Starting college is overwhelming, and managing responsibilities with academics is even scarier. As a student you are required to complete assignment deadlines, apply for societies and internships, self-study, and squeeze some fun in between. While college is the time to live your life to the fullest and make happy core memories with friends, it is equally important to adapt a balanced lifestyle. One of the most productive and fun ways to achieve healthy balance between recreation and work is bullet journaling. So, if you seek to strike that balance, here are a few productive strategies for you.
MAKE AN ELABORATE TO-DO LIST WITH PEN AND PAPER
The journey to a productive lifestyle begins with figuring out what your immediate priorities are. Starting your college life is almost like beginning everything from scratch and in all the frenzy to catch-up with everything happening, you might miss out on some important tasks. Hence, it becomes important to have a tangible piece of paper containing all the necessary items and tasks at hand so that none get left out. The to-do list can look like anything you want, after all, there are no rules. You can make a time table, a daily schedule, a journal diary, a vision board or anything else you like. It sounds too simple, I know, but the solutions to most problems are simple, you just have to act upon them for it to work. So, grab a pen and paper, make simple daily notes with check boxes, and get going ticking them off!
HABIT TRACKER
Ticking off tasks in no time will become a habit, and it will start to come naturally, with little to no effort. Building good habits is another strategy to adapt a productive lifestyle. The habit can be anything you want to achieve: a fitness routine, tidy-up routine, daily affirmations, daily diary entry, a digital detox; literally anything! Building such habits is not just a way to be productive, but a path to self-discovery as well. You can even start to learn new skills or take up monthly or weekly challenges that will expand the horizon of what your mind and body are capable of. I personally think reading few pages a day is one of the best habits one can build. With a habit tracker you can track your daily progress with building habits. This is an exercise to build your endurance, as well as enhance your abilities.
MAKE A REWARD SYSTEM
Just as you can plan you daily activities out, you can construct a reward system, an idea I borrowed from my friends. If you love to plan your life ahead, a reward system is a real treat. A reward system works like this: you plan your work/deadlines ahead monthly, weekly, or daily and when you complete the assigned tasks you get to reward yourself any way you like! It can be anything you want or wanted to do for a long time. But be mindful of not over-indulging into unhealthy habits as rewards. That would beat the motive of building healthy habits, and that’s not what we want.
Planning your tasks with a reward system will balance your routine automatically and will restrict the recreational fun to a decent limit. And guess what, it also helps you restrict possible unnecessary spending! And for my fellow technophiles, there are apps that you can use to gamify your tasks and daily routine that reward points for task completion and take them away upon failure to do so. This way, something as simple as ticking the boxes becomes a thrilling experience.
make it AESTHETIC
What are we creative folks here for, if not the aesthetic of bullet journaling? Adding cute little borders, color coding your tasks and different categories and writing headings with beautiful calligraphic fonts makes completing the tasks real fun. Even if you don’t like or want to draw everything from scratch, you can always download printables from the internet or make your journal online altogether. That’s the amazing thing about technology, you can make the things easier for yourself whenever you want. It doesn’t even have to look perfectly pretty, just have to be whatever feels right for you. Becoming too much of a perfectionist about the design beats the idea of being productive in the first place and can lead to unnecessary waste of time.
Following healthy strategies is very important and building them into habits is the best thing you could do as early as in college. There might be some failures and slight backslides on the way, but that is no reason to give up, after all we are humans, and humans make mistakes. Don’t be too harsh on yourself. So let your creative juices flow, and start working on your plans. A pen and a diary is all you require! You don’t have to make complicated master-plans, keep in mind Michael Scott’s advice to Dwight, “Keep it simple, stupid.”