Time management and productivity

Time management helps you stay organised and reduce stress.

It involves understanding how you work best, breaking tasks into steps, planning your time, managing distractions, and building consistent habits.

Give the following strategies a fair try before deciding what works for you.

Where do I start?

Everyone works differently. Before choosing your strategies, it helps to know when you concentrate most easily, what environments help you focus, what tends to distract you, and how long you can realistically work before you need a break.

Breaking down work

Large assignments can feel overwhelming when they seem unclear or too big. To get started, break tasks into small, clear steps to make them easier. For example: choosing which sources to read first, creating a reference list, or proofreading a single page.

Prioritising tasks

When you have several tasks to complete, sort them by two things: how soon they are due (urgency) and how much they matter (importance).

Urgent tasks have a deadline approaching soon. Important tasks have a significant impact on your grade. Do urgent and important tasks first. Plan other important tasks before they become urgent.

If two tasks feel equally pressing, prioritise the one worth more marks.

How do I plan my time?

Set regular study sessions rather than relying on long, irregular sessions. Combine your fixed commitments (lectures, work, and other responsibilities) with flexible study blocks (set periods of time dedicated to study), and schedule breaks and buffer time (time set aside for unexpected delays). Review what you have completed at the end of each session to check your progress.

Use your timetable to manage multiple deadlines, prioritise topics, and spread work over time. Keep it realistic and flexible.

For guidance on planning your workload across a whole month, go to Planning your monthly workload.

How do I stay focused?

Distraction and procrastination are common reasons study sessions are unproductive. Both are harder to manage without clear goals for each session.

You can reduce the impact of procrastination with good habits.

The Pomodoro technique

This approach helps you stay focused by dividing your study time into short, structured intervals. It makes it easier to continue and helps prevent burnout during longer tasks.

How do I build good study habits?

If you are writing, prepare before you start with some planning and drafting or try using a reference management tool to track your sources.

Learning to use the tools, such as formatting templates, document styles, and keyboard shortcuts, can save significant time across a semester. Digital Skills IT training for students covers many of these in detail.

Organised notes save time when writing assignments, preparing for seminars, and planning larger projects. Go to further guidance on notetaking methods and their usefulness in avoiding plagiarism.

This guidance is for students who have the essential strategies in place and want to develop a more planned and reflective approach to managing their work.

How do I plan complex or long-term work?

Longer assignments and projects require more than a weekly timetable.

Plan backwards from your deadline. Identify the major stages of the work and estimate how long each will take. Some stages depend on others being completed first, so include this in your plan. Build in time to review and revise before you submit.

Estimating how long work takes can be challenging. People consistently underestimate how long tasks will take. This is known as the planning fallacy and it affects students and lecturers alike. The answer is not to abandon planning, but to treat your first estimate as a starting point and add time to it. Research suggests tasks typically take 50 per cent longer than we predict; a two-hour task will probably take three hours to complete (Buehler et al., 1994).

For guidance on coordinating time and responsibilities in collaborative work, go to Group work and collaboration.

How can I manage procrastination on complex work?

On long-term work, procrastination often takes the form of active avoidance. This means not starting tasks that feel unclear, very important, or too large to complete in a single session. Avoidance is a specific form of procrastination that needs its own strategies.

Start by noticing when avoidance happens

It often signals that a task feels unclear or that you are uncertain how to begin.

Act early

Starting earlier than feels necessary reduces pressure before it accumulates.

Shared deadlines and study partners can also help

Agreeing to show progress to someone else keeps you accountable, even when motivation is low, or anxiety levels are high.

How do I manage large amounts of reading?

A clear and consistent approach to reading and notetaking saves time and makes drafting easier.

How can I maintain productivity over time?

Managing your energy is as important as managing your time. Dividing your days into periods of work and recovery produces better results over a full academic year than working for as long as possible.

Protect the basics. Regular sleep, eating, hydration and breaks are not optional extras. They directly affect your ability to concentrate and retain information.

Review your workload at the end of each week. Check whether your plan is still realistic and adjust it if your circumstances have changed. A plan that no longer fits your situation is useless.

Learn to recognise the early signs that your workload is becoming too much to manage. Difficulty concentrating, loss of motivation, or a feeling that you cannot prioritise effectively are all important signals. Adjusting early is easier than recovering from burnout.

How do I revise strategically?

Revision requires its own planning approach, separate from your regular study timetable. The Exam preparation guidance covers how to plan revision across several weeks, which techniques work for different exam types, and how to adjust your approach as the exam gets closer.

Page last edited: 8 August 2026
Next review due: 8 August 2029