Essay Time Management

Effective Time Management in Essay Writing

You are on the clock: 40 minutes. When you are writing a timed essay, essay time management is everything. You need to outline, write, and proofread your essay in the allotted time. Proper time management ensures that you complete all these steps without running out of time.

Outline your Timed Essay

Spend 10-20% of your time outlining. If you have 40 minutes to write an essay, spend 5-10 minutes preparing your outline. Outlining is crucial because it actually speeds up your writing. Instead of relying on what comes to mind, you will have a roadmap to follow. An outline is particularly crucial to the logic of your essay. Because you are ultimately trying to support your thesis (or demonstrate your reading comprehension skills), you want your points to be laid out very clearly.

Use your outline to help you organize your ideas. You want your ideas to flow into one another before arriving at a natural conclusion. Here is a basic example:

Introduction

• Essay hook

• Thesis statement

Body Paragraphs

• Topic Sentence for each

• Evidence for each

Conclusion

• Reworded or paraphrased thesis statement

• Non-generalized importance of your findings

• Concluding statement

Timed Essay Checklist

What do you need to accomplish?

1. Understand the prompt. If you do anything slowly at all, it's this, because if you fail to answer the prompt, you have a huge problem on your hands.

2. Take the position with the most evidence. If you have a lot of evidence for a certain position, go with that one. It will help your time management if you have plenty of evidence to support your thesis.

3. Gather your strongest points into an outline. Avoid subtle points. Take your strongest points with the strongest evidence and outline how you will deploy them.

4. Stick to your outline. Try not to add ideas not present in your outline. It's too late to be changing any of that, and you'll waste a lot of time. This is part of why you want to be sure your outline is great at the outset!

5. Write your essay clearly. It's important to write your essay with the final product in mind. Unlike with a take-home essay you write on the computer, you will not have a chance to fine-tune your timed essay. Fix confusing phrases in your head before you write them.

6. Proofread your essay. You can’t take 24 hours away from a timed essay before you make your final edit, so when reviewing your work, try your best to tackle it from a new perspective. Even closing your eyes and taking a deep breath before your final edit can help! If you have multiple timed essays to complete during a certain window, you can also create space by completing a second essay, then returning to make the final edit on your first essay (and so on).

Examples of Benchmarks for your Timed Essay

Here is one way to budget your time for a timed essay:

Time Management for an Essay in English Class

When working on a take-home essay, you have good time management if you:

1. Start early. If you have three weeks to write your essay, start writing in the second week at the latest. If you need to do any research, get that out of the way in the first week. Also try to outline your essay in the first week. The more time you have to consider your essay’s thesis statement, structure, and evidence, the stronger your essay will be.

2. Balance your work with your other responsibilities. Don’t juggle so many balls you drop one, though! Schoolwork is one of those balls you can’t afford to drop. To succeed at time management, prioritize what is most important. What are your most important tasks for the day? What are your most important tasks for the week?Fig. 1. Keep your eye on the ball.

3. Ban your phone. Not period, of course, but you are doing well if you don’t touch your phone when you are working on your essay. There is nothing more distracting than a phone, so you are putting yourself in a good position when you monitor its use. If you need to track your time, using a non-smart watch is helpful.

4. Leave the last few days to proofread your work. Remember, you want to clear your blind spots after writing. Only time will do that.

5. Reward yourself for writing, but not too generously. When you finish a page or two, celebrate. If you just finished writing your name on the paper, keep going.

6. Hit your benchmarks. Consider the length of your essay, and give yourself benchmarks to hit. When you sit down to write, know how far you need to get in order to stay on track. If you need to do research, set research benchmarks as well.

How Not to Manage your Take-Home Essay Time

When working on a take-home essay, you have poor time management if:

1. Over half your allotted time has elapsed, and you haven’t gotten started on your essay. As a student, you have a lot of responsibilities in life. You have extra-curricular activities, friends, and a family, and you have to take care of yourself, too. Your teachers know that, which is why they gave you all that time to write your essay! That time is there to use. If over half your allotted time has come and gone, and you haven’t completed anything besides your title and header, you’re procrastinating.

2. When you work on your essay, you write very little. If you have five pages to complete in three weeks, one paragraph a week isn’t going to cut it. You’re not managing your time well if, on a night you planned to write your essay, you barely touch it before doing something else.

3. You dread the amount of work you have the few days before your essay is due. You probably know the feeling. Essays are so dang long, and worst of all they don’t write themselves. The idea of sitting down and writing your essay is daunting. It may feel better to put it off. Dread is the start of procrastination, though, and procrastination is the start of crunch, and crunch is bad.