How to Build New Study Habits for Success

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There is something about New Year’s that makes the impossible seem attainable.  It’s like hope manifests, and anything you dream of can be achieved, given this brand-new chance.  I love setting New Year’s goals.  I feel like any of my past shortcomings are washed away seemingly overnight, and with this fresh start, I can do anything given the right plan.

This is not totally inaccurate.  The reset of the calendar is the perfect opportunity to set big goals and actually make a plan to achieve them.  This is especially true of students.  With the school year starting in September, you have at least one semester under your belt to understand how essential study habits are to your academic performance.  It takes hard work and careful planning to achieve academic success; you learned that last semester.

January is a new beginning and the perfect opportunity to implement new study habits that will lead you down the road to academic success.  This semester, you’re going to get it right.  This article is the perfect place to start.

If you struggle to create a study plan that works for you, check out my free study planner and activity tracker.  It comes loaded with over 20 study activities, a pomodoro planner, and a confidence tracker to help you have the best semester yet.  Download it here.

Study Habits and Academic Grades

It’s probably not surprising that study habits directly affect your academic grades.  The further you progress in your studies, the more important effective study habits become.  This ranges from your mindset to the activities that you take on during each study session.

Good study habits, coupled with a regular study schedule and routine, will help you stay on top of your workload and avoid cramming.  This means it will be easier for you to keep up with the material and be more confident in your understanding of it.  This, in turn, reflects on how quickly you can complete assignments and how confidently you walk into your exams.

Study habits can be developed and maintained at any point in your academic career, from middle school to master’s programs.  Learning which study habits work best for you can help you quickly get in the groove of any class regardless of its difficulty level.

Study Habits and Strategies

Study habits and strategies cover a vast array of actions.  These routines are going to look different for everyone.  What’s important is that you discover what works for you and what does not, and you create a plan that plays to your personal strengths.  Here are some simple places to start:

Reflect on the Past Year

The best place to begin any journey is by understanding where you came from.  Reflect on your study habits over the last year or semester and audit how you did.  Try to be painfully honest with yourself about your weaknesses and strengths.

This self-reflection is essential for personal growth and academic success going forward.  If you don’t understand what needs to be fixed and what doesn’t, you won’t be able to make meaningful changes.

Past struggles and failures are the foundation of future accomplishments.  You already have all the tools to start creating excellent study habits to help you succeed; all you need is a reliable plan.

Setting SMART Study Goals

Every journey requires a destination.  As far as study habits go, these are your goals.  Smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive.  Using these criteria to set your goals helps to set a clear pathway to success.

Decide what you want to achieve this academic year.  Is it a specific mark in your class or an overall better study strategy?  This target is vital for creating a plan to design your study habits and strategies.

Setting smart goals is simple.  For example, if you want to set a goal to create better overall study habits:

• Specific: I want to improve my study skills for Math 1500

• Measurable: I will spend two hours, three days a week, focused on practice problems.

• Achievable: I will schedule these sessions at the beginning of the week to ensure I have time set aside for them.

• Relevant: Since this is a prerequisite for my major, it’s vital that I get a good mark and build a solid foundation in this knowledge.

• Time-sensitive: I plan to start immediately and continue this until April 15th, which is the end of the semester.

Do you see how each of these steps creates an actionable plan for you to improve your study habits for this class?  This template can be used for any subject or even specific assignments.

Sometimes, setting too many goals can be overwhelming.  It drains your motivation, and working out where you need to focus your energy is difficult.  If you struggle with goal setting, I have a great article that will lead you through the process step by step; you can check it out here.

Time Management Strategies

One thing every student can relate to is the fact that there is never enough time.  Between classes, studying, homework, trying to have a social life, and maybe even a job, there are not enough hours in the day!  This is where time management comes in.

Getting a handle on your time becomes more and more important when you try to implement good study habits and strategies.  Luckily, there are a couple of simple techniques you can use to get a handle on your day.

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a simple time management strategy that lets you alternate between periods of deep focus with frequent breaks.  This helps you be incredibly productive for short spurts, rewarding you with a break between each cycle, ensuring you are not burnt out, getting more done, and staying productive longer.

The technique involves focus intervals of 25 minutes broken up with five-minute breaks in between.  After the last focus session, you get a 20-minute break to reset.  This entire cycle lasts about two hours and can be stacked one after the other to allow for an even longer study session.

