Time management tips for the application period
November 27, 2025 at 12:00 (noon) ET, is the 2026 R-1 Main Residency Match application deadline. This time can feel overwhelming—between electives, applying to programs, and maintaining your personal life, it’s easy to wonder how you’ll get it all done during the application period. Strong time management isn’t just helpful; it’s essential for reducing stress and staying organized. With the right strategies, you can balance your responsibilities, keep on top of deadlines, and even take time to rest. In this post, we’ll cover practical time management tips to make your application period feel more manageable and less stressful.
Create a schedule or to-do list
Creating a schedule or a to-do list can help you visualize all the tasks at hand. Allocating times to each item on your to-do list will help you stay organized and on top of everything that you need to do to submit your application well before the last-minute rush.
Prioritize tasks
Are there items on your to-do list that will take a longer amount of time to complete? Are there some tasks that are more important or that have a time sensitivity to them? By prioritizing your most important tasks to be completed first, you’ll help decrease your stress levels by getting the most crucial elements out of the way early on.
Set realistic goals and deadlines
By setting realistic goals or self-imposed deadlines for yourself, you can give yourself actionable milestones to hit and work towards during the application period. This will also help you leave yourself plenty of time to review your application before hitting submit.
Eliminate distractions
In this day and age, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted; by social media, endless streaming services, or even by other tasks that maybe aren’t a priority right now. Sometimes we need to eliminate distractions from our space to focus on the task at hand.
One way to do this is to physically remove the distraction (putting your phone in a different room or changing your location). If this doesn’t work, there are plenty of apps out there that let you limit and/or block your time on your phone so you can focus on what really matters in this moment.
Implement time-blocking techniques
Time blocking is a technique where you divide your day into time slots to complete certain tasks. In order to do this, you need to list and prioritize your tasks, create a time estimate for how long you think each task will take and then schedule them into your calendar.
There are plenty of apps and templates out there to help make this process easier.
Reward yourself
Rewarding yourself for getting things done is just as important as the process of achieving them. By rewarding yourself, you are giving yourself something to look forward to. It could be little rewards along the way (like a baked good from your favourite coffee shop) or maybe you have a bigger reward in mind for submitting your application early (like a weekend getaway).
There is a lot of work and time put into preparing and submitting your application, and you deserve to be rewarded for all the hard work you’ve done this year.
