Whether it’s in undergraduate or graduate school, students struggle with time management. Some students don’t necessarily go out to parties or procrastinate by socializing constantly, but they allow their work to become back-burner material, second to other organizations on campus, family, friends, and jobs. I have a few tips that should get you on your way to better managing your time.

1. Budget Your Time.

Just like most of us who budget our regular paychecks out to different aspects of life, such as the mortgage, car, insurance, groceries, etc., we divvy up our time and have to decide where to spend it. Mostly, our time is something that we spend without realizing it. A way that we can avoid “going into debt” with our time is budgeting.

You can start budgeting your time by generally thinking about where you want to spend it. For instance, you may want 40% to go towards school, 30% to go towards family and friends, and 30% to go towards personal time. Then, you’ll be able to specify what would go into each category: homework and studying into school; social gatherings and family reunions into family and friends; and sleeping and relaxation into personal time. Now that you know where you know you want to spend your time, you can schedule when you want to spend it.

2. Schedule Your Time.

People schedule their time in various ways, such as filling out weekly planners, typing in iCalendars, or memorizing their schedule. My first suggestion here would be to make sure you write out your schedule somewhere instead of trying to memorize it because we’re all human, and forgetting a part of your schedule is inevitable.

After deciding on a medium to use for scheduling, you’ll want to basically translate your budget to your calendar. Knowing that 24 hours are in a day and 168 hours are in a week, schedule yourself for the time you’ve allotted for each category. (You may have more or less categories than the examples I used above.) The main take away that I can give you when you physically schedule yourself in a planner is that you need to take care of the more important things first. For instance, you’ll probably want to take care of your school time before hanging out with friends and family. Here is a schedule that Rutgers College of Nursing gives its students for how scheduling to write a dissertation should happen.

3. Follow Your Schedule.

A mistake that many students make is that they’ll make a pretty schedule and budget their time exactly where they need to spend it, but then they either forget about their planner, or they’ll just not pay attention to the schedule they wrote.

This article from Elizabeth Gritter, Ph.D. offers practical ways to stay on track and prioritize your needs.

Overall, it seems like an easy task to do: just schedule your time out into priorities and time slots. But sometimes, students get caught up in other activities and try to schedule their time by adding more things instead of acting on it and getting tasks done. Check out PhDStudent’s article on how to schedule time and act on it to gain more insight into managing your time.