"Better three hours too soon, than one minute too late." -- William Shakespeare

This week's readings are all about time management, and in the past two weeks, we have been practicing time management with juggling various assignments and deadlines, multiple readings, blogging, and especially, the "Group Think" Project. Many groups lamented the lack of time members had available to meet, and many students wrote in their blogs that managing their time was one of the biggest challenges faced in the first two weeks of college.

Effective time management is one of the biggest predictors of college success, and therefore it's important that we spend a lot of time in this class discussing it, reading about it, practicing it, refining it, figuring out what works best. As many of us already know, the college student's worst enemy is...PROCRASTINATION. Let's spend a little time thinking about procrastination. I've noticed, when checking the blogs on a Saturday morning or afternoon, that a bunch of students have not yet posted even one of the two blog assignments due by midnight Saturday. Why is that? Why wait until late Saturday when you have all week to complete this assignment? Do those students have their posts already written and saved in Microsoft Word, and just have not yet uploaded them to Blogger? I tend to think "probably not" because I know, for myself, that as soon as one post is finished, I want the satisfaction of seeing it live. More questions: If you save both posts for Saturday, are both posts "your best work"? Do you have to rush to finish them? What if Blogger goes down on Saturday and you can't get your posts up on time because you haven't left yourself any wiggle room (they're still due, after all, because you've had a full week to do them)? Why not just complete them (or at least one) during the week so they don't interfere with your Saturday? These are real questions that I want you to think about, not to chastise yourself, but to get you to feel in charge of your own time management decisions.

We all know the pitfalls of procrastination, but we all often do it anyway. Why? And more importantly, what can we do about it? What do we learn from this week's readings? How can we apply those ideas to our own experiences? We are going to begin this discussion in class, but take it further in one of your blog posts for next week and try to answer some of the questions I've posed (and maybe try to complete your post before Saturday ☺).