How to Stay Motivated in School

Schedule your study time. If you don’t set yourself up to do well in school, you’ll hate facing it every day. So you must try hard. By creating a regular schedule for after school and the weekends, you’ll bring up your grades, improve your self-confidence, and appreciate school more.

• Set a patterned routine. Successful people often stick to regular routines to help them stay on task and achieve their goals.
• There might be some variation throughout the week — for example, you might have a club or practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not the other days. But every week, you should know what to expect from each day.
• Give yourself a break from time to time. Studies have shown that taking a break to recharge when you feel like you’re going to burn out help improve your productivity.

Maintain a calendar. School won’t seem so overwhelming if you stay on top of all of your obligations. Buy a daily planner to help keep track of the schedule you created in the previous step. Write down all your homework in this calendar, as well as due dates for long-term assignments and projects.

• Remember to write reminders about long-term projects in the days leading up to the due date, so you don’t forget about it until the last second.
• You can also use a calendar app on your cell phone to keep track of your obligations. Most apps can be programmed to remind you of deadlines.

Create a good studying environment. If you’re working in a hectic area, then you might hate the time you spend working. Make sure your study space is set up to help you enjoy your study time as well as you can.

• Keep your desk neat and clean so you don’t get frustrated by how sloppy it is.
• Keep your tools (pencils, highlighters, staplers) neatly organized so you can find them easily.
• Make sure the space is well-lit. Dim lighting can give you a headache, which definitely won’t help you stay motivated.
• Figure out if you work best with silence or with a little background noise. Some people are distracted by noise, while others can’t work without a little music playing in the background.

Start a study group. When you study with friends, it doesn’t feel so painful! But you have to make sure you stay on task instead of joking around and having a good time.

• Study groups should have no more than 3-4 members so they don’t get unruly
• Meet at least once a week on a regular schedule. You can meet at school during a free period, or after school at somebody’s house.
• Volunteer to be the group leader/coordinator. You will determine what classes and projects the group will focus on in a given week so that everyone’s working together and helping each other instead of randomly working on their projects.
• Prepare for each session. Don’t just show up and expect to do work in your study group. Come prepared with insight on the task you’ve been working on all week.
• Remember to give the group short breaks from time to time to relax and recharge.

Break large tasks into smaller ones. Don’t get overwhelmed by a class presentation or a long paper. Remember that you don’t have to finish a project in one sitting.

• List all the different steps you must complete to finish the project.
• Make a schedule that forces you to finish one small piece of the project per day.
• For a paper, you might read and summarize one source on day one; another source on day two, a third source on day three; synthesize their arguments on day four; outline your argument on day five; integrate quotations from your sources into your outline on day six; write your paper on days seven and eight; rest on day nine; and revise on day ten.