Brainstorming questions:

1.How can you make your school life productive?

2.How do you manage your study time?

Passage 1: Time Management and Productivity

Time management is highly important if you want to be productive in your school life, but you don’t have to sacrifice your physical and mental health in the process. By following effective management techniques, you can balance the stress of school and life.

Time management refers to your capability to plan and control how you devote your day to effectively accomplish the goals you’ve set. This includes allocating time among each of the spheres of your life, work, family and social life. Since everyone’s goals are different and carry a different weight, it’s important to set clear priorities to separate time wasters from the activities that really matter. Poor time management skills can not only lead to procrastination but can cause unnecessary worry and wear away your overall quality of life.

Time management is perhaps the single most important skill that will help a student succeed. How well a student manages his or her time will also affect overall well- being at the end of the week, at the end of the term or at the end of the year. Staying on top of coursework requires some planning and commitment to stick to scheduled study times.

There are some tried-and-true methods that can help you master time management. Like any habit you develop, you can become better at it through practice.

It’s difficult to use time wisely if you don’t know what to do with it. Students can benefit from having short- and long-term goals. For example, a short-term goal might include completing their homework early each day, so they have ample time for other personal activities. Their long term goal could be to study for the forthcoming national exams.

You should also understand what your assignment requires and when their due date is. Writing down deadlines for each one and breaking longer-term assignments into tasks with their own deadlines can help you avoid beginning a major project at the last minute

In like manner, setting time limits on specific tasks is important. Just because you spend a lot of time on a given assignment doesn’t mean you’ve spent that time wisely. By assessing what needs to be achieved within a given time frame, tasks can be rated according to their importance. Setting priorities for each day, week, month and year can help students accomplish their goals. It also helps to make sure activities that are very important but not urgent – such as personal devotions, adequate sleep and exercise – are given priority. Some people like to prioritize easy tasks for early in the day and use the boost to move forward. Others prefer to tackle bigger jobs first.

Managing time wisely will help to find the right balance between time and work. A few students resort to multi-tasking in order to get the work done within the specified time limit. At times, this may result in poor performance in the various tasks assigned.

Social media usage and internet surfing are temptations to students efficient time management. These days, students at all levels are highly addicted to these time- wasters. Whenever you are on task doing your assignment or studying, make sure that you put your phone away and close browser windows as they can take attention away from the task at hand. In order not to lose focus, use technology wisely.

Being a secondary school student doesn’t have to mean your life is all work and no play. It’s just as important to pencil in breaks, exercise and time with friends and family as it is to schedule time for studying. Nobody performs at their uttermost under excessive stress. Since students need healthy ways to manage the pressures of study while maintaining productivity, getting enough sleep and exercising are all great ways to minimize stress, and actually make learning more effective. The major mistake committed while working is when one is in a rush to meet the deadline without taking proper breaks for rest or relaxation. It is impossible for anyone to focus on work and to produce good results without considering any break in between. Even if you struggle with time management, it’s a skill you can build. Using these time management techniques, you can successfully balance the demands of school, and life because Proper time management is the foundation of a successful life and ensures achievement of one’s goals in a healthy manner.

Brainstorming questions:

1.How many hours do you sleep per night?

2.How much time do you have for holidays per year?

3.Do you ever feel like you are wasting your time at home?

Passage 2:Cultural Views of Time Management

If you show up a bit late for a meeting in Ethiopia, no one will be too worried. But if you keep someone in Western countries waiting for ten or fifteen minutes, you may have some explanation to do. Time is seen as relatively flexible in some cultures but is viewed more rigidly in others. Indeed, the way members of a culture perceive and use time tells us about their society’s priorities, and even their own personal view of the world.

Differences in the way a culture views time can affect the way their time is managed. For example, a linear time view is a way of conceiving time as flowing from one moment to the next in a linear fashion. This linear perception of time is predominant in America along with most Northern European countries, such as Germany, Switzerland, and England. People in these cultures tend to place a large value on productive time management, and tend to avoid decisions or actions that would result in wasted time. This linear view of time correlates to these cultures being more “monochronic”, or preferring to do only one thing at a time. Generally speaking, this cultural view leads to a better focus on accomplishing a singular task and hence, more productive time management.

Another cultural time view is multi-active time view. In multi-active cultures, most people feel that the more activities or tasks being done at once the better. This creates a sense of happiness. Multi-active cultures are “polychronic” or prefer to do multiple tasks at once. This multi-active time view is prominent in most Southern European countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In these cultures, the people often tend to spend time on things they deem to be more important such as placing a high importance on finishing social conversations. In business environments, they often pay little attention to how long meetings last; rather the focus is on having high quality meetings. In general, the cultural focus tends to be on synergy and creativity over efficiency.

A final cultural time view is a cyclical time view. In cyclical cultures, time is considered neither linear nor event related. Because days, months, years, seasons, and events happen in regular repetitive occurrences, time is viewed as cyclical. In this view, time is not seen as wasted because it will always come back later, hence there is an unlimited amount of it. This cyclical time view is prevalent throughout most countries in Asia, including Japan and China. It is more important in cultures with cyclical concepts of time to complete tasks correctly, therefore most people will spend more time thinking about decisions and the impact they will have, before acting on their plans. Most people in cyclical cultures tend to understand that other cultures have different perspectives of time and are cognizant of this when acting on a global stage.

(Adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#Cultural_views_of_time_management)