Time Donut Tool Shows What Really Is Time Consuming

Attending class, doing homework, joining student organizations, and working at internships all have one thing in common; they take up student’s time. Ever wondered if you could better manage your time but didn't have the tool available to find out? Enter the Time Donut, a new tool, mobile friendly tool developed through the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative. Although initially developed for STEM majors, the tool is available for all to use and can be also found on the advising UMBC website. 

UMBC’s Time Donut tool helps students track what they are doing by visualizing their time through data using emerging web technologies including HTML5 and D3.js. Students simply enter the expected number of hours spent into four categories -- academic, work, health and personal -- while specifying daily or weekly versions of the time donut. 

Bryan Lee, IT Projects Coordinator, said “We see students putting too much on their plate, they have to either withdraw, get an incomplete, or even worse fail the class because they realized they took too big of a bite.” 

The time donut tool can show if that  happening. As you enter in your expected hours, the donut alerts you when you go over and says “Whoops! Adjust your time allotments.” As you get closer to your time allotments, the donut alerts you and says “Doing great! You still have time.” 

                                

“This is for those who are looking to improve on their time management skills,” says Lee “Time management skills are really important in the professional world and honing in on these skills will really help.” 

Why is it called a time donut?  Lee says “Well, it started with the name of the type of data visualization, 'donut chart'. And since we were using the chart to illustrate total number of hours, we combined the two ideas and came up with Time Donut and it just stuck."

As a student goes through and sees there isn’t that much time in the day, they realize that taking 21 credits with a part time job along with balancing student organizations might not be the best course of action. 

The time donut is a useful tool for anyone who needs help with time management. “Play around with it, see what works and doesn’t work.” says Lee, “You might find that the amount of hours you spend you could actually be doing more.”