When preparing to study for exams, whether they are midterms or finals, it can feel extremely daunting as the days and weeks before test day goes by. Students are faced with a variety of different pressures, either from themselves as they aim for their chosen college or from peers and family members who expect great results. 

The reality is that getting the best possible results in your finals isn’t just about working hard and attending classes but also about your approach to studying. Without structure, studying sessions can turn into hours spent stressed and frustrated at a lack of progress or a feeling of being unprepared and burnt out.

Furthermore, every subject is different – methods that are effective for studying math may not be effective for nursing, and so forth.

That’s why you should slow down, take a breath, and create a routine – this way, you can create a set of parameters for studying success, taking into account your own personal needs and the subject requirements to ensure the studying process is both streamlined and effective. 

Below, you can read on to find out more about what makes the perfect studying routine. From breaking down tasks into manageable chunks to ensuring that you get your eight hours of sleep, it’s all equally valuable to your future success.

Make studying work for you

When creating the perfect studying routine, it’s important to remember that it needs to be perfect for you. This requires some self-reflection on what has brought you success and what has caused you trouble in the past – for example, have you struggled with long periods of uninterrupted studying? Have you had more success studying in the morning or the evening? Answering these questions will help you be more productive. 

This way, you can avoid trying to force traditionally accepted methods to work for you if they never have before and make productivity happen in a way that's natural for you.

While the specifics are for you to decide, there is a range of ways in which you can increase your chances of studying successfully, both through holistic and academic approaches.

Time management

When an exam is approaching, it can often feel like there isn’t enough time – regardless of how much preparation is done. 

That’s why implementing time management strategies from the start is important – it will allow you to make the most out of every study session and ensure that you are maintaining as balanced a lifestyle as possible.  

Ensuring your time is managed clearly and efficiently will reduce the need for worrying about which subject to study, how long you should do it for, and what time of day you should do it. 

This should help you to switch off in the meantime, which will contribute towards increasing your focus during the time allocated for study.

Setting goals 

Setting goals for yourself as you implement your study routine is an effective and proven way of increasing focus and self-esteem. In what can feel like a mountain of a process, from the first day of study to the final exam, setting goals will allow you to stay motivated while rewarding yourself for your hard work.

This, alongside efficiently dividing your time into your studying’s constituent parts, will give you a strong sense of direction when engaging in your studies. Feeling lost on which subject to tackle first can contribute to feeling overwhelmed, especially when there is a lot of academic information to process. 

By taking your overall objective and establishing easily achievable daily tasks and rewarding yourself for completing those tasks, you can ensure that every day feels valuable and meaningful towards your studies - while allowing yourself time to enjoy the things you love.

Use familiar methods

While it’s important to reflect on the study routines that have not worked for you in the past, it’s equally crucial to understand what does work for you and how these methods can be optimized and utilized. 

Even if you’ve never taken a systematic approach to studying before or paid much attention to how you learn most effectively, if you can identify ways of processing information that has given you the best results in previous exams, that’s a great starting point.

While neat, ordered lists may provide the clarity required to process lots of information. For others with a more creative mindset, it may be more stimulating to create a poster, using aspects of color to create an association between that particular color and relevant information. 

Self-testing, recalling answers, and other study techniques are proven to stimulate deeper connections in the brain than simply believing that you know the answer and moving on. 

Downtime

To make sure that you are at your most productive during study time, taking steps to ensure that you have adequate downtime is vital in staying fresh, focused, and maintaining consistent momentum up until the exam date. 

By waiting until too close to the exam date, you risk beginning your studies at a point when cramming is necessary to revise all of the content required to know for the test.

It’s a common misconception that waiting until closer to the exam to revise means the information is more accessible on the day of the test. Cramming your studies into a short period of time is likely to cause stress and will not produce an environment suited to processing information.

Needing to cram your studies will affect your ability to maintain a balance between study time and downtime, which could lead to increased tiredness, disorganization, and less ability to recall information.

By building downtime into your study routine, you can ensure that you are still partaking in positive activities for your wellbeing and avoid building resentment against having to study during certain hours of the day.

Staying healthy 

Just as maintaining a balance between study time and downtime is important, ensuring that you stay healthy is an effective and widely beneficial way of giving yourself the best chance of success in your exams.

