---
title: "Time Management: The effective use of to-do lists"
id: "3578"
type: "post"
slug: "time-management-the-effective-use-of-to-do-lists"
published_at: "2019-05-07T12:06:24+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-03-17T13:58:09+00:00"
url: "https://www.boston.ac.za/blog/time-management-the-effective-use-of-to-do-lists/"
markdown_url: "https://www.boston.ac.za/blog/time-management-the-effective-use-of-to-do-lists.md"
excerpt: "Are you struggling to keep up? Have you forgotten an important deadline? These are all symptoms of poor time management,"
taxonomy_category:
  - "Boston City Campus Blog"
---

Are you struggling to keep up?  
 Have you forgotten an important deadline?

These are all symptoms of poor time management, which can be corrected with a prioritised to-do list. To-do lists can also change your life when dealing with multiple deadlines!

**CREATING A TO-DO LIST**

- Write down all the tasks you need to complete for the upcoming week or month
- If there are large tasks, break them down into smaller tasks
- Ideally a task or step should not take more than a few hours to complete
- It may be helpful to compile a to-do list per module you are registered for, or one for personal tasks, and one for college tasks. Try different approaches and see which works best for you

- Read through your list and allocate each task a priority rating
- If you find that majority of your tasks have been allocated as very high, redo your list with a realistic and critical eye, looking for what is really high priority, and what can be safely demoted to moderate or low priority

- Start making use of your list by working through the tasks in order of priority
- Once you’ve completed a task in full, tick it off or draw a line through it
- Once a day spend 10 minutes revising your list – adding anything new that has come up, reassigning priorities should things have changed etc

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