Chelmsford County High School for Girls
A foundation grammar school and specialist college
Study and revision help
Current students
Planning your time
Think about these questions:
- Do you have trouble settling to your work?
- Do you rush your work to meet deadlines?
- Are your study sessions as successful as you would like?
Use a Study Planner
A planner will help you meet your study targets - it tells you when you are doing what.
- It helps to spread your study time throughout the day. E.g. "It's 4.30pm I should be doing my English homework."
- It encourages you to settle down to work.
- It encourages you to think of certain times in the day as study times.
- It encourages you to keep up with your work.
- It gives you a target to aim for.
- It gives you a sense of achievement and allows you to enjoy yourself once the work is completed.
- To start thinking about priorities, try to think about "The Ten Things I want to do in my life."
- Draw a table with two columns.
- List the ten things you want to do in your life in the first column.
- In the second column list how important each one is to you - give a score of 1 to the most important, and a score of 10 to the least important.
For example:
| Importance | |
| Meet the Queen | 10 |
| Pass my exams | 3 |
Did you learn anything from this exercise? How important was "learning" for you?
Exercise 2
- Now take nine things that you have to (or want to) do. Include a few long-term aims. List the nine things...
- Now look at the grid below and put the nine things in the boxes. The most important and urgent things should go in Box 1A; the least important and urgent in Box 3C. Important long-term goals will go in 1C.
The idea is to do things in 1A first - they are the highest priorities. Then tackle 1B and 1C, then 2A and so on. Don't be tempted to start with things in 3B and 3C just because they are easy and undemanding - they are not important, or urgent.
Now try to produce a priority grid for a piece of coursework or an exam, e.g. reading particular chapters in books, going to the library, talking to your teacher, checking your own progress, etc.