This was originally posted by Instructor Redpen. I'm reposting it here because it is brilliant, as her writing often is.
You'll be asked to submit a study schedule to your instructor on a weekly basis. That doesn't mean a sentence saying you'll "try to find time every day" or a sentence saying you plan on "trying to get through Section 12." Those are vague statements and what you'll get from it is vague progress.
If you do not commit yourself to the time in advance, you'll never find enough time to do you any good.
I don't know why students often think that "a half hour a day" is enough!!! I think this may be because children in grade and high school are sometimes expected to do "a half hour" of homework every night. This isn't grade school or high school, though.
If you've never gone to college, you may not understand how your responsibilities shift when you study as an adult. As an adult, you have no teacher telling you what to do every minute. ALL of the responsibility for studying falls upon YOU. You have to learn the material yourself and you have to create time for it.
This is college-level work. Right now, in Module 1A, you have 2 classes--Medical Terminology and Intro to Coding. These are 3-hour college classes. In a college, you would need to spend 3 hours in class every week, plus an additional 4-6 hours studying on your own. That comes to 7-9 hours per class, or 14-18 hours per week for both of them.
Fourteen hours a week works out to 2 hours per day. You must MAKE TIME for 14 hours of studying a week, at a minimum. It's ONLY 2 hours a day! I know few people who cannot make 2 hours a day.
This is, incidentally, LESS THAN HALF of a regular college course load. It's an amount that a student with a full-time job can handle IF they set their priorities accordingly and schedule their activities.
If you are MOTIVATED, you can do this!
Priorities are important. School has to become a priority--a BIG priority. Everyone's life is already full. Nobody has a lot of free time lying around for school. Everyone has to shift priorities and eliminate low-priority activities to make room for studying. You have to schedule your time and treat it just like a part-time job.
It would really help you to find the time BEFORE the week begins. This is how you do it:
1. Get or make some organizer pages. Draw 7 columns on a sheet of paper, one for each day, then mark the hours on them from 12 midnight to 11:49 p.m.
2. Mark out your job hours.
3. Mark out your commute time.
4. Mark out all your other unavoidable responsibilities.
5. Mark out exactly when you are going to sleep.
6. Mark out exactly how much time you need to eat, bathe, get dressed, etc.
7. Mark out a minimum of 14 hours per week for studying. You should be able to find 2 hours per day. Your best bet is to go to bed 2 hours early and get up 2 hours early, then study during those 2 hours. Few students are ever successful with studying at night. Few are successful with studying only on weekends.
If you can only fit in 1 hour per day, then you will need to find a way to fit in an hour someplace else. Whatever, you must MARK THOSE HOURS. It's just like having another part-time job.
8. Make dual-use time. Can you record notes to listen to while you commute? Prepare something to study while you eat at work. Don't bring a whole book--write out something to work on. NEVER leave the house without something to study. Carry something on notecards to study in line at stores.
If you enjoy long tub baths, start studying in the bath. It's a great way to study.
9. If you are spending a lot of time fixing meals, cleaning up after them, cleaning house, and doing everybody's laundry, you may need to look at what you are doing that other people can do. Shift responsibilities onto other people in your family. If you are, for example, vacuuming every day, or washing floors every day, or washing sheets every day, you may need to consider doing them only once a week.
10. Study with a timer. If you have an hour marked out to study, set the timer for 1 hour, then study with PURPOSE until that timer goes off. That's the ONLY way to get anything done. Studying doesn't have to take forever. It only drags on and on if you don't have a plan and don't study like there is a fire under you.
Getting started is the hardest part. If you only plan on "trying to find time," you never get to the "getting started" part of studying! So, you have to get the planning and the finding time out of the way IN ADVANCE, so that you can sit down and just get going.