Mp3 Script for Time Management: Setting and Prioritizing Goals

Managing Your time at University
By Learning Strategies Development Queen’s University, Kingston

Theme Two: Setting & Prioritizing Goals

Your next step to effective time management is setting your goals and then prioritizing them, which means put them in order of importance.

Before you begin to set your goals, ask yourself some of these questions:

What are my goals: Short term? Long term? Academic? Life goals?
Why have I set these goals for myself?
How do these goals relate to my values?
How are these goals helping me achieve what I want in university and life?

The process of goal setting can be viewed in a shape of a coffee filter:
 you start by thinking about what you value in your life and how these values translate into BIG picture, long term goals. 

Once you have done this, you will find that you have greater clarity to make good decisions in the short and medium term. Thinking at the macro level first will help guide your daily decision-making and ensure that the immediate goals you set are couched in your value system. 

Therefore, it is important to spend time considering what part your values play in your academic choices 

Setting goals helps us determine a direction, assess whether or not we are on track, and provides an opportunity for us to celebrate our achievements. 

Goals can reflect different time frames (immediate, mid or long-range) and are mostly useful when they are realistic, and involve an action or concrete outcome. 

After you’ve set your goals, you need to PRIORITIZE them.

Students are generally tired, busy and distracted by many competing demands. So this makes the task of setting goals and prioritizing them really important. 

Here are some strategies to assist you in prioritizing your goals. 
4Ds
No matter what the stuff in your "inbox" is, you only have 4 choices:
• Do it: If the task can be completed in 2 minutes or less, do it now.
• Delegate it: Give the task to someone else to do. 
• Defer/Delay it: But make a plan as to exactly when you will deal with it.
• Dump it: That your choice!

ABC
Categorize your goals into:
• A: immediate
• B: might do now but I might do later if I have time
• C: nice but not likely to happen; probably will have to delay it
Mark each goal with an A, B, or C. Do the A goals now! 

For other helpful tools, go to our pdf or the text-only file of the “Time Management” module. Go to the TOOLS section and you will find the Time Management Matrix; the Course Planner chart; and the Task Analysis chart. 
All three with explanation as to how to use them. We recommend you take a look at all of them. 

[Alternatively, click on the hyperlinks in the Powerpoint to go directly to these tools].

This concludes our second theme of “Setting and Prioritizing Goals”. Please continue to the next theme “Getting Organized”.