How to Create a Study Schedule for Girls New to College ...

1. Consider Your Extra-curricular Activities

The first thing you should do if you want to make a study timetable or schedule is to simply consider all of your extra-curricular activities. This could be anything from clubs, teams, sports or late night classes that you attend during the week. Make sure you have all of these activities in your head as you follow the next step in making your specialised study timetable!

2. Create a Timetable in Grid Form

Now it's time to start making your timetable! I recommend that you use a handy programme like Excel which comes with grid all ready for you to use, or alternatively, there's heaps of ready-made templates on Google images if you google 'study timetable' and all you have to do is print this off and fill it in! Couldn't be easier, right?

It's completely up to you however you choose to make it, but bear in mind that making it on the computer means you can make copies (which takes a lot longer if you're making your timetable by hand.

On the timetable, write each day of the week (Monday - Sunday) along the top row and each hour of the day in the left hand column. If you don't know what time to start with, simply start from when you wake up in the morning and finish with the time you usually go to sleep or the time you generally wouldn't do anything past due to it being too late.

3. Add in Your Weekly Activities

Now that you have all those activities that keep you super busy during the week in your head, simply write them into the correct slots on the timetable!

So for example if you have netball practise at 3.30pm each day for an hour on Mondays, you will find Monday's column and write 'Netball' into the 3.30pm - 4.40pm slot. Do this for all of your activities until you've added them all into the timetable.

4. Colour Code Your Weekly Activities

Colour coding your timetable is also a great idea and can be a quicker alternative to the one above, especially if you're someone who does a lot of activities during the week and can't really be bothered to write them all in!

To colour code your timetable, all you have to do is grab a few highlighters and allocate each colour to each activity that you have filled in on your timetable. So for example, if you assign the colour blue to netball practise and green to dance practise, all of your netball practises throughout the week will be highlighted in blue for the time slots that you have it in, and likewise for dance practise which would be in green.

Don't forget to write a 'colour key' down the bottom, maybe in a corner of the page, to remind yourself of what each colour represents. So for example your colour key might look like 'netball = blue, dance = green, swimming = yellow' and so on. After a while, you won't need to look at the colour key anymore as you will begin to associate the colours with the activities off the top of your head!

5. Use the Empty Slots for Study Sessions

Now that you have all of your activities accounted for in your timetable, you should be able to see the free times available throughout your week at a single glance. This makes it super easy to know when your study sessions will fit in, so the next step is to fill in half to most of these free spaces with 'study'.

That being said, don't feel like you have to fill up every single space on your timetable as of course you will need plenty of rest in between activities plus time to relax and have fun as you are in college now, after all! We can't be expected to study all of the time, can we?!

Also, be mindful of where you're placing your study sessions. You might want to be careful that you don't write it in for awkward times like super early in the morning or really late at night when your concentration levels might be lower than usual due to your natural body clock.

6. Make Extra Copies of Your Timetable

Yay! You've now successfully created your study timetable! If you made it on the computer via Excel or another programme, I highly recommend that you print off multiple copies of your timetable to keep in different places, but also just to be on the safe side in case you lose the first.

Good places to keep each copy of your timetable would be sticking it up on your bedroom wall at home, your locker at school and maybe a third in your folder that you might carry round a lot. It's handy to have a copy on you whenever you are so that you can easily refer to it, plus no matter where you are you'll know exactly what you're doing for the entire week and when you need to study, of course!

7. Follow Your Study Schedule!

The most important part of making your study timetable is that you actually follow it, of course! Make good use out of it and don't forget that it's there to help you in any way possible, from doing better in your tests to just being a subtle reminder that you need to study for an hour or so that day.

On that note, I wish you heaps of good luck and I hope your study timetable is a big help to you when all those stressful tests and exams come around!