5 Key Steps to Create a Highly Productive Daily Routine for a Student
Want to know how to create a productive daily routine for a student? These are the tested and approved steps to help you succeed in your studies and other goals on autopilot.
Going to college can be the ultimate step to achieving success in life, and if you’re anything like me, you are doing all the research you possibly can to get the best results you can achieve. As a former law student myself, I am giving you all the crucial steps I swear by.
You are going to learn about how to create the most optimal daily routine for a student, which can be used as a daily routine for college students or as a daily routine for school students.
After learning about all these tried and true steps to creating a highly productive daily routine for a student, you are going to master not only your studies but ALL your goals!
This post is all about creating the most optimal and highly productive daily routine for a student to succeed in all areas of life.
Ultimate Daily Routine for a Student
Daily routine for college students and school students
1. Optimise for energy levels
Let me start with the fact that I can not give you a blueprint of the perfect daily routine for college students or school students that works for everyone. I don’t ever intend to.
Why? Because we all have different energy levels and creativity levels throughout the day. The best daily routine for a student is optimised for those peaks and dips in our energy and creativity levels.
For example, I used to work out first thing every morning because that is what I saw in all the morning routine videos I used to watch on YouTube. But that was detrimental to my creativity. Now, I work out when I have an energy dip around 11 am, so I get re-energised for the afternoon.
Become aware of the moments during the day when you usually have energy dips and peaks and allocate activities to those times that work for those levels. During the moments of the day when you have higher energy levels, those are the times that work best to be studying or doing homework.
When you have your energy dips, those are great times to do something else, like going to the gym or for a walk, having a meal or doing household chores.
2. Respect your creative brain and work with it, not against it
I am sharing the exact steps you need to take to create the perfect daily routine for you. That will probably look a little different than my daily routine when I was a law student.
For example, I am at my most creative right when I wake up. A billion ideas start flowing through my mind, and that is when I need to start blogging. So, I am blogging for the first hour of my morning. Disclaimer: That is most of the time. I also have mornings where my brain just does not work. Do not feel like a failure when you have one of those days. That’s just human nature which we all have to deal with, unfortunately.
So, do not only optimise your day for your energy levels but also your creativity levels. If you have a lot of energy in the morning but are not at your most creative, maybe that is the perfect time to block for studying. If you get into your creative element in the afternoon or during a golden hour in the evenings, block those times to do homework and write essays.
3. Study & homework blocks
Now, you know when you are at your optimal energy levels to spend time studying, doing homework, or writing essays. The next step to creating the most productive daily routine for a student is to create time blocks. Those time blocks should correlate with the times of day when your energy levels are generally higher.
Create at least two large time blocks for the days you do not have to work at a job. Otherwise, you will need to limit that large time block to just one for work days.
So, that could be one large time block in the morning before lunch and one in the afternoon after lunch, which most of you will probably choose.
Then, depending on the period you are in, you might want to add smaller time blocks to your day for either your studies or your side hustle.
For example, I dedicate 1 hour in the morning right when I wake up and before my shower and 1 hour after dinner for blogging.
If you have a side hustle or if you are in your exam period, you may want to create two additional time blocks for those as well.
These are non-negotiable time blocks during which you do nothing else but dedicate yourself to your studies (and maybe your side hustle).
But don’t be too rigid about it, either. If you are at the end of your time block but are in a creative flow and want to go for a little longer, by all means, go at it! Conversely, if you are in the last hour of your time block and feel like you can’t give any more of yourself, listen to your body and stop a bit earlier.
4. Get out!
It’s really easy as a student to become a hermit and never see the day of light, especially if your lectures are recorded and you can watch them from the comfort of your bed. I’m not going to lie. I loved it. I rarely actually went to class when I did not have to.
However, staying in every day, studying and working from home, doing workouts at home, and eating at home, will not be optimal for your mental health, and life will become a little mundane. At some point, you might not even know what day it is. That is when you start procrastinating and want to avoid that at all costs.
You need to stimulate your brain by actually going out. Get a gym membership and work out at the gym or go for walks in your neighbourhood. Have lunch outside, whether that means taking your homemade meal to the park or going to a restaurant or coffee shop for lunch.
You don’t even need to go out during your breaks only. One of the tips in my blog post on the 7 Genius Productivity Hacks for Students for Long-Term Success is to study or do your homework at a coffee shop or the library during one of your study blocks.
You can also kill two birds with one stone by having dinners with friends or family in the evenings after you finish your studies for the day.
5. Set boundaries for your social life
As a student, I think the hardest thing to juggle is time for studying and your social life. It’s the time of your life when you need to become very disciplined at studying but also experience major FOMO when others around you are not doing the same. Some have it worse than others, but I think we all have experienced a little of it, and the college days are the worst because you feel like that is the time to live and let loose.
To combat this inner struggle and put it to rest once and for all, you need to determine for yourself how much time you can dedicate to your social life without the detriment of your studies and other goals you have for yourself. So you need to take all your goals into consideration, not just your studies, like turning your side hustle, business and career goals, financial goals and health and fitness goals.
Map out not just your day but your entire week for yourself and see what pockets of time you can dedicate to your social life. Often that means you will have to miss out on certain social events. But that is okay because you prioritise other goals and know exactly when you can and can’t spend time with friends and family.
That also goes for texting. You can't distract yourself with texts during your time blocks for your studies and other work. But, more on that in this blog post on the 9 Life-Changing Productivity Tips for Procrastinators.
So, when someone asks you to hang out during a time that does not work for you, just tell them that you can’t because you need to work on something, and give them alternative times for when you are available for social activities. Or, if you like to have dinner with friends and family, set a hard deadline to go home after an hour instead of three.
And stop feeling guilty about setting higher priorities. Sometimes it’s not even your friends and family demanding extra time, but you give them that extra time because you feel like you have to. But they would be totally fine if you did not give them that extra time and are happy that they had at least some time with you. And if they’re not, f*ck them! They do not support your goals, so why should you support theirs?
And, remember, the successful people you know are never the last to leave the party, and they are not giving any f*cks.
Daily routine of a student at home
Are you a school or college student still living at home? Then I have more tips that also are helpful to create a daily routine of a student at home. Read this blog post on the 7 Steps to Building the Ultimate Productive Daily Routine.
More tips for the best daily routine for college students
If you have created the blueprint for your daily routine, the next blog post you must read to create the best daily routine for college students is this one on the 7 Genius Productivity Hacks for Students for Long-Term Success.
This post was all about creating the ultimate daily routine for a student to become super productive and achieve goals.
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