Establishing a Routine in College

When you’re in college, you’re going to be living on your own for the first time. You’re also living far away from home, whether it is an hour or another state or country. That means your mom will have no idea what homework you have to do for your classes and when it is due. When you were living at home, your mom may have given you reminders to work on your homework and get off of your phone. However, when you’re at college, there is no one there to remind you to do these things. Not even your professors will give you reminders about homework. As you can imagine, starting out college with this much freedom with your homework can be rough. It can be all too easy to not read a certain section of a book for English because you want to play video games, or you think you remember pretty well from your classes what will be on the exam and don’t feel you need to study. 

Unfortunately, if you start these habits early on, it will be hard to change them later and you’ll find college isn’t as fun as it used to be. You don’t want to retake classes or graduate at a later date because of this early established pattern. The way to help yourself get through all of your homework while still having free time is to establish a routine.

First of all, invest in a good planner and keep detailed notes of when things are due on the larger daily planning slots. In the overall month at a glance section, write less detailed notes on the due date so you can see your entire month and what you have to do.  This will help you plan out what time you do have to spend with your friends.

Don’t wait until the last minute to work on homework. You’ll be more stressed, you’ll be rushing more, and you’ll find it actually takes up more of your time. Also, if you find you have a large chunk of free time in between classes and all of your friends are in class, don’t spend that time texting them. Use that time to your advantage and work on your homework, especially if you need the library or computer lab.

Make a To-Do list for each day with things you need to work on in order of importance. For example, things due sooner will be to the top of your list so you can get them done. That way if there is something that isn’t due for a while but you wanted to work on it, you can skip it for that day if you need to in order to have some free time.

You will need to build in time for studying. Make a study schedule and stick to it. It doesn’t have to be “Monday I’ll read from my History textbook from 3:30-4.” Make it more general – Monday from a certain time you will work on whatever you have to do. You need to build in study time to your schedule and stick to it. Make a new version of your schedule with your classes blocked out and block out time in your day that you set aside for studying. With certain times for studying, you won’t feel so overwhelmed later and like you’re not getting anything done. You can even set a routine for how you study and how you do your homework to make things easier for you.