How do students at Tufts allocate their time among study/work, social, and sleep? Are choices of lifestyles affected by school year, gender, race or major? Are students satisfied with their lifestyles and how would they improve their current management of their time?
The time management project set out hoping to find out information about time allocation and planning of Tufts students that was previously not available to the community. We hope that this project can give Tufts students a better idea of their peers’ performance and possible alternatives they could use to make life easier and less stressful.We conducted our research by sending out a survey to Tufts community. We collected 85 responses from November 13 to 21, with 26% of male and 74% of female respondents. Among all respondents, 6% are seniors, 15% are juniors, 29% are sophomore and the other half are first-years. The sample size is relatively small, and gender distribution is different from the general Tufts community. Thus, the result may be different from the actual outcome of general Tufts population. However, we still obtained interesting findings ranging from Tufts Students’ priorities, influence of different activities on students’ time management, difference in time allocation between genders, and the effect of time management strategies like planners.What Do Tufts Students Prioritize?
In order to determine the answers to this question, we had Tufts students rank different categories of activities, including social life, sleep/necessary daily activities, job, school work and relaxing, on a scale of 1-5, 1 being the top priority and 5 being the lowest priority. On average, Tufts students ranked school work as their top priority and none of our respondents placed school work below their third top priority. People generally put sleep and other daily activities as their second priority although social life was a close third. The majority of people put relaxing as their fourth priority, and more than half of our respondents put their job as their last priority. There may be a few explanation as to why jobs are ranked as the least important activity: it is either because the relative high percentage of first-year respondents are not being worried about jobs yet, or because the respondents don’t have a job.The More Clubs, The Busier You Are?
The activities that most respondent particpate in are pre-professional and media/campus publication clubs. Overall, most of the respondents to this time management survey reported feeling “busy busy” as opposed to “dying”, “kinda busy”, “not doing too much”, and “life is so beautifully empty” (in fact, no one believes life is so beautifully empty). The most time consuming club activity turned out to be greek life, followed by student government and sports. However, regardless of the busyness level respondents reported, the time people spend on clubs related activities are around the same. Among 47.3% of our respondents that feel busy busy, the majority of them are in one to four clubs. The clubs tend to be pre-professional clubs and media/campus publication clubs. They reported that they spend, on average, 3-5 hours a week on club-related activities.Though, 82% of students in clubs believe they need more time at least every few days. With this extra time, students who participate in clubs would like to spend more time with their social lives and relaxing as opposed to working and studying. What we learnt from this finding is that, though clubs are generally thought to be time consuming and hard to manage, people didn’t seem to be affected by numbers of clubs they take on. It is either because people adjust their time allocation to accommodate club activities, or because people decide number of clubs to take on based on their schedules. Either way, Tufts students clearly successfully plan their club activities to work with their schedules.Difference in stress levels and time allocation between genders
Who’s more on top of their lives? Male or Female? This section devotes to interesting findings about difference on feelings about stress levels related to gender (there were no survey respondents that identified outside the female-male binary.)


What Stresses People Out?
What take up the most time in the everyday life of a student? What disrupts their daily plans and makes them feel burnt out every late night? Finding answers to these questions can be the first step in start of solving the problem.


Effectiveness of Time Management Strategies
Most of the time, our schedule is consistent and largely determines how we allocate our time. In this case, planned schedules, which we either record digitally or write on paper, is one kind of time management strategy that we naturally employ to organize our lives. In fact, according to our survey, 58% of the respondents usually write schedules on their planners. Our survey has a section specifically looking at people’s habits for planning what to do with their time, and the result generated insightful discoveries suggesting relationships between ways of using a planner to assist time organizing, people’s perceptions of how busy they are, and the extent of either satisfaction or frustration they feel about their time management skills.


21% of the respondents have sought time management assistance and among such, 58% visited the consultants at Tufts. The majority of people who visited the service found it relatively helpful.
If you have problems dealing with the stress of accumulating tasks, going to a time management consultant can be a good choice to ease your tension.
There are so many more relationships and findings to mine from our survey. Additionally, we acknowledge that this survey was imperfect and could reflect inaccurate result due to relatively small sample size. Also, we recognize that more time management strategies could have been covered and studied, such as note-taking habits and goal setting. However, we hope our research provides some insights for students who are curious about theirs peers performance regarding time allocation and management, and we are open to comments and suggestions.research, writing, and infographics by Claire Huang, Darby Huye, Mackenzie Parmenter, & Astrid Weng