How to Tackle Back to School: Study Techniques and Routines

Going back to class after several weeks off means rebuilding your schedule, concentration and study habits. The best way to do that is not to start by studying for hours at a time, but to create a routine you can realistically maintain throughout the academic year.

September is also a good opportunity to look at what did not work last year. Maybe too much studying was left until the last minute, entire afternoons were spent highlighting notes or a phone interrupted every few minutes. Changing those habits can make a bigger difference than simply adding more hours to your timetable.

Effective study techniques combine planning, active learning and breaks. The goal is not to fill every afternoon with tasks, but to make sure each study session has a clear purpose and to check afterwards whether the material has actually been learned.

How to tackle back to school and regain your study routine

Trying to return to full academic speed on the first Monday after the holidays can quickly become frustrating. Study habits are easier to rebuild gradually.

During the first week, it may be enough to establish regular times for waking up, eating, studying and resting. Once classes, readings and assignments begin, study time can increase little by little.

Four adjustments are particularly useful at the beginning:

• Get back to a regular sleep schedule, avoiding major differences between weekday and weekend bedtimes.
• Set a specific time for studying, even if the first sessions are short.
• Plan the week before it starts, including classes, deadlines and important tasks.
• Leave room for leisure and rest. A timetable that is impossible to follow will not stay useful for long.

Sleep deserves more attention than it often gets in conversations about studying. Research involving university students found a positive association between regular sleep patterns and academic performance. The researchers also observed that this relationship was independent of average sleep duration, although the study design does not establish causation (Phillips et al., 2017).

So before looking for complicated productivity systems, it is worth getting the basics right. Going to bed and waking up at similar times, preparing materials in advance and knowing what needs to be done the following day can make it much easier to get started.

The routine should also reflect the stage of education. Someone beginning one of the available bachelor's degrees may need more structure to manage a week with several different subjects. At postgraduate level, independent study usually becomes more important. When comparing master's degrees, it is also worth looking at the study format, workload and level of weekly commitment each programme requires.

Foolproof study techniques to boost your productivity

There is no single foolproof method that works for every student and every subject. There are, however, study methods with stronger evidence behind them than simply rereading the same chapter or highlighting it again and again.

A review of ten common learning techniques published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest gave its highest utility ratings to two strategies: practice testing and distributed practice. By contrast, popular approaches such as rereading and highlighting received lower ratings because their benefits were less consistent across different learning situations (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

These findings can be turned into some very practical methods for studying:

• Active recall. Close the notes and try to retrieve the main ideas from memory.
• Spaced study. Return to the same material over several days rather than concentrating everything into one long session.
• Self-testing. Use questions, exercises or mock exams to identify what is actually understood.
• Explain it in your own words. Try to teach the concept to someone else without repeating the textbook.
• Interleave different types of problems when the subject allows it, rather than spending hours solving almost identical exercises.

Active recall is especially useful. In an experiment published in Science, repeated retrieval practice after learning material produced substantial benefits for long-term retention, while repeatedly restudying material that had already been learned did not provide the same improvement in delayed recall (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008).

For anyone wondering how to study better for exams, a study session can change significantly by asking a few questions:

• What can I explain right now without looking at my notes?
• Which concepts am I still mixing up?
• Could I answer an exam question on this topic without help?
• What should I review again in two or three days?

That takes more effort than rereading. That extra effort is precisely what makes it a better test of whether the material has actually been learned.

Some study hacks can make it easier to get started, but it is worth distinguishing between a quick productivity tip and a learning method that helps knowledge last. Even when the goal is fast learning or how to learn a new skill in less than 24 hours, an initial introduction cannot replace the practice needed to consolidate a new skill.

Strategies to focus and avoid distractions in September

Even the best timetable loses much of its value if every study session is constantly interrupted. Concentration is not just a question of willpower. The environment matters too.

Smartphones are a good example. Two experiments published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that the mere presence of a person's own smartphone could reduce available cognitive capacity, even when participants were not using the device. In one experiment, those who left their phones in another room performed better on cognitive-capacity tasks than those who kept them on the desk (Ward et al., 2017).

That turns one very simple recommendation into one of the easiest study tips to try: if the phone is not needed for the task, move it off the desk and, ideally, out of the room.

A few other small changes can also help:

• Close tabs and applications that are unrelated to the task.
• Switch off notifications during the study block.
• Decide what you want to finish before you start.
• Prepare notes, water and other materials in advance to reduce interruptions.
• Group messages, emails and minor admin tasks together and deal with them later.

Working in blocks can also help create boundaries. There is no need to treat techniques such as Pomodoro as a rigid rule about exact minutes. The useful part is working on one task for a defined period and knowing when the next break will come.

If distraction is the main difficulty, how to concentrate when studying: effective strategies and tips can provide further ideas for reducing interruptions and rebuilding sustained attention.

Thinking routines: Learn to organize your mind

Sometimes the problem is not a lack of time, but having so many open tasks that it becomes difficult to decide where to begin.

Thinking routines can help organise a study session before, during and after the work itself. They do not require a special app or system. A few specific questions are enough.

Before starting:

• What do I want to have finished when I leave the desk?
• What do I already know about this topic?
• Which part do I find most difficult?
• How will I check whether I have understood it?

At the end:

• What could I now explain without help?
• Where did I hesitate?
• What is the first thing I should do when I return to this subject?

That final question may seem minor, but it prevents every session from beginning with several minutes spent trying to remember where the previous one ended.

Broad goals also become more useful when they are turned into specific actions. “Study economics” does not explain what needs to happen. “Complete exercises 1 to 8 and correct the mistakes” has a clear beginning and end.

The same principle applies to academic assignments. “Work on the project” can become “find three sources”, “write 500 words” or “edit the conclusion”. The more specific the task, the less energy is wasted deciding what to do.

Planning, asking for help, working with others and dealing with frustration also develop abilities that go beyond passing an exam. These are part of soft skills vs. hard skills: which matter more in today's job market, and many of them begin developing long before a student's first full-time job.

Flexibility and virtual campus: Study at your own pace this academic year

Flexibility is particularly valuable when studying has to fit around work, placements or other responsibilities. But studying at your own pace does not mean studying only when there happens to be some free time.

In online or hybrid education, a virtual campus makes it possible to access materials, classes, activities and deadlines from different locations. That freedom also requires students to take greater responsibility for organising their own learning.

A systematic review of self-regulated learning in online higher education found that time management, metacognition, effort regulation and critical thinking were positively associated with academic outcomes across the studies analysed (Broadbent & Poon, 2015).

A simple routine can make that flexibility easier to manage:

• Check the virtual campus at the beginning of each week, rather than waiting for a notification.
• Transfer important deadlines to a personal calendar.
• Set aside specific blocks for classes, independent study and assignments.
• Keep an extra block free as a buffer for unexpected changes.
• Review what has been completed each week and what is beginning to build up.

Technology is also widening the range of tools available to students. Collaborative platforms, planning apps, video-conferencing systems and AI applications all form part of ICT in education: the tools revolutionizing classrooms and can make content easier to access and study easier to organise.

But there is one principle technology cannot change. No tool can replace the moment when a student has to remember, connect, solve or explain something independently.

Going back to class does not mean being back at full speed from day one. Regular sleep, specific tasks, active study and fewer distractions can make a bigger difference than simply spending more hours with your notes open. Every student will need to adapt these ideas to their own timetable and way of learning, but the principle is the same: if we build a realistic routine at the start of the academic year, it will be much easier to maintain when the workload becomes heavier.