First Semester Advice: Time Management

Time management will prove to be very important in med school, as you simply don't have as much time to catch up on material as you did in undergrad.  Any time you fall behind, the amount of work you have to catch up seems to multiply exponentially.  Therefore, you must be careful with how you spend your time.  In the past I sometimes found myself overstating how much time I actually spent studying, so I kept a desktop timer that I paused whenever I browsed something else on facebook (it's easy to waste 15 min. on mindless videos or memes), went to the bathroom, took breaks, etc.  This might be a good thing to implement especially for the first week, just so you have an idea of how long it takes to to create your study products for one lecture, allowing you to schedule more accurately.   I get the best results when I follow a routine of how much time I want to spend making study products for each lecture.  Generally, this is an hour for study notes per lecture.  Sometimes that hour is not enough, but by the end of the day I at least know that I have went through the main concepts for each lecture.  If you don't specify how much time you want to spend on notes for each lecture, then you can easily spend too much time focusing on minuscule details at the expense of learning major concepts from other lectures.  (For our mini exams, there are 2 exam questions from each lecture hour, so study accordingly)  There are usually four classes per day, so four hours devoted for study products.  Then I make a checklist (or in this case use one made by a generous classmate) of what I want to accomplish for that lecture, which may look something like this: