With so many things vying for your attention, even as a college student, productivity may seem like a farfetched dream. However, the difference between a succeeding and a struggling student is that one can effectively manage time. Effective time management involves maintaining the right balance between college life, homework, and your free time. Meanwhile, if you want to be less stressed and more productive in education, you must be able to organize your days.
We understand that you have a lot to do: assignments, classes, extracurricular activities, your part-time job, and family responsibilities. When you’ve done all, you must also have time to eat, sleep, exercise, and recharge to avoid a breakdown. Therefore, we’ve rounded up these strategies to facilitate student productivity and help students accomplish their goals with enough time to rest.
Plan Your Day with a Daily Schedule Template
You want to stay on top of your schedule for the day by organizing your seminars, classes, and workshops. Creating a daily schedule template helps you control and manage your time daily, enabling you to be organized and focused. More so, you’ll be conscious of the pressure of time and be able to avoid procrastination. A good template-creating technique you can use is time-blocking, where you plan how you intend to spend every minute of the day.
Know Where Your Time Is Going Into
After creating a schedule, you have a good idea of how your day will turn out. However, you still need to analyze how you spend to develop time management skills. You need to know how you spend your time to build better time management strategies to help you maintain focus. Knowing how you spend your time and where you are losing it will help you plan better and more effectively.
Write Your Goal before the Session Starts
An excellent way to increase your productivity is to pen down your goal before the school session starts. For example, if your goal is to obtain a particular grade, specify it in your plan; this helps you remain focused. Furthermore, setting short-term goals presents a clear path to longer-term goals while giving you ideas on how to achieve your desired grades. You will remain on your toes, conscious of how you spend your time, when you have a target to meet.
Create a Working Study Timetable
As the new school session starts, you want to start reading as soon as possible. This way, the work will not get cumbersome when it’s time for exams, and exam stress will be ruled out. Furthermore, creating and sticking to a study timetable increases your productivity, helping you balance school work and other responsibilities. Meanwhile, your study timetable needs to factor in your social commitments and extracurricular activities for it to work.
Furthermore, when drafting your timetable, ensure one activity does not suffer because of the other; they should not clash. Apart from scheduling the courses you want to study, decide the time you want to spend per day. Space out your study time so that there is sufficient time for rest, exercise, and recharge for greater productivity. You can also outsource your assignments to cheap thesis writing services to create more time for relaxation.
Reduce Screen Time As Much As Possible
Endeavor not to turn study time to screen time; as much as possible, silence your phone when studying. Technology can be a good thing, but not so much when it stands between you and your academic goals. If you want to focus better, you should silence your phone or, better still, turn it off.
However, if you have to study with your phone, you can use apps that can help you block other distracting apps. Social media apps, for example, can be a distraction and hindrance to being productive in education. There are apps that can block you from accessing specific sites while you’re studying, including Freedom, Flipd, and Offtime. These apps sync and block sites you’ve decided to avoid for a specific period to help you stay focused.
Be Part of a Study Group
When you study alone, you can quickly get bored or burned out – or you can come up with an excuse to quit studying. However, when you belong to a study group, you will remain accountable and better understand your materials. A perfect way to boost your productivity in your education is by joining peers of like mind to form a study group. More so, your group will inspire you, giving you the needed moral and academic support for excellence.
Your group will choose a topic you will discuss in the next meeting, which each member will read up on. You’ll be motivated to study more since you would not want to appear empty while others are bustling with ideas. Also, being part of a study group can help clarify certain areas of your courses that you don’t understand. Overall, becoming part of a study group will ultimately produce a better version of yourself where academic productivity is concerned.
Rest
This article on productivity will be incomplete if we fail to mention this all-too-salient point: rest. Losing sleep on consecutive nights will lead to stress, and that will ultimately affect your productivity negatively. You will be more productive with a clear mind, relaxed body, and well-nourished system. Therefore, allow yourself enough time to sleep, eat healthy when necessary, and invest time to exercise and manage stress.
Some effective stress management exercises that can help student productivity include yoga, deep breathing exercises, and meditation. You may wonder what time you have to go for yoga, but making time would be in your best interests. Even only a few minutes of exercise leaves you refreshed, recharged, calm, and refocused; you’ll get more things done this way.
Segregate Larger Projects into Smaller Daily Tasks
Research has shown that we procrastinate not because we’re lazy but because we have a project so large it feels undoable. Therefore, rather than be anxious about the bulk of work we have to do, we log in to Twitter or binge Netflix. However, studies have also shown that one can overcome that overwhelming feeling by breaking larger projects into smaller, actionable tasks. Doing it this way helps keep you focused and prevents procrastination, thus boosting productivity in your daily endeavors.
Conclusion
Productivity is all about prioritizing more extensive and complex chores so that there’s enough time to rest after. It also involves balancing your personal, educational, and social life without breaking down. These productivity tips will keep you on your toes, helping you achieve your goals at the end of the school session.
