Do you find it hard to manage your time? With today’s demands on our time in school, college and work it can be hard to juggle everything.
Check out Dr. Sean O’Neill project that is helping students to manage their time and reduce the stress in everyday life.
Across a variety of contexts, life today is littered with demands and expectations. We may have expectations for ourselves when attempting to achieve something in life, or others may present them to us. As a consequence, we may experience these demands and expectations as stressors, and much to our dismay, are often unavoidable. So what can you do…..?
A first logical step is to be proactive and to recognise that although these things we call stressors may be unavoidable, we can control how we respond to them.
Secondly, get organised and develop a plan that will establish the right habits that are functional for you in the context you find yourself in.
Thirdly, commit to your plan. When developing a self-management plan there are five tips that may be harnessed to improve your response.
1) Set SMART goals – these should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely
2) monitor your performance against the goals you set for yourself – a laminated graph or checklist is good for this, especially when its placed somewhere highly visible
3) treat yourself – put some thought into this prior to beginning and make sure to reinforce yourself for achieving your self-selected goals
4) involve someone else – make a social commitment with another person and check in with them regularly to discuss your progress
5) continually review your plan.
Here in the School of Nursing and Human Sciences, at Dublin City University (DCU), we recognise that having a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder does add an additional degree of complexity to the demands students experience when in education. We are currently running a research project designed to support individuals with Autism to better self-manage their academic life. We are doing this by combining an evidence-based behaviour analytic self-management strategy with smartphone and wearable technology to improve a range of academic targets self-selected by participants. This intervention package is individualised and tasks participants to set achievable goals and prompts their completion and recording, with feedback provided. For example, a prompt to engage in an activity (i.e., independent study) may be sent to a participant’s smartwatch and then recorded as ‘completed’ using an ‘app’.
Our research is not limited to those in third level education as we know that establishing these life skills is often best done early. As such, we welcome participants that are attending secondary school, in either fifth or sixth year, or at college. If you would like to get involved, or just hear more about this project, then contact Dr. Sean O’Neill at Dublin City University via email: sean_o_neill@dcu.ie or phone 01 700 8523.
This research is supported by funding from the charity RESPECT and the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement no. PCOFUND-GA-2013-608728
