Time management is vital to mastering graduate school, but most graduate students are left to figure it out on their own. Despite poor time management being a major contributing factor in student overwhelm and burnout, a class on time management is not an offering in most university course catalogs.

Lucky students have supportive advisors that might have some suggestions for managing their time and activities more efficiently, but most of the time, students get generic advice they’ve tried already.

If graduate school were easy, then everyone would be getting a graduate degree, but most of the time students fail not because they can’t master the material, but because they don’t know how to manage their time and activity efficiently and become overwhelmed with the competing demands of graduate school.

It’s made worse when you realize that the very skills and approaches that helped you get into graduate school (a desire for perfection, giving every activity 100%) actually work against you once you are in graduate school. It’s a perfect storm that contributes to obscene levels of depression, anxiety, and dropout among graduate students.

There are solutions though. You can learn the underlying principles of time management that will enable you to be a master of your own schedule, productivity, and wellbeing. Graduate school doesn’t have to be a miserable, overwhelming, experience. Check out these articles to learn the strategies of healthy time management that will change your approach to graduate school so that you can feel more in control, less stressed, and more content as you navigate the challenges that graduate students face.