Your school or college years are probably one of the most stressful times of your life: combining all of your assignments and readings with an utmost lack of time and a sense of constant underachieving is enough to driving you mad.
Although it isn’t easy, it’s possible to manage your stress levels to get the most out of your academic life while keeping you from going completely nuts. These are a few of my tips to lower your stress to a minimum and enjoy the experience:
1. Break big tasks into smaller ones – Normally, when you think about that BIG exam that’s coming up, all you can remember is that chunk of readings that you haven’t tapped into yet, or the endless number of articles that you’ve been avoiding the entire semester. The best way to make sure that you can cover all of that information is to break down a huge exam into chapters you need to study, exercises you need to solve or articles you need to read and writing every one of those items in your planner or calendar. Every small achievement is a step closer to your ultimate goal, which is to be prepared for that exam – by focusing on smaller tasks, you organize your time a whole lot better, while making sure that it’s possible to study all of those pages.
2. Fake your deadlines – one of the best tricks in my book is to fake my deadlines. If a professor schedules an essay at the beginning of the semester for the 20th of November, write in your planner instead that the deadline is November 17th. You’ll organize your task ahead of time and if something ultimately happens and you fail your deadline, you’ll find out that you are still three days ahead.
3. Make a study guide – When I have four exams in the same week I find it hard to balance all the work that I need to for each subject without forgetting any of the others. That’s why I like to make a calendar with the time that I have available to study for those exams and writing for each day the chapter/topic that I need to study for each subject. I move my work load around my calendar if I’m going to have a busy week or a weekend where I won’t be available to study. The trick is to fit all of the material for your tested subjects into that small calendar and follow it precisely until the day arrives.
4. Start ahead of time and remain one week ahead – This is that kind of big trick that can save your whole semester. If you keep one week ahead of time, preparing your classes in advance and keeping all of your assignments done 7 days ahead of their deadlines, it will have a HUGE impact down the road. You will always be ahead of the game and if something happens during the semester, you have 7 days to pick up where you left, without ever falling behind.
5. Dedicate your time to the information that you didn’t understand. One of the things that stresses me out the most is to think that there’s something that I learned in a class that can’t quite grasp.
That drives me nuts. I just keep thinking about it but I never have the courage to dive into it, being afraid of thinking that it will be COMPLETELY impossible to understand. That’s why I like to dedicate a few hours solely to topics/subjects that I can’t understand. I will read those slowly, annotate any questions, read other books on the topic and mainly I’ll do my best to understand them comprehensively, without switching my time between other tasks. You know what’s funny? Normally those are the subjects that I end up mastering by the end of the semester. Effort always pays off.
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