Task Management

To a certain degree, this picture presents how messy the astronomy is, so I usually work on it first.

This is one of my math assignments waiting to be completed. Thirty two questions in total. I will finish this first before it results in procrastination.

This is an example shows how I use the target planner.

This week the topic is Task Management. There are many different task strategies in the textbook, and some of them are very useful for me. This time I will discuss two strategies which I have used a lot but have never talked about in the blog. They are First, Work on your hardest course or do your hardest assignments first ,and Second, Target planner.

Work on your hardest course or do your hardest assignments firsr, actually, these are two different strategies from Top-Five Stragegies to Manage Assignments. However, because they both have the same principle, so I think I should combine them together. Basically, we can find three reasons to use this strategies. First, as the textbook says, the hardest course needs the most concertration and the longest attention span. So if you work on your hardest course first, usually it will be easier to concentrate on your task. Second, unlike a manchine, human will get tired. When you are tired, it can be extremely difficult to focus on your task, especially the hardest one. So you should do your hardest assignments first, at least before you feel tired. The third reason is that I realized that the tough tasks are more likely to result in procrastination. So completing the hardest one first can really prevent procrastination.

For me, the hardest course is Astronomy, but the hardest assignments usually come from my Calculus class. So I will arrange to finish my exam or lab preparation for Astronomy first, and then complete my Calculus assignments.

Another strategy is the Target Planner. I used this strategy almost everywhere, and I found that this strategy is very multifunctional. Generally speaking, you will use a bull's eye target to represent the crucial steps to finish a task, either academic event or nonacademic event. And this task can almost be any event, as long as it is a multi-steps task. For example, after I recommend this strategy to one of my friend, he used this to help himself achieve his first driver's license. As we all know, this process can be very complicated, from five hours lesson to learner permit to road test, this bull's eye target really helped increase the efficiency. And for me, I used this strategy in almost all five courses I enrolled in this semester. And it really works for me.

All in all, there are still some very good task management strategies I cannot cover in this one blog. But these two strategies above, work on your hardest task first and target planner, are really good.