With the start of the school year right around the corner, it's finally time to bust out your old study practices. But with new content every semester and a three-month break from academics over the summer, it can be tricky to know where to begin. As huge fans of productivity and organization, we've collected a few tips to help you retain more information and stay on top of things in the classroom.
Always Title Your Notes
This makes it easy to find the unit or information you’re looking for at a glance. When you're flipping through your notebook or swiping through the notes you've saved to your phone, important topics can get lost in a sea of text. By titling your notes, you'll always know where to find specific vocab and ideas. You can also date your notes just in case a professor gives you a specific time frame of material on which you’ll be tested. When you write with Jotters, you can easily label your notes at the top of each reusable page, snap a picture to save them for later, and keep them organized in your phone for better studying.
Color-Code
When going back over your notes, use a highlighter to identify important points. If your notes are the reusable kind and saved to your phone, you can highlight them in the Notes app! Choose different colors: blue for main points, green for statistics, pink for dates, etc. This will help you study more efficiently and remember important topics!
Rewrite
Rewriting your notes can help you remember more information. You don’t need to go through and rewrite every single page or slide, but you can rewrite the notes that you highlighted onto different colors of Reusable Sticky Notes. Stick these to your mirror, your laptop screen, the fridge, or wherever they'll be most useful for you when you're studying. When you feel like you've mastered the information on one of your Stickies, just wipe it with a damp cloth, and reuse it for new material that you want to memorize.
Reflect. Then Reflect Some More.
It’s important to be consistently reviewing your notes. Don’t just save this for the day before your final! Try setting aside 10 minutes after each class to go over what you just learned. If you don’t have time every day, try aiming for 30 minutes each week. You can keep track of your studying time with a Reusable Weekly Planner or a Reusable To-Do List!
Good study habits will make life so much easier when finals season rolls around! Get on top of it now, and crush your classes down the road.
Smaller than an average whiteboard with all of the punch of a notebook, these throwbacks can be the key to keeping it all together. With a little creativity, notecards can be an essential item in your organizational tool kit!
Why are bad habits so much easier to keep around than good ones? Our brains like to feel comfortable and safe - and bad habits can feel like a cozy (but bad for us!) blanket. Whether consciously acted on or not, we love the dopamine rush of a fulfilled bad habit craving. When we try to change our brains, they steer us back to what we know - the habits we want to break.
