One of the basic conditions of human life (and the ways of experiencing it) is that it is temporal and the our lifetime is limited. Today we observe fast technological changes, access to a lot of information and frequent necessity to execute tasks quickly, which is why many people experience limits of time necessary to perform their action. Conscious of their own mortality, people also experience the limits of their own lifetime. In this context, the question, what would it mean for a given individual “to make proper use of time” seems to be quite important. Research was conducted on a group of 127 students. The objective of the research was to obtain answers to exploratory questions: What are the individual concepts of that, what does “proper time use” mean for students (both in short-term perspective and lifetime perspective). In order to discover the individual concepts of “proper time use”, a questionnaire containing open questions was constructed. Th e questions were connected with three time use perspectives: a week of study, a week of holidays and the whole life. It corresponds with the division made by Popiołek (2010) into two perspectives, in which time is captured by the man: every day time and lifetime. Answers were categorized. The most frequent criteria of “proper time use” were: attaining objectives (74%), pleasure and seeking sensations (61%), relations with other people (49%), personal development (34%) and life satisfaction (30%). Definite majority of the answers were general and pointed to a lack of deeper reflection on their lives, on “how I would like to make use of my lifetime”. The results obtained may have application value – based on them, initial postulates were proposed for work on increasing self-consciousness of students in the respect of time management.