Lots of people are busy, yet not everyone reaches
his/her goals. If becoming the ideal college scholarship or grant applicant
seems like a good idea, then learning how to manage time is important. When teaching students who would soon become the first in their families to go to
college, I knew scholarships were vital.
I used a simple illustration to show them how to use
their time wisely to help reach this goal. I had them write down their
five year goals. One, of course, was to graduate high school, another to be
accepted to the college of their choice, a third was to earn lots of scholarship money. The others
varied.
Once they did this, I asked them to write down all the
activities they were planning to do over the weekend. Then they looked at
each one, and asked themselves, “Will doing this help me reach one of my goals?”
If the answer was yes, they put an “A” next to it; if not, they labeled it with
a “C”; if they weren’t sure, they used the letter “B”.
The next step was to decide if the items were urgent or
not urgent. Was there some sort of time constraint on the activity, like
studying for a test to be taken on Monday? They ranked each activity in each
category in order of urgency, using numbers 1 through whatever.
Over the weekend, they finished all the activities in
category “A” in numerical order. Then they completed category “B” and some of
category “C”. This not only helped them pinpoint the important items which were
urgent, but kept the urgent, but not important items from distracting them.
When students used their goals as a measuring stick for selecting activities to do, they were less confused, stressed or frustrated. They also moved
closer to reaching their goals. This is just one of the strategies my students used to earn Full Ride scholarships to college. Others are in my book,
Free College Awareness, coming soon from Griffin Publishing and Watering Seeds.
You are reading from the blog: http://www.roadtofreecollege.com
Photo Credit: Google Images
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