Throughout high school, some may find themselves balancing an unparalleled amount work and at times it may seem impossible to balance everything. However, before you drop your commitments consider that maybe you aren’t working in the most productive manner. For those who have many extracurriculars while maintaining good grades, we think these are the best tips to maximize your productivity and ultimately balance your increasingly difficult work load.
- Drink lots of water
Do you ever get so focused in your studying that you forget to grab a drink of water? While those precious minutes of studying may seem invaluable, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, dehydration can greatly reduce the quality of your studying. They report that dehydration can lead to difficulty focusing, impaired short-term memory, difficulty recalling long-term memories, and impaired ability to perform mental arithmetic. Water breaks are well worth it!
- Sleep
This one may seem obvious, but likely you may not be getting the proper amount of sleep recommended for a high school student. Even if you are in bed by 11 PM and wake up around 7 AM it could take well over an hour to fall asleep. The time you actually spend asleep time is very deceptive. Make sure to get your sleep.
- Take lots of breaks
Breaks are essential to knowledge acquisition. Simply staring at your computer for hours on end will likely be less effective than if you were to implement breaks into your study regiment. When studying consider using researched techniques, like for instance the pomodoro technique, where you study, and take breaks for consecutive optimized amounts of time.
- Become accustomed to working in the morning
When studying or doing work, most of us are constantly checking our phones and social medias. Frankly, it is quite unrealistic to advise anyone to just not use their phones especialtly at night when everyone is online. Instead, consider doing school and extracurricular work in the morning. This will provide two benefits; you will likely use your phone less because no one will be up and responding and you will become much more alert at the start of school since you have given your brain more time to warm up.
- Use a calendar or notepad to map out your schedule
Remembering everything on your plate can be anxiety provoking and is rarely foolproof. Schedule your life and events on either a notepad or google calendar (Our school emails have google calendar premium for free). Being able to see your whole week planned out in advance will allow for better time management and will be a major boost of productivity.
- Complete your assignments as they come
Would you rather a little freetime everyday or a lot of freetime at once? If you’re anything like me, you’d probably choose the latter, but that may seem impossible with stacking deadlines. Unfortunately, for those with heavy workloads, the only solution is to complete assignments as soon as they come. A lot of the time, doing these assignments will prime you for future material anyways and end up reducing the time you may have to dedicate to future studying.
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