Bringing Some Routine To The Chaos Of College

Now that you’ve been at school for a few weeks, things are starting to feel routine… or are they? Hopefully you’re getting your class routine down and not having to look at your schedule every day just to know which class to go to. And as for regular meals, you’re probably quickly learning just how irregular those meal times are! Dinner at 10 p.m. and cereal for dinner? Sounds like the average night.

So maybe college life isn’t known to be the most routine or organized period of life. But that doesn’t mean every night has to end in a disheveled wreck of textbooks, papers, and chewed-up pens. Even if college life isn’t always very predictable or routine, bringing some routine to daily life has plain and simple advantages. Trust us, just because you’re attempting to make college life more routine doesn’t mean it will feel like high school.

For starters, let’s go back to those meals. Lunch might be at noon one day, 3 p.m. the next day, and then you never get around to it the day after that. Sound like your average week? Probably. But eating meals regularly and at the most regular time slots that you can permit has more advantages than not being hungry. The whole daily cycle of living and how it affects your body has plenty to do with what you eat. Eating regularly will help you avoid getting too tired and will cut down on binge eating later on. By at least making regular meal times for yourself, you can also better plan out the rest of your day as you bring some regularity to the chaos of college life.

Next up is study time, which could be anytime. Even 3 a.m. But how about bringing some scheduling to that as well? If you tell yourself that you’ll study every night from 7-11 p.m., you’ll not only be more likely to actually do it, you’ll also make the strenuous task seem less stressful. At some points you just might have to pull all nighters, but by keeping regular study hours, you’ll stay on top of your work and also know when it’s time to quit. It can seem daunting to go in with plenty of reading and studying ahead of you, but tell yourself you’ll quit at 11 and head to bed. Problem solved.

One way to live more routinely is, ironically, to make yourself busier. Go ahead and join a couple clubs and organizations. You can be sure that they’ll have regular meetings based around their schedule, not yours. This means you’ll have to go at set times, thus forcing you to plan other activities, like meals and studying. By being more involved, you’ll actually have more of a schedule, which leads to having more control over crazy college life, or at least making it feel that way, which is just as important.

If you’re not the type to plan things out, you can keep taking every day in college as it comes and seeing where the day takes you. But you’ll get more done and stay more organized by adapting to a daily schedule. No, it doesn’t have to be as permanent and rigid as a flight schedule, but you should bring some control to college life and see just how much better you can live it.