "a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance high education my promoting the intelligent use of technology" (Educause, 1999-2011). All my other information came from the university library that in itself should be valid and reputable. The next step I took was to read all the references and employ my critical thinking skills to infer the perspective of the writer. All writers have some kind of perspective when writing an essay or book. While understanding the writer's position, I can separate what information is relevant to find the solution to my problem of managing time.

To begin to solve the problem of managing time, I would need to know what it all means. Time management is defined as "the analysis of how working hours are spent and the prioritization of tasks in order to maximize personal efficiency in the workplace" ("Time management," Retrieved May 29, 2011 ). According to Carter, Bishop, and Kravits (2007), time management allows you to get your work done on time and will little stress. Understand what time management means is just the first step. I need to put the theory and make it work in reality. The very fact that I am writing this paper on the last day is proof that I have not utilized good