Managing Time in VCE

How do we effectively manage time when we have a million and one responsibilities?

Below are three quick strategies to improve your efficiency.

Time management in VCE is a nightmare of its own, and often its a skillset that tends to be overlooked when it comes to improving the efficiency of revision.

01 Pencil in due dates before hand

Schools often publish a list of SAC dates early in the year. As a first step in ensuring you are prepared for your SACs, pencil in these due dates ahead of time. This way you are aware of how much time you need to effectively prepare.

This also allows you to effectively manage time from a broader, weekly perspective. I’d encourage penciling in appointments, weekly sport commitments and other key dates and meetings that have specific deadlines

I personally find that planning over a week is the best way to ensure effective prioritisation. If you have a SAC happening at the end of the week, it makes sense to be able to prioritise revision at the start of the week, perhaps over a different task that does not contribute to your ATAR.

Effective prioritisation becomes so much easier when you have a clear view of your existing deadlines and responsibilities.

02 To do lists - do things in batches

Often times I find that the commonly given advice is to do ‘a bit of everything.’ “When you come home for the day, revise what you learnt for all of your subjects,” tends to be the go-to advice most people dispense for studying or revision.

I personally find that for me this process is not at all useful. What does work, I find, is doing things in big batches.

If I am answering an email, I won’t just answer one. I’ll answer all twelve I need to get through at once.

If I’m working on VCE Legal Studies, I won’t answer a few homework questions and then move on to the next task. Instead, I’ll do the homework, read the next chapter, and make notes in preparation for the next SAC.

I personally find this to be the most effective time management tool that I have because it means that less time is lost shifting from one context to another.

I don’t have to suddenly shift gears from English to Classics to Economics, I can just knock out one subject with effectiveness.

This strategy does make it tough one multiple assessments/SACs occur on one day. However, if you’ve penciled in your due dates before hand you have the ability to efficiently allocate blocks of time for effective study on a single topic.

03 Do what is easy first

If something is easy, do it first.

If you only need to send a quick email off to your English teacher, that takes less than two minutes. If you need to write a practice paragraph of an essay to hand in, that takes around twelve minutes. If you need to read a chapter of your Legal Studies textbook and then answer twenty questions, that takes a solid hour or more.

It makes sense to cross off what is quickly achievable off the list first, right?

This way you feel accomplished, you have less work left to go, and you’ve left the bulk of your energy and time to be spent on a more difficult task down the line.