You’ve been waiting for this day for months, if not years. You see the unread email sitting in your mailbox marked “Admission Decision,” your finger hesitating on the trackpad of your laptop with every elated and negative thought running through your mind. You think back on all the sleepless nights of chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and biology you endured just for this moment. The countless papers on topics you felt you would never need to know about after the semester is over. You click on the email with trepidation, taking one long, deep breath and …
You’ve made it in!
You let out an excited scream, picking up your phone prepared to let everyone who has followed you along on your nursing school admission adventure only to hesitate. So, you’ve made it in, but what now? Thoughts begin racing through your mind. How should I prepare? What should I expect? How much harder will this journey get?
This week, we’re discussing time management in nursing school and how to prepare for this exciting new adventure.
Time Management in Nursing School
Many questions come after being accepted into nursing school, from supplies to school-life balance to working. Nursing school can be one of the most rewarding, albeit stressful experiences in your life, but where do you start when it comes to preparing for nursing school? It seems that all the trials and tribulations of pre-requisites are behind you, only to be faced with the daunting reality of the many challenging aspects of nursing school.
So, celebrate your admission, tell everyone you know, because you just got into nursing school, so now what? This week we discuss setting yourself up for success with time management skills in preparation for starting nursing school.
Time management and nursing school go hand-in-hand. If you haven’t mastered time management by now, it should be one of your top priorities before starting your nursing program. Why is time management so important? Learning time management before you enter your nursing program benefits your success in the program and helps to set you up for success in your future nursing career. Here are a few tips to start managing your time to find a healthy balance between your person, work, and school life.
Tips to Improve Time Management
- Get a planner. Paper planners aren’t just for your parents and grandparents anymore. In the past few years, the paper planner market has exploded with options ranging from cute to function to meet all of your needs. With the emergence of tablets, there is an emerging digital planner market for those who can’t add another book to their bag. Planners help with time management in a few ways. Planners provide a space to collect all of your obligations, due dates, work schedules, and personal needs in one convenient place.
- Schedule your time. The best way to start this is to have a portion of your last semester before nursing school left. That crucial time allows you to give scheduling your time a decent practice run while also helping you identify what does and does not work for you before nursing school begins. One important tip when it comes to scheduling your time is that you want to remain flexible. Nursing students can have many different responsibilities outside of nursing school, and nursing school can take up a large chunk of your time during the week between lectures, homework, clinicals, and labs. An hourly planner, or using an application like Google Calendar, can help integrate scheduling your time more effectively.
- Find a routine. A routine in nursing school can help you find time management more, well, manageable. Routine is easier to accomplish if your responsibilities outside of school are the same every day or week.
- Remain accountable. Just remember, it’s one thing to schedule your time, but it’s another thing entirely to stick to the schedule! Make sure that you are keeping yourself accountable by following the schedule you’ve designated.
- Use that syllabus! The syllabus for your nursing courses isn’t just for your nursing instructor to continually tell you, “it’s in the syllabus.” The syllabus is your lifeline during a nursing course, giving you all the important dates of exams, lectures, labs, and clinicals, and you should be using it to your advantage. At the beginning of each semester, make sure you are running over your syllabus with a fine-toothed comb to help you plan your time during the semester, especially if you have many commitments competing for your time.
- Cut out distracting social media. I get it; social media is a driving force in our society in almost all aspects of our lives. Social media has become a fantastic way to connect with peers, friends, and family members but can be too distracting when trying to get anything done. The vital part of managing social media during nursing school is that there should be a delicate balance between distractions and obligations.
- Don’t forget to have some fun! Nursing school doesn’t have to take over your life entirely. Don’t forget to spend time each week, or even each day, taking the time to do something that you like. Hang out with friends. Watch a movie. Go out for dinner. Self-care is an essential part of success in nursing school, too!
Time management is just one of the critical parts of succeeding in nursing school. Nursing school can take your life in a whole new direction, throwing you for a loop if you don’t prepare properly. Next week, we discuss the importance of setting up your personal study space with a few tips, tricks, and like hacks to help you on your nursing school journey.
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