The Time Management Matrix

Post graduate life is totally different than someone’s undergraduate or work life. For undergraduate, time is always sufficient to do homeworks, review lectures and prepare for exams, if the student plan his daily schedule very well. Even in the career life, employees have a cushion of more than four hours of their normal working hours that can help their busy schedule for certain days.

On the other hand, one of the major challenges in post graduate students’ life is time management, where they suffer the most from planning their very short time with their daily duties and action plans. In almost every single day, graduate student has to read tremendous amount of pages about his or her research, work out many exercises and homeworks and meets with his project team to develop their project and submit it before the dead line.

Many recommendations have been presented by professionals and old post students to help out current graduate in managing their time, such as prioritization and well established calendars throughout the year. Besides that, there is a very smart technique created by Stephen R. Covey in his book “The Seven Habits for Highly Effected People” called Time Management Matrix which can help students a lot to manage their time by combining both previous techniques prioritization and academic calendar. Following figure can illustrate the structure of the Time Management Matrix.

Fig: The Time Management Matrix (Stephen R. Covey)

Simply, this matrix divides graduate students' daily activities in to four different quartiles based on urgency and importance (Urgent Important, Important not Urgent, Not Important not Urgent and Urgent not Important). Each one of these four quartiles has its own time frame and action priority. For example, medical emergencies and short notice deadlines shall be in the first quartile. Because, they are important and have to be done now (urgent). In contrast, playing video games and watching movies should be in quartile three as not important not urgent. Other interruptions such as phone calls, emails and meeting can be considered as urgent but not important and placed in the fourth quartile. The best way to handle such interruption is to delegate someone else to do them in your behalf. Finally, the rest of graduate student’s activities such as; reading lecture notes, building relationships and exercising are in the important not urgent quartile, where graduate student has enough time to plan them according to their priority.

Following the Time Management Matrix simple and smart approach can organize the graduate student’s academic life in very effective manner and help him to do many of his several activities in a very short frame window.