At the beginning of the semester the first thing you should do is create a schedule. This will show the time scheduled for classes, part-time work, sleeping, eating, exercising, socialising, commuting, household chores and any other fixed commitments. By giving clear visibility of everything you need to do, you realise there isn’t necessarily a huge amount of time left for independent study, so you need to use time efficiently. Many universities advise completing two to three hours of independent study for each formal contact hour. Some students can get away with less, but in general, that is a good starting point. If you haven’t got enough time, then you might need to reconsider some aspects of your life.

A calendar is the best way to keep visibility of major deadlines like tests, exams, and assignment due dates. Also include things like medical appointments and important dates like birthdays. It may seem like an amateur mistake, but a surprising number of students get the date of their exam wrong and fail the course. Getting confused about the date of an exam will not be accepted as an excuse by your university for special consideration.

The task queue is where you break down the items you want to accomplish into manageable actions. Normally, a task queue is reviewed first thing in the morning or at the end of the day to ensure that it correctly reflects your current priorities.

Tasks need to be of a reasonable size. A large project like a 5000-word essay will need to be broken down into more manageable tasks. In this scenario use a spreadsheet to decompose the project into tasks like "initial literature search", "review articles", "create brief summaries of key points", "outline essay" and so on. These tasks can then be added to the task queue. In contrast, a task like "review week 2 of Psychology 101 lecture notes" would be a single task.

Different ways of organising task queues are possible, but a good starting point is to have one task queue for each class, plus one for life outside university. The task queue includes all the items to be completed for the class. It is reprioritised on a daily basis with the most important tasks identified. Sometimes you might realise that a task isn’t that important, and you will never get around to it, in which case you might just drop it from the queue. This might be something like suggested reading that isn’t essential.

Regardless of the exact approach you use to implement your task queue, having the tasks recorded gives an overview of everything that needs to be done which can be tracked and organised. This is much better than only having the items in your head.

Each item in the queue needs a deadline. There’s no point finishing an important item like an assignment after the due date. For items like reviewing lecture notes, set a deadline before the next lecture otherwise you may find yourself getting too far behind and won’t complete learning the material before the end of the semester.

For many university courses, it is possible to essentially generate the task queue at the beginning of the semester. This is because the course content is clearly defined in the course outline.

Setting priorities can be tricky, but you can reach a point where you start spending too much time on deciding which task has a higher priority. It’s best to just use your judgement and assign a rating of A,B and C. When deciding what tasks to work on, start with the highest priority and work your way down the list.

Ideally, you should leave yourself plenty of time so you can complete all assessments. If you have a clash of assessments, choose the one that is worth the most marks or must be completed. Deprioritise the one that is worth fewer marks, isn’t mandatory, or where the course has a lenient policy with respect to late submissions.

Although it isn’t ideal, on rare occasions it may be necessary to skip a low value assessment that isn’t compulsory. Just make sure you fully understand the rules of the course. Sometimes students skip assessed activities and don’t realise till later that they can’t pass the course without them. It may be the case that a course has a large number of assessed tasks, not all of which are compulsory, which leads to the temptation to skip some of them. However this can lead to a situation where you have already skipped the maximum number of tasks when a genuine emergency arises.

Each evening you create a to-do list for the next day. This involves adding the most important items from your task queues as well as any other urgent items that have come up. The next day you start from the top of the list and work down crossing off tasks as they are completed.

Some time management experts will say small tasks such as "do washing" or "pay bill" don’t belong on a daily to-do list and should be on a separate list. But a consequence of this is that the number of lists is going to explode. It’s fine to put these small tasks on your daily list. Deal with them in between study blocks or together in a batch after your scheduled study time. It’s all about being flexible, no one system is best for everyone.

There’s numerous productivity and time management systems in existence. New books and apps for time management are being released all the time. It’s unlikely there is a magic system that will solve all your issues around time. Instead, follow a straightforward system and combined with commonsense. Don’t get bogged down in a fancy system that’s just too complicated. For years people have been productive with a calendar and a few simple lists meaning there’s no need to overcomplicate things. Keep things simple, then managing time doesn’t become a chore.