Manage Your Time: The Number One Strategy For High Performers
Most HSC students do not struggle because they are lazy. They struggle because their week is a moving target. Sport shifts, assessments land at once, and the to do list grows faster than motivation can keep up.
Time blocking is a simple fix with a grown up feel: instead of keeping tasks in your head, you assign them a home in your calendar. You stop asking “When will I do this?” and start answering it.
UAC’s own advice to Year 12 students is blunt on this point: make a timetable that includes study and also time for life, then stick to it as consistently as you can.
Why time blocking works (and why most timetables fail)
A common trap is building a “perfect” schedule that assumes everything will go smoothly. Psychology has a name for this: the planning fallacy, our tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take. In one classic study, students badly underestimated how long a major project would take, even when asked to consider best case and worst case scenarios.
Time blocking helps because it forces realism. If your calendar is already full, it becomes obvious that you cannot cram in five extra hours of study without dropping something.
A practical system that students (and parents) can actually use
1) Start with a weekly “skeleton”
Put in non negotiables first: school, travel, sport, tutoring, work, meals, bedtime. This is your real week, not your aspirational week.
2) Add 5-10 study blocks across the week
Aim for consistency over hero sessions. Two focused blocks on weeknights plus a longer block on one weekend day beats a chaotic seven hour Saturday.
3) Build in buffers
Add a short admin block for catching up, printing, organising notes, emails, and the inevitable “something came up”. This is how you beat the planning fallacy in practice.
4) Make each block specific
“English” is vague. “Write one body paragraph and improve two quotes” is actionable. Specific plans reduce procrastination, and research on implementation intentions (clear if then plans) shows promise for improving follow through on goals.
What to do inside a study block
Organisation is not just scheduling. It is choosing methods that actually work.
Evidence summaries in education consistently back spacing (study spread out over time) and retrieval practice (actively recalling information, not re reading) for long term retention. Spaced repetition is widely described as an evidence based technique for improving recall efficiency.
So a strong time block might look like: 10 minutes recall quiz, 25 minutes practice questions, 10 minutes error log, 5 minutes plan the next session.
A quick note for parents
Your role is not to police every block. It is to help protect the conditions that make blocks possible: a stable routine, a realistic workload, and a calm weekly check in where your child adjusts the plan before it collapses.
Time blocking will not make the HSC easy. But it does make it manageable, and that is usually what high performance looks like in real life.
