Some of the experiences that make college so memorable are the sleepless nights spent studying with friends, scrambling to get from class to class, and the upkeep of meeting constant deadlines. However, the more we encounter these situations, we unknowingly add more stress to our lives under the appearance of being busy.
As former (and current) college students, ISO has created some tips that will hopefully prevent your semester from being memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Build Good Habits
It’s very easy to let your mind go into autopilot as you live through the motions of academia. Since you’ll be spending more time working on deliverables for your school, it’s best practice to work on regular self-maintenance early and find patterns that you can work into a daily routine.
Habits play a large role in our everyday mental scheduling. While we have a checklist of tasks that need to be accomplished within a given period, items that are repetitive and continuous, like washing your clothes or vacuuming your space from time to time, begin to solidify and feel like necessities rather than a chore – to the point where not doing them feels irrational.
Building early habits is a large investment in future you – so that when you’re amidst constant deadlines, office hours appointments, and group project meetings, you know you’ll at least do one good service to yourself. For some, this might mean meal prepping at the beginning of the week, taking a half hour out of every day to meditate, or even ensuring getting at least 8 hours of sleep a night.
Efficiency is Clever Laziness
When you’re in college, you’re going to learn to have to pick your battles. You’ll miss a meeting or two because of scheduling conflicts with another group or have to skip a lecture to prepare for a super hard midterm. While it happens, you can avoid making these decisions often with a little bit of planning.
Efficiency is built by improving two skills: organization and time management. Like building habits, this will not happen overnight, but repetitiveness is key. A great tip for this is to set priorities. Putting levels of importance on your tasks will give you a clearer vision on how you should portion your time for each activity, and when you should begin doing them.
In some cases, you might have too many priorities on your plate. Prioritizing also means taking a critical look at what’s in front of you. Usually, that also means asking yourself specific questions about your work:
Do you know if your professor is known to push timelines or due dates for assignments?
Are you dealing with a deadline for a draft versus a final copy?
Breaking down each of your tasks into more time or grade-specific needs may allow you to see which ones have more weight and will allow you to tackle your greatest obstacles first. Tasks that you have the most confidence in should be saved for later, after you’ve tackled the challenging ones first.
Plan For the…Worst?
No, no, don’t start burning your textbooks now. This tip is meant to help your foresight. Think about all the times you’ve received an assignment that was due far in the future, and immediately left your mind blank that entire period, before scrambling to finish a 20,000-word paper at 11:59 PM.
Oh, and of course your deadline is in one minute.
Thinking toward that future moment can snap you out of this behavior in the present and allow you to adjust your workflow to avoid old outcomes. This same process works in other areas, like getting help in a class you’re weaker in before the final or backing up your files in other devices if you know your internet connection (or laptop battery) is spotty.
Small Goals Matter Too
It is best practice to set your mind ambitiously in academia, your career, and ultimately your life. However, constantly only focusing on the bigger picture may be to your disservice at times. Some developments in life are meant to be smaller, so it helps to change your lens on these as well.
While you should always aim to be at the top of your class or getting that dream job, the amount of pressure you place on yourself can be disillusioning if you only focus on that goal. Setting smaller, easier-to-achieve goals can allow you to feel a sense of accomplishment more frequently and keep you mentally stronger in the long run.
Good examples of this are:
- Cooking your favorite meal for yourself on the weekend
- Doing 2 more pushups than the last time you worked out
- Finishing a fun project you’ve left undone for a while
The best thing about small goals is that finishing them are still wins for us, and we all need a win every now and then – no matter how small. Bonus if your small goal is attached to a bigger goal (writing 50 words every day out of that 20,000 word paper) – your bigger goal may be finished faster than you expect!
College and stress go together like fish and water – you can’t have one without the other. The purpose of this article is not to remove stress completely, but to rather manage it throughout life. Practices like the above extend to much further than school, and you’ll earn respect from your peers for approaching stress in a more calm and collected manner.
Lastly, if you want to ease stress off your mind, your health, and your wallet, opt out of your school plan for one with ISO! Our plans provide top quality comprehensive coverage that won’t break your bank, so you can get working on your goals right away.
