Abstract:

Frequently, students who have recently started university from secondary school face with an increase in their studies' complexity due to the number of subjects, the volume of content, the system's demands and the professors. Thus, they come from a "single-task" environment and suddenly they enter into the "multi-task" world.

Since early 2020, the pandemic has brought a global revolution in the university education. Virtualization and telematic teaching have meant that students have to learn by themselves how to manage their time and subjects without direct guidance from professors, which is not always the best way. As an illustration, it is as if the student entering the university stage takes off as a pilot in an airplane cockpit without knowing how each of the instruments work and, in order to land, they must learn how to use them during the flight. Classes, deliveries, exams, and, in most cases, all this combined with the tasks of starting a life outside the family nucleus makes that the natural consequences of this situation are stress, dropout or school failure, and lack of confidence.

Therefore, it is crucial that at the beginning of the course, students acquire skills related to productivity, personal time management, and subject management that will enable them to cope optimally with the large volume of work and multi-tasking to which they will be subjected. To address this problem and thanks to the training and experience of the authors in both the university and business world, this work allows us to offer an overview of the main techniques and tools of productivity and project management used today by large companies and entrepreneurs adapted to the field of university students in order to face their university stage optimally. We must not forget that we as people are the most prominent company that we will (self-)manage in our life. Therefore, it is essential to learn how to organize ourselves correctly.

The main blocks that will be shown in this work are:
1. Planning and organization: techniques for the planning of objectives at annual, quarterly, and monthly scale. Techniques for a weekly and daily organization through the correct management of tasks and calendar will also be shown.
2. Attention and distractions: the importance of single-tasking vs. multitasking. Tools to preserve attention by avoiding interruptions and distractions, especially those coming from the digital world.
3. Urgencies: the description of urgency will be addressed to differentiate it from what is not (confusion of urgent vs. essential issues). Methods to restructure our planning in case an urgency appears (correctly identified).
4. Subject management: one of the most used civil engineering tools for project management will be discussed but applied to subject management: the Gantt chart.
5. Reconciliation of personal and professional productivity: a balance between the professional and personal sides is critical for personal productivity to be effective.
6. Applications: Finally, we will show digital tools that facilitate applying the different techniques of personal productivity-focused.

During this congress, the general structure of the contents and tools that must be provided to the students at the beginning of the university stage to optimally cope with the large volume of work and multi-tasking will be address.

Keywords:

Productivity, telematic teaching, (personal) time management, subject management, multi-tasking, productivity tools, planning and organization.