Tourism, Hospitality & Events
Why time management is important
As you will be working on your dissertation for several months and will have other assignments to complete it is really important to manage your time effectively. Thinking about how best to organise your time at the beginning will help you avoid rushing at the end. Here are some tips on how to avoid distractions, set deadlines as you go and save time finding new research.
Search Alerts
Information is constantly updating and changing and it is the same for research. To stay up to date with current research you can sign up for search alerts and details of relevant articles will be emailed to you.
When searching on the databases look for an option for search alerts - in Hospitality and Tourism Complete this is available via the share option.
You can also request table of contents for relevant journals - sign up via Publisher pages such as Taylor & Francis or select journals via Zetoc (a research database with over 29,000 journals).
Dealing with distractions
- turning if off
- setting it to silence
- turning off notifications
The internet allows an endless possibility for distraction - if you don't have enough will power or want some help to avoid these there are various tools that allow you to block access or set time limits.
Leech Block - an extension for Firefox, choose sites you want to block and specific time period or limit e.g. ten minutes in an hour.
Stay Focused - an extension for Google Chrome blocking sites/pages once you have exceeded your allowance,
KeepMeOut - suitable for all browsers bookmark the pages that you want to avoid
If you find it hard to stay motivated try and think of ways to reward yourself once you have completed a particular task. If you enjoy spending time on social media allow yourself a certain time period as a short study break or reward.
There are also online tools to reward you for completing a certain amounts of words.
Written? Kitten will reward you with a photo of a kitten every 100 words you write. (you are able to change to puppy/button and change word amount)
Write or die is a paid writing application which as the name suggests is more of a punishment tool than reward system although there is also a reward option.
If you find it hard to stay focused for long periods of time think about trying the Pomodore technqiue - you work for 25 minutes and then have a 5 minute break, marking off the time periods as you go.
Planning Ahead
Thinking about your dissertation as a whole can seem quite daunting so spend some time dividing it into more manageable sections.
See Skills at Leeds checklist and adapt to your project.
To save leaving everything to the last minute think about setting yourself mini deadlines as you go. Stay on track by setting up calendar alerts to remind you of your deadlines - with both Outlook and Google calendar you can get apps for your phone and receive notifications of your deadlines.
There also also various task management apps such as Remember the Milk and Trello that allow you to create online to do list and keep track of progress.