Silent Devotion

The Frehman Five- Rules for First Year College Students

The secret to earning a college degree is not a secret at all…just get to your junior year. If you get that far, you’re almost guaranteed a degree.

And, a pretty high percentage of college students who complete their sophomore year return for their junior year.

The “killer” year is year one. Lots of freshmen leave college before completing two semesters. Others complete the year, but do not subsequently return. If you are scheduled to begin college in the not-too-distant future, here are a few suggestions to keep you from being among them.

1. Attend all scheduled classes. There is a reason this is the first rule listed. If you think it’s OK to miss classes, remember this; you’re just a freshman…you don’t know anything yet. You only think you do.

2. Manage your time intelligently by making a schedule and having the self-discipline to stay with it. Do not ever study or sleep fewer hours than scheduled.

3. Don’t procrastinate. You’re not in high school anymore…catching up is very hard.

4. It’s easy to “go wild” when you are first away from your parents and their rules. But, if you do a lot of drinking, fail to get enough sleep, and/or put your social life ahead of your educational goals, you will soon regret doing so. Be responsible.

5. Get involved. Don’t return to your hometown every weekend. Take part in events and activities on campus. Be open to new friendships. Join at least one student group. Be an active part of the college or university community. You’ll never regret it.

Nobody can guarantee that you’ll enjoy college. And, certainly, nobody can promise that you’ll earn a degree, but following the five rules above will make you a good bet to be both happy and successful.

Which Of These Time Management Skills Are You Missing?

For many people, time management is difficult as a concept; however, if you take the time to learn some time management skills you can manage your time well so that you get everything done you need to.

Here are three time management skills for you to consider and identify which you need to be implementing now to help you reach your goals much more quickly.

1 - Make Things Simpler. Even though it might seem you have a lot of things streamlined, you can usually simplify a lot of things so that you can manage your time better. For example, if you have a lot of clutter, get rid of anything you don’t use, need or love; alternatively, perhaps you have too many tasks “cluttering” up your day and don’t have time to get everything done, so that eliminating or rescheduling some of these things can remove some clutter and make your day simpler. If you do this, accomplishing what you need to in your daily life will be much more simple and straightforward; you’ll also take less time to do this, which can save you a significant amount of time every day.

2 - Review and Reevaluate Weekly. Once you’ve established your time management techniques, you need to sit down every week at a scheduled time and determine how effective your time management techniques have been that week; by doing this, you can change what’s not working for you so that you make it more effective. If you do this every week and make a plan to consistently reevaluate the time management techniques you’ve put in place, you can change what’s not working and keep reevaluating them so that they continue to do well for you. Figure out what’s working and what’s not, so that you have an excellent foundation to build further time management skills and fine-tune the ones you have in the future.

3 - Love Your Routines. Develop and learn to love your routines, so that you’ll always have a very good idea about what you need to accomplish and by when. Establishing a routine will help you stay on track and keep action and momentum going; therefore, if you feel like you’re not getting enough done in a given day, or if you think your time management strategies could use some revamping, routines might just be the way to give you the boost you need. Create routines for different areas of life, such as what you have to do every morning at work, or as a weekly cleaning schedule. When you don’t have to figure out what you need to do next because you’ve laid a schedule out already, you’ll find that you save a lot of time.