Your personal Tumblr library awaits
You are tired. You are lazy. You can't do anything. Those are the voices I hear, and you might hear, after a long day at school. All I want to do is lay down on the couch and take a nap or get lost scrolling on my phone. But I know if I do, I'm going to spend the next two hours doing absolutely nothing.
Try not to stop doing stuff when you have a break. And I don't mean you should be constantly working. Make yourself a cup of tea. Journal. Call your friend. Something that keeps your momentum. It's harder to stop when you're stationary compared to when you're already moving.
More study tips! Separate your to-do list into three buckets: red light tasks, yellow light, and green light.
Red light tasks are the hardest things you have to do. Typically, there is some planning involved, different components, and it will take you multiple days to work on it. Think essay, presentation, big project.
This might come as a surprise but studying for hard tests I put in the yellow light category. (If you’re cramming put this in the red category, but pls don’t.) You are going to want to split up hefty homework assignments and big tests into smaller actionable pieces. The idea is to study a bit every day. The idea is that there is more flexibility and resources while you study, and each problem generally has a clear solution.
Green light is something like emails, routine Khan Academy practice, reading a chapter of a book, or small homework assignments. The point of my system is to be flexible and put things into categories based on how I’m feeling and how much time there is as well.
What this does is it reduces your to do list into three sections, makes a plan, and helps you quantify how urgent tasks are.
Here is my typical schedule for these tasks:
After school:
Break for 1hr
Green as a warmup
Yellow for one hour for 1-1.5hrs
Red after dinner for 2~hrs
Green until tired .5hrs
Weekends:
Finish ALL Green in the morning Sat
Red for 5~ hrs (or however much you need) Sat
Breaks interwoven between
Dinner and relaxing Sat evening
Yellow for 2-3~ hr Sun
Red for 1-1.5hr Sun evening
Day off where I wasted the entire morning:
Red for 2hrs
Yellow for 2hrs
After dinner do Green until tired