December 2020
Mark Foley has some time management tips to boost your CIMA studies.
Having worked in the training and education sector for over 22 years, I have met and supported thousands of CIMA students through their studies.
Over the years, I have identified several obstacles to effective study but one in particular stands out as a significant challenge, which I hear about on an almost daily basis – a lack of time to study. Do you feel there are never enough hours in your day? Do you feel a bit overwhelmed by how much you need to get done? If that seems familiar, here are some handy tips to help you manage your time more effectively.
Begin with the end in mind
What’s your end goal? What’s the timeframe for achieving it? Once you have defined this, you can start making decisions about how you are going to get there.
For example, let’s assume you wish to earn your CIMA qualification by 2023. You need to break your journey down into smaller, manageable parts and identify milestones. This includes, for example, choosing which study method suits you best, setting and sticking to deadlines, breaking study topics into smaller chunks and booking your exam in advance.
Comprehensive planning will allow you to set effective and achievable objectives. Each milestone you reach will help you feel motivated towards achieving your goal of qualifying with CIMA and building your dream career.
Make the most of technology
Technology can be a wonderful tool to help improve your time management skills, allowing you to become more organised and reduce distractions.
You may want to consider using online calendars such as Google Calendar to input your study plan, manage deadlines, and track your progress. In addition, you may want to use productivity apps such as Trello or Remember The Milk, which have features such as to-do lists, to help you organise and track your study time.
Do you find yourself looking at your phone every time you get a notification, or randomly start browsing the internet for things you don’t need when you were meant to be studying? If so, then you’re not alone! Take a look at StayFocusd, a Google Chrome extension that limits the amount of time you can spend on certain websites.
Pomodoro Timer & To Do List is another great app to help you keep your focus; you select a task you need to accomplish, set a 25-minute timer and start working, and when the timer rings you take a five-minute break.
Prioritise
When studying for your CIMA exams, it’s essential that you prioritise tasks and activities so that you use your time both effectively and efficiently.
However, how do you choose which ones to go on top of the to-do list?
You can use Einsenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle to decide which tasks and activities are the most important. Start by listing the tasks and activities, however small, you feel are required to reach your goal. Next, place them into one of the following categories to get a clearer picture of what you should focus on:
• Important and urgent: Tasks and activities that need to be completed now to achieve your long-term goal. You should perform them immediately.
• Important but not urgent: Tasks and activities that will help you achieve your goals but are often ‘put off’ as they lack a hard deadline. Put them in a study planner and commit to performing these.
• Not important but urgent: Tasks and activities that will prevent you from achieving your goals. You should think about whether you can reschedule or delegate them.
• Not important and not urgent: These tasks and activities are just a distraction from your main goal, and, where possible, you should avoid or cancel them.
Avoid procrastination
Procrastination is an issue that affects most of us at some point. The first step in tackling procrastination is acknowledging that you are in fact putting off certain tasks and activities; then you can go on and identify what the root cause may be. To make things easier, start breaking the tasks and activities into 15-minute chunks, this will help you to fully engage with them and sharpen your focus.
Once you have performed this, put each chunk into your time planner and fully commit to completing them. Give yourself a small reward when you finish a task or activity to keep motivated.
This is a particularly useful way to break this habit and will allow you to progress your study journey in line with the milestones you’ve started creating.
• Mark Foley, Director of Relationship Programmes – Management Accounting, Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.
This article is based on a time management webinar delivered in conjunction with Kaplan’s Head of Learning, Stuart Pedley-Smith. Watch it in full using the following link.
