One of the most significant aspects of achieving your goals is consistency and this applies to Year 11, as well as year 12.
Whether you are trying to achieve the ATAR of your dreams, or would like to simply keep up a work life balance, the following will provide you with the importance of routine and some tips on how to develop a good routine.
1.Schedule a balance of activities
Developing a routine is pivotal in ensuring you sustain a balance of activities throughout your senior years.
It is very easy to get caught up in the idea that year 11 and 12 is a lot of hard work and requires studying hours on end to achieve your ideal results. However, this is far from the truth. It is vital that studying doesn’t significantly deplete the amount of time you spend on recreational and personal activities as well as your sleep. This isn’t to say you focus more on those things than study. But it is important to create a routine so that you can plan your day well enough to be able to do all those things, whilst completing the required amount of school work and study.
The importance of this is rooted in the fact that many students get burnt out very early on due to overlooking the importance of keeping up activities besides study. Hence, is the importance of a routine as it enables you to allocate your time effectively. It ultimately enables you to recognise that you in fact have a significant amount of time available to complete tasks, even though during year 11 and 12 you may constantly think you don’t have enough time to do everything!
2. Helps tackle procrastination
Notably, a trap many fall into is procrastinating due to the immense amount of time available. However, by allocating 5-8pm for study everyday, for example, you are giving yourself a limit on the amount of time you can spend on the tasks you are required to complete for the day.
However, the amount of time you allocate should be reasonable. Not too little that you won’t be able to get everything done. But also not too much time that enables you to delay your start time and procrastinate the tasks you should complete.
I personally recommend splitting up your time into segments throughout the day and allocating it to specific subjects. For me, I liked to start off with my content heavy subjects which required me to test my memory or learn an immense quantity of content, such as Legal Studies and Modern History. After these, I studied my maths subjects at the end of the day as I felt like that required less of an effort for me personally.
As an idea of a routine, here is what a day leading up to HSC exams looked like for me (while I was on holidays and didn’t have a shift):
7:30: Wake up and get ready
7:45 - 9:15 : go for a walk
9:30 - 10:30 : have breakfast and spend time with my family
10:45 - 12:30: study for content heavy subject
12:30 - 1:15 : food break and watch something/spend time with family
1:30 - 4:00 : Study another content heavy subject
4:15 - 5:30 : evening walk or other recreational activity
6:00 -7:30 : dinner and family time
8:00 - 10:00 : maths study
Such a routine was greatly beneficial as it provided my day with structure and ensured that I had breaks and was keeping a balance. The allocation of study times also encouraged me to spend small segments of my day focused on what I was studying and I found myself procrastinating much less whilst completing everything I wanted to during the day.
3. SLEEP!!
Sleep is one of the most overlooked things that students can do to help them excel in their studies. Without a good sleep routine, getting at least 7-9 hours, you will find yourself not studying as effectively as you could.
Not only will you be too tired to focus, but a task that you may be able to finish in an hour may take you 2 or 3 instead. This leads to a lack of efficiency in time use and the extra time spent on studying could be spent on recreational activities that would in return help you keep a balance and not get burnt out from excessive amounts of time spent on studying.
Moreover, the lack of focus will mean that you may have to go over the content, or questions completed, again! The lack of focus will make it harder for you to recall information and remember how you answered questions. Therefore, it makes it a very ineffective use of time and demonstrates that it would have been better off to sleep for a few extra hours and cut down the amount of time allocated to studying.
4. Finally…
If there is one thing you are to attain from this, it is the importance of organising your time well enough so that you can maintain a sufficient sleep schedule, set time aside to socialise and continue enjoying your hobbies, enabling you to effectively harness high-energy times for doing school work and study.
Written by KIS Academics Tutor Sandrine Maximous, for HSC Legal Studies, maths and more! Sandrie is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies and Information Technology (majoring in Data Science) at MQU. You can view Sandrine's profile here.
