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It’s hard to manage time in a room full of people who want you to waste it. No student is going to remind you to “Get back to the lecture; we’ve had enough tangential dilly-dally.” Meanwhile, the temptation to let the Bill Nye video roll over into the next activity melts away those precious minutes of learn-time like fat in a Foreman Grill.

Michael Stelzner over at Copyblogger has posted some helpful time management tools in response to a survey of his readers. When asked “What keeps you from writing?” they overwhelmingly answered “time.” These three .pdf files easily carry over to any other activity.

Start with the Time Management Assessment, a checklist of useful habits ranging from the not-quite-revolutionary (“I carry a calculator, to do math faster”) to more legitimate items of efficacy (“I am not afraid to ask people for information that I need”). The Assessment also helps you tally up all those little black holes of work-time such as personal calls. Astonishingly, checking your inbox, watching YouTube and tweaking your Facebook profile aren’t listed—but do yourself a favor and add them as categories.

The next tool is a time log, a surprisingly helpful little worksheet for researching your own habits on a minute-by-minute basis. This could be ideal for maximizing class time. Now, with all you’ve gleaned, you can answer the penetrating self-scrutiny of the Time Management Questionnaire, which asks you why you think you are the way you are and gives you a big old box to write in. Stelzner found this at the “ethical work and business tools” website titled, ahem, businessballs.com. –PATRICK O’BOYLE

Time Management Tools