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These 10 productivity hacks and tricks go a long way to ensuring you work not just harder but smarter instead. And the best thing? They’re applicable both in the classroom and beyond. While it’s said that being busy actually makes us feel good, that busy feeling actually increase stress levels and leads to worse performance.

Airplane mode

Put your phone on airplane mode and turn off your email notifications on your laptop when you’re studying.

• The constant buzzing of social media and news pulls us out of our concentration, making it harder to be efficient
• Minimize your distractions to maximize your productivity

Take breaks

Take longer breaks to give yourself a true reward for a week of hard work

Stay focused

Switch-tasking is going from one task to another in rapid succession.

Get adequate sleep

While young people may be known to stay up till the wee hours of the morning, getting a good night’s rest goes a long way to ensuring you’re more productive the next day.

• Take measures to ensure that you don’t just clock enough hours of sleep but also have a comfortable sleeping environment to get proper rest.

Find your “golden hour” and stick to it

These times are when your motivation is at its highest

• Use these golden hours to get the most work done
• Make use of your most ideal surroundings to recalibrate your “golden hours,” i.e. the calm hours before your coworkers arrive.

Keep a schedule rather than a to-do list

Assign tasks to do according to the amount of time you have, so you don’t get too overwhelmed and end up burnt out

• Don’t avoid difficult and time-consuming tasks, but instead manage your time better

Use the Pomodoro Technique

Break your work into 25 minute small spurts with small breaks in between

• This pushes you to work faster and more efficiently within the allotted time, and no one can blame you for frequent breaks when you know you’re on track to completing all your tasks.

Learn to say “no”

Helping others is great, but not when you end up causing more stress for yourself

• Say “no” when your groupmate asks you to do more than you are supposed to
• It’s better to do one job well than to do multiple jobs badly

Keep a smart task list

There are a plethora of productivity apps and project trackers out there to help us allocate our time better

• Use them wisely
• Evernote
• Asana
• Prompts on due dates
• Color coded projects
• Check