To make the pomodoro technique even more effective, you can switch up activities between each focus interval, ensuring your brain is not fatigued by repeating the same task all day.  Learn more about the pomodoro technique, its many uses, and how to apply it in this article.

Time Blocking

Time blocking has you wall off specific chunks of your day and dedicate them to particular tasks.  With this technique, you have to estimate how long a task will take you and then dedicate that time to your schedule.  This helps you visually identify how long your to-do list or study sessions will take you.

Time blocking is incredibly helpful for students who tend to overbook themselves.  When you block off these portions of your day and assign them to specific tasks, finding time that does not exist will be hard.  This is in contrast to a traditional to-do list that goes on endlessly.

I like to use Google Calendar for my time blocking.  It allows me to colour coordinate and repeat tasks that I need to schedule daily, weekly, or monthly.  Then, when I schedule my week, I can move these tasks around to accommodate my other obligations.

Getting the hang of time management can sometimes be tricky.  I have a masterclass dedicated to a time management challenge in the Absolutely Studying Academy.  It walks you through creating and implementing time management strategies that work for you and your life.  It sits alongside the study skills digital course and tons of other premium masterclasses to help you succeed in your academic adventure.

Diversify Study Techniques

Switching up your study activities is vital for a few reasons, some of which might not be immediately obvious.  Firstly, it ensures you are learning the material in various ways.  This makes your understanding better and your ability to recall easier.  When you are able to approach problems from different angles, you find new ways to apply the knowledge to unfamiliar or abstract situations.

Switching up how you study can also help you from disassociating out of boredom.  Let’s face it: your brain hates boring.  If you rotate through different activities regularly, you can help to fend off some of that monotony.  Cycling between active recall, summation, and creative or visual activities will keep your brain engaged, even if the material remains the same.

Finally, exploring new studying methods will help you constantly update your study habits to include activities that are best for you and your specific learning style.  There are a surprising number of ways to study, but you will never be able to optimize your routine unless you explore the possibilities. 

Most people stick to the same three or four study activities.  This is because they are easy and don’t require you to venture out of your safe zone.  Experimenting with different exercises and dropping ones that do not motivate you to get to work can help optimize your study sessions and actually make them enjoyable.

Create a Dedicated Study Space

Having a space strictly for studying helps you get to work more quickly.  Keeping everything you need to be productive and organized in a single location will also ease the transition into focus mode. 

Just like laying in your bed can make you sleepy and unmotivated, having a space specifically for work and focus can immediately set you in the mood to study.  You can also create a routine that helps you transition more easily between your downtime and study time without forcing yourself into a focus session.

Prioritize Self-Care

As helpful as many of these tips are to getting your study routine in order, they are worthless if you are burnt out and overwhelmed.  Taking care of yourself, mind, and body is the foundation of a successful student.  This has been definitively proven time and time again.

Taking frequent breaks during your study sessions, eating well, and getting enough sleep will help you out more than any cram session.  These simple tasks make sure your brain is healthy enough to retain the information you are packing into it.  If your brain can’t hold on to the material, there is no reason for you to even try to take it in in the first place.  Your cognition diminishes when you constantly run on empty, even if you think you thrive in the chaos.

Learning is so much more than being able to recite thousands of facts and bits of data.  It’s about being able to use that knowledge to solve problems and apply it in abstract ways to new ideas.  Before you can do any of that, you have to understand it, and having the highest possible cognitive function will help you do this more easily.

Regardless of when you plan to implement your fresh start, you must begin with a clear goal.  So, really think about it: What does academic success mean to you?  Only then will you be able to create a SMART plan to get you where you want to be.

By being intentional about how you spend your time, switching up your study techniques, and taking time out for self-care, you will be able to design a routine full of study habits that work best for you, allowing you to excel more effectively.

If you need help implementing these new study habits, check out my free study activity tracker.  It has more than 20 study activities to complete and track over the course of your semester.  You can use this workbook to implement your study sessions and time management goals to have your best year yet.  Download your copy today.

I would like to be transparent so that there are no misunderstandings. As an affiliate, I may earn a small commission from any products linked in this post. This is not a sponsored post, and I was not asked to recommend these products. These are products that I genuinely love and want to share with my audience.