Using responses collected from our shared measurement system, the SOAR Portal, Data Dive shares insights into the challenges faced by students with disabilities and offers resources to support them.
Prioritizing Your Path to Perseverance
October 2024
While workload may increase throughout the semester, for many, stress and anxiety compounds as finals approach. Understanding how to effectively organize and manage your workload can lower stress levels and lead to better academic performance.
In October, a majority of students (74.5%) reported that prioritizing tasks based on deadlines and importance was the most effective strategy in managing their time and workload. Contemporaneously, 41.8% of students expressed they felt very accomplished in achieving academic success last month while only 26.5% reported they felt accomplished in managing stress and anxiety.
By prioritizing tasks, you create a sense of self-control, combat procrastination and develop perseverance, staying committed to your goals through busy, overwhelming or challenging times.
Guiding Perceptions
“It has been a really hard month…I can feel the burnout sneaking up on me.”
“This time of the semester is hard for me because I start to get worn out. It makes it harder for me to sit down and study, complete assignments, and just keep going at the level I had in the first 8 weeks.”
Effective time management and perseverance go hand in hand — while prioritizing tasks helps you manage your workload, perseverance keeps you moving forward despite difficulties, failure or opposition, even if progress is slow.
Utilizing task prioritization techniques can help you persevere through difficult assignments, projects, and unexpected obligations that come your way, while easing some of the stress that emerges during the semester, especially when preparing for finals.
- Create a to-do list – Visualizing outstanding tasks will help you identify and review the extent of upcoming responsibilities. (And it is quite motivating to check off completed items!)
- Estimate the time and effort needed – Understanding the resources needed to complete each task can help more effectively assign it’s priority level.
- Rank by importance, urgency or deadline – Sometimes we focus on the easiest tasks first, but ranking tasks will bring clarity to what needs done first.
- Break down large tasks into manageable parts – By working on subtasks one-by-one, you can avoid procrastination of seemingly daunting tasks, track your progress, and celebrate small achievements along the way.
While prioritizing is important, adopting multiple time management strategies can aid in achieving perseverance — not only throughout your academic journey, but also as you face new experiences, obstacles or uncertainties in the workplace.
Remember, every challenge you overcome brings you one step closer to accomplishing your goals!
Peer Advice
“If you have a hard time with procrastination, set out in a planner what subjects you enjoy doing, and use those classes or subjects as points of motivation.”.
“Partition your work load. STEM is a challenging field and things can be overwhelming a lot of the time.”
“Don’t look at failure as the end, look at it as a goal. strive to perfect that goal.”
“Write down lists of everything you have to get done and then go back through and rank them by importance. Then make a new list with all assignments/events in order of most important to least important.”
“Don’t give up! You’ve got this :)”
Student-to-Faculty Advice
“If a student looks tired or overwhelmed, a great way to help out noninvasively is to offer the whole class an extra day or so on an assignment. You probably won’t get any complaints, and you can offer some indirect support.”
Supporting Resources
- Learn which of these 10 prioritization methods work best for you to identify which tasks are most important.
- Prepare yourself with 10 Study Tips for Surviving Finals Week from our partner campus, Point Loma Nazarene University.
- Overcome procrastination, maintain motivation and achieve goals by managing daily and/or difficult tasks with Goblin Tools (especially helpful for neurodivergent people).
- Stay organized and on-track to meet deadlines on individual tasks or collaborative projects with workflow and project management tools such as Trello or Asana.
- Resources offered at your campus can help you navigate challenges that come your way.
- Maximize your success by utilizing your TAPDINTO-STEM mentors and community of peers.
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