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1. Introduction
The conception of time, its perception and management, depends on the culture we belong to as expressed by Edward Hall (1959) in his seminal work The Silent Language, “Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout the truth where words lie” (p. 1). Therefore, while in occident it is conceived linearly, with a beginning and ending, in other cultures, the time is considered cyclic, and for that, without an ending. “People of the Western world, particularly Americans, tend to think of time as something fixed in nature, something around us and from which we cannot escape; an ever-present part of the environment, just like the air we breathe” (Hall, 1959, p. 6).
As the conception of time determines our behavior, our life (Hall, 1959; Pant, 2016), several studies on perception and management have been carried out. In the business field, from the classic studies of McCay (1959), Drucker (1967) or Lakein (1973) to the most recent of Hassan (2003), Kannan and Tan (2005), Cockerell (2016), and Parke et al. (2018) there has been great interest in analyzing the planning and organization of time, in order to determine its link with performance or income, showing the importance of time in management research (Mitchell and James, 2001).
The relationship of time management with non-strictly economic variables such as anxiety, physical and psychological well-being has also been analyzed (Macan, 1994; Ho, 2003; Misra and McKean, 2000; Pérez-González et al., 2003; Strazdins et al., 2011; Boixadós et al., 2012).
In the field of education it is essential to know how the students use their time, especially since the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) (2015) enhances autonomy and critical skills of the student, and considers that the workload includes different types of learning activities: readings, seminars, projects, individual and group practices.
This diversity of tasks requires the student to adequately manage their academic time and, by extension, their overall time, facing the challenge of organizing it appropriately in order to correctly fulfill all the activities of their daily life and finally validate the...