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It can be especially tricky to balance life and work when you’re a student. You might be juggling studying, with a part-time job and your personal life, at a time of great change and upheaval, making finding a balance even more difficult.
For that reason, we’ve decided to compile a list of productivity tips for students that you can use in line with our guide on how to maintain a healthy work-life balance to ensure you can thrive.
Common reasons why students fail to reach peak productivity include poor time management, stress, fatigue, and distraction.
In the rest of this article, we’ll share advice that aims to help students focus and become more productive.
Without further, let’s dive in.
Top Productivity Tips for Students
There is plentiful productivity advice on offer for students. What follows is the best of the best we could find. We hope each tip proves useful in a different way. You can choose your favourite tips to follow so that you can create the perfect, customised routine, maintain high levels of productivity, and get more done
Create a Manageable To-do List
Everyone has a different schedule. If yours is like most students, it’s bound to be jam-packed and hectic. Anyone who can juggle high-quality studying, work, and personal life is a rare person indeed.
If you don’t take the time to create a list or calendar to help you stay organised, you’re setting yourself up to fail, and it’s sure to increase your stress levels. If you miss a single deadline, things can quickly spiral out of control, making it even harder for you to catch up as you continue to miss deadlines.
On the other hand, if you write yourself a to-do list that’s too long, it can overwhelm you. Instead, try to limit yourself to 3-5 tasks you can finish within a day, as is recommended by the Ivy Lee productivity system.
Such tasks may include:
- Finishing an outline for your dissertation.
- Picking up toner for your printer.
- Completing a draft of an essay.
Goals, by contrast, are overarching, bigger-picture achievements like completing an assignment or finishing your dissertation. Typically, goals are made up of multiple tasks. With some practice, you will become a whizz at managing and creating a perfectly balanced to-do list.
Don’t Bite off More Than You Can Chew
Taking on too much is a sure recipe for burnout and increased stress. There is no shame in cutting out some activities so that you can focus on tasks that are the most crucial. So, don’t put yourself under pressure to do everything. Rather, create balance where possible and eliminate extra activities which don’t add value to your life.
Eliminate Distractions
There are numerous distractions in the modern world that can be disastrous for productivity. They include:
- Surfing the web.
- Checking emails and social media notifications.
- Playing games on mobile devices.
- Streaming music and TV shows.
As a student, it’s all too easy to blur the lines between life and study and to tell yourself that you’ll own hop on to social media for a few minutes. It is best to monitor your behaviour and block any websites that you stray onto too often. Taking that simple step may do wonders for your productivity.
Use the Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique can be a marvellous way to boost your productivity. It is a proven time management system that helps you make the most of the time you have available. It does this by breaking up your study session into 25-minute work sprints. You work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. You work through 4 such cycles before giving yourself a longer break.
This works by creating a manageable feeling of urgency, which motivates you to finish tasks in good time.
Prioritise Exercise
Walking is a particularly efficacious form of exercise. It helps reduce stress, clear your head, and refresh you ready for your next session of study.
You can use the time you have on your walks to listen to your favourite podcast, call family, or just relax.
Use Google Calendar
If you have a Gmail account, you can avail yourself of the calendar feature. Use it to:
- Track deadlines.
- Manage your work schedule.
- Keep tabs on family events
And much else besides. You can add reminders, alerts, and notifications, to help you avoid procrastination and ensure you don’t miss anything vital. For more on how to tackle procrastination, check out our post on the 6 types of procrastinators.
Change Your Environment
If your productivity is flagging, it is a good idea to change your environment a bit. You could study at the kitchen table every now and again, instead of at your desk. You could even take your work to your favourite café, should the mood take you. See what effect change has on your productivity.
Pinpoint Times You’re Most Likely to be Productive
We all know that different people work best at different times of the day. If you work best in the mornings, do so but never fear if you are most productive in the evenings, or late at night. Work whenever suits you and your other responsibilities allow. If you can, find the times when you are most productive work then to maximise your potential.
Don’t Try to Multitask
So many of us multitask every day that it may seem counterintuitive not to do so. While some people might be able to multitask, most of us need more focus and a more rigid structure to complete tasks. If you attempt to multitask, you may become distracted, which could decrease by as much as 40%.
Follow the Two-Minute Rule
The two-minute rule, devised by David Allen, states that if a task takes less than two minutes to finish, you should do it at once to get it out of the way. You can use this rule in many aspects of your life to set goals you can achieve within two minutes, such as reading one page of your book each night before bed.
Do the Most Difficult Tasks First
When you’ve followed the two-minute rule and done those quick and easy tasks, it’s time to tackle the hardest ones of the day. If you dread doing something, you are more likely to procrastinate and thereby create unnecessary stress. To avoid this, take on your hardest task head-on so you can feel you’ve truly achieved something and motivate yourself to complete other tasks.
Set Deadlines
You can use deadlines to keep yourself on track. Devise your own tight deadlines to challenge yourself, secure in the knowledge that if something goes awry you will have extra time to finish tasks if you need it. You might be surprised by what you can achieve within a certain timeframe.
Use Apps to Help
There is a range of productivity apps out there to help keep you on the straight and narrow, by giving you rewards for every milestone you reach, helping to keep you motivated and therefore productive.
Some of the best apps available for students are:
- Todoist.
- Quizlet.
- Notion.
- Calendar apps.
Prioritise with the Eisenhower Matrix
To be truly productive, you must learn how to prioritise well. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to identify and separate urgent and important tasks from non-urgent and unimportant ones.
That way, you are sure to always be working on the tasks that matter most and can therefore be said to be more productive than you would be if you were to waste time on more trivial work or study.
Participate in a Study Group
Joining a study group can help you:
- Avoid feeling isolated.
- Exchange and come up with new ideas.
- Gain better insight into what you’re studying.
- Gain experience working in teams.
- Accept mutual accountability and thereby stave off the temptation to procrastinate.
Become a Wizard with Time Management
If you work to develop strong time management skills, you will be able to accomplish your daily tasks effectively and in good time. Check out our list of the 7 best time management apps to discover how technology can help. Excellent time management skills are sought after in many professions, so if you take the time to learn them, you will set yourself up for future success.
Wrapping Up
There you have it. Use these helpful productivity tips for students to become a master of time management, learn to prioritise like a pro, achieve all you desire, and leave your peers and friends in the dust.
We hope this piece has given you the confidence to try some of these tips to create a personal study schedule that is sure to boost your productivity.
Good luck and happy studying!
Make Your Biz Fizz 