How to spend equal amount of time studying for each subject

[Rose34]

Hi everyone,

Basically, I procrastinate when I study but not the kind of procrastination where you play on your phone or watch TV. I procrastinate in terms of spending long hours of studying for just one subject and leaving the others, like I would study for 2 subjects max each day and sometimes just 1 subject. I am aware that I should be paying an equal amount of attention to each subject BUT I find it really hard to do the work I'm given in a short amount of time. Currently, I'm in year 11, so going into year 12 I want to quit this bad habit of spending too much time on one subject. Therefore, can anyone give some tips to improve my time management? I do Methods 3&4, bio, chem, legal, and english. 
I try putting on a timer for 3 hours for each subject but that does not work sometimes because I do not finish my work at that allocated time, so I want a more effective methods.

Kind Regards,
Rose. 

[PhoenixxFire]

Hey,
I wouldn't really agree that you need to be spending equal amounts of time or effort on each subject. Some subjects you'll find easier than others and not need to work as much on, some weeks you'll have a lot more homework for one subject than for another so you'll need to allocate your time accordingly. I've never really found it helpful to set a specific number of hours per subject.

From what you've said it doesn't sound like your problem is procrastination but rather prioritisation. It sounds like you're trying to get everything that you want to do done, and you frequently end up running out of time.

You might find it useful to write yourself an (always changing) list of everything study related that you want to do.
It may help to also add an estimate of how long you think each task will take you to your list. So for example it might be:
- Some math questions that are due in a week (3 hours)
- Go back and look over some chemistry content that you don't quite understand (1 hour)
- An english essay just for practice (2 hours)
- Bio revision before a test in two days (4 hours)

You might like to do all of those things this week, but you might not have time, so you need to make sure that you can get the most important ones done by the time they're needed.
So you could prioritise your list like this:
- Bio revision for test in 2 days (4 hours)
- Math questions due in a week (3 hours)
- Confusing chemistry content (1 hour)
- English essay for practice (2 hours)

And then just work your way down the list, taking however long it takes to complete each item.
The next week you might not have had a chance to write the english essay - and maybe you really want to write an essay every week for practice, so now it's more important to you so your list might now look like:
- English essay for practice (2 hours)
- Bio worksheet due in a week (1 hour)
- More confusing chemistry (1 hour)
And you just keep adding new things you want to do, removing things you've done, and rearranging the order of the list as your priorities change.

I think a lot of vce students fall into the trap of overestimating how much work they're going to be able to do. So rather than just trying to study more for more subjects, being able to prioritise what you need to do first will make sure that even if you don't get to everything that you want to do, you'll at least have done the most important ones.