During exam season, the average day-to-day routine can quickly fall away as a large number of hours suddenly need reallocating to study time. Combined with the stress this brings, it can mean that healthy activities such as playing sport after class and cooking a fresh meal in the evening are replaced with easier, less time-consuming alternatives such as video games and takeout. 

It can feel especially rewarding to tuck into your favorite takeout after completing a long study session or playing a few rounds of your video game of choice at the end of the day. It’s important to ensure that stress relief and rewarding yourself don’t hinder your ability to study effectively.

Incorporating the need to stay healthy into your studying routine means that when stress levels are higher, and pressure levels are increasing, there are still frameworks in place that ensure you are still meeting both your physical and psychological needs. 

Studies have shown that participating in regular physical activity is beneficial to cognitive activities such as recalling information and learning new things. It also actively reduces stress and releases endorphins that help improve mood and energy levels – all of which are benefits of exercising that will enhance your performance on exam day.

Sleep discipline 

Ensuring that you get as much high-quality, restful sleep as possible is always important – but during exam season, it can often be sacrificed to make way for more time-critical activities such as revising information.

This is yet another example of why studying routines are so important. There are only so many hours in the day, and with so many varying responsibilities, getting enough sleep is one of the first personal boundaries that can slip to accommodate the extra workload.

Once you are behind on sleep, it can begin to have significant knock-on effects and quickly have a negative impact on how successfully you are able to carry out your studies, as studying becomes less efficient and time is required for catching up on the hours of sleep lost. 

Much like staying on top of your physical fitness, getting enough sleep will ensure that your brain is in the best shape possible for tackling large amounts of information and help to keep energy and mood levels in a beneficial state.

How to best study for your subject 

Much of the advice discussed so far focuses on enabling yourself to carry out your studies to the best of your ability in terms of health, organization, and keeping yourself motivated. It is beneficial advice when applying yourself to any application, whether studying for an exam or preparing for another important life event.

Of course, when it comes to studying for your subject, in particular, you have the ability to specifically target methods of study that work best for your chosen subject. 

Stereotypical images of students studying for their exams conjure up ideas of desks stacked with mountains of academic reading material and endless numbers of flashcards with entire subjects condensed onto a small piece of paper.

While there is substance to these stereotypes when considering many information-heavy academic subjects such as English or History, in the modern-day, there is a vast array of courses available that take many shapes and sizes. 

Vocational courses that focus on providing students with hands-on experience in both the classroom and in their future industry of choice provide an alternative route to a degree that better prepares them for heading straight into work upon graduation. 

Below discusses some of the widely used study methods for both academic and vocational courses and how the nature of your course will affect the methods that will fit best into your study routine.

The nature of vocational study

Whether you are enrolled in a fully vocational course or your course involves hands-on, ‘on-the-job’ training, the need to organize resources such as people, spaces, or equipment can prove a critical aspect of ensuring your vocational study plan succeeds. 

For Journalism students, while there is much traditional revision to be done in learning the ins and outs of Media Law, it is a profession that involves handling situations that you may not be able to fully control. This includes traveling to meet people face-to-face for interviews and booking equipment such as cameras, microphones, and radio studios – all of which, with a lack of organization and preparation, can be difficult to secure reliably. 

This is why it is critical to build time into your study routine that accounts for the sourcing, booking, and collecting of equipment - as failing to do so could impact whether you can attend a breaking news story or film a sports game part of your assignment. 

This example applies to other vocational courses such as Nursing – for those participating in an ABSN degree (Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing), they will need to secure a placement to attend and complete around their studies to achieve the qualification. If a placement isn’t secured promptly enough, it could impact their ability to obtain a license at the end of their degree.

With this extra dimension to your studies, using tools to organize your time effectively is vital – so that you can practice, revise, and complete all work in an efficient manner.

The nature of academic study  

In a heavily online world, studying for academic subjects no longer requires trips to the library where a student can spend hours looking for the ideal study material – using computers and phones, information is readily at your fingertips. 

Compared with vocational study, this frees up time to spend actively revising, rather than traveling, organizing, or researching – but it can also mean long hours inside, where the need to socialize and breathe fresh air can be neglected to a student’s detriment.

This means that compared to vocational study, where organizing your time in advance is key to ensuring you have everything you need, academic study it’s more a case of managing your workload, your own expectations on what constitutes success, and ensuring that your personal health and human needs don’t become neglected as a result of overworking or high levels of pressure.

However, the basic principles of all studies are the same – stay organized, stay prepared, and most importantly, stay healthy.