Viola’s Task Management Strategies

This is the end of the semester and all of us college students are facing overwhelming tasks. So using task management strategies is very important here to help us out.

I have a read/write learning preference, but I find reading too much at a time or finishing all the reading assignment at one time is too overwhelming and low-efficient as I will get bored and tired. So I have tried one strategy about attention span. The core is to let your attention span be your guide to divide assignments into smaller parts. I have been using this strategy when I read for AST, the only course that requires a lot of reading I take this semester. AST is lecture based class, but reading is kind of a dispensable step before class as that is often the case that either the professor covers the material quickly or the slides are too brief.

The steps of this strategy are quite simple. I time myself and find out how long it takes me to read before my attention span wanes. I use this as a guide to chunk my assignments into manageable parts. This is an optimization as it allows me to capitalize on my attention span and keep an efficient level of concentration.

For me, my attention span for reading is about an hour and I can read about 10 pages. Usually there are about 30 pages to read for a week so I need three hours to read these pages. Because of my schedule, I only have one or two classes on Tuesday and Thursday, I assign one hour reading on Tuesday and one hour on Thursday and another hour’s reading will be left for weekend. I find this plan quite feasible. As I have chunked the task according to my attention span, I can finish the assigned reading materials before I get really bored and read with low-efficiency. So this strategy really helps me to read with relatively high efficiency.

I have used a strategy called Divide by Four in my ENL class to write essays during this semester. This strategy means to divide a task into manageable parts, so one can accomplish it efficiently, thus preventing procrastination. I am a procrastinator and I find this really works for me to stop procrastinating as the task is chunked and I do not need to finish a whole task at a time.

Most tasks can be divided into four sections: (1) prepare (2) start (3) continue (4) finish. When I write an essay for ENL class, I will always brainstorm first. Then I write an outline of the essay, identifying the topic sentence in each paragraph. Next I will write a draft with additional information as support. The last step is rereading and revising. Here is my schedule of writing an essay. I have also labeled the time as due dates next to the tasks as a reminder.

I find this strategy helpful in this writing class. I chunk the task before doing it and the task itself does not look that intimidating. I follow the four steps and I can finish each part smoothly. So this strategy can especially helpful in finishing a big assignment. You chunk it and always do one step at one time. The work does not seem too much and it will help relieve some stress.

    These two strategies I have discussed above all more or less focus on chucking the task. Chunking a task means finishing a task in several steps so one will not be overwhelmed by the huge amount of work and starts to procrastinate. These strategies have helped me a lot and I will continue using them in the following semesters.