Time Management/Activities/How much time will your studies take?

When planning how to use your time, it is important that you understand what is going to use up your time.

The first year of the massage therapy programme incorporates 13 courses. The second year 12. For many of these courses, you have timetabled practical sessions where you are expected to attend class at the central campus.

Most of your courses will have an online component where you are expected to spend some hours per week learning as you are now. Most of the online learning will be assynchronous (i.e. you can do it at a time that suits you), however there may be some synchronous sessions (i.e. participants and lecturer will be online at the same time).

From the second semester of study, you will have time booked in the student clinics, where you will work with clients, and there will be opportunities to experience massage in different work-based contexts at irregular intervals.

In addition to this, you will be expected to spend some time practising your massage with friends, family & classmates, revising your class work, and doing homework and work on assignments.

As a student you will experience many sometimes conflicting priorities. It's easy to see that if you want to be an effective learner, you must be able to identify priorities and manage your time effectively.

The table below shows the number of hours per course over the first year of study in the massage therapy programme.

Self-directed learning includes completing assessments, studying and massage practice.

As you can see, this is quite a commitment of time. Of course, some weeks will be busier than others, and you can expect the last weeks of each semester to be extra busy as you complete assignments and prepare for exams.

How much time do you have?
It's useful to establish how you use your time. You need to sleep, eat and groom yourself; you may have regular work; you may have regular recreation activities.

Using one of the following spreadsheets, calculate how much time you will have to spend per week on each of your courses. (Clue: There are 16 weeks in each semester)


 * Attending practical block courses
 * Online learning activities
 * Supervised Clinical Practice
 * Studying, massaging and completing assessments

Spreadsheets


 * Microsoft Office Excel
 * Open Office

Remember that block practical courses only occur every three weeks. You may want to calculate how much time you will need to spend in a week that contains a block practical, and also a week that does not.

If you have any trouble with this exercise, please post your queries to the course google group.

Please note that the figures you are calculating here are the times that an average student should take to complete their course work. This will, naturally, vary from individual to individual because all students have different strengths and weaknesses.

How well do you use your time?


Completing this exercise and this worksheet should help you to see how effectively you use your time.

Having done a quick weekly estimate of how you spend your time in the previous activity, write some notes on your current status related to managing time.
 * What are the constraints you are experiencing?
 * How have your time management issues changed now that you are enrolled at polytechnic?
 * How do you currently feel about the way you are dealing with the demands on your time?

You will need these notes at a later date, so put them somewhere that you will be able to find them.

Contributors

 * Marc Doesburg, Otago Polytechnic, 2006
 * David McQuillan, Otago Polytechnic, 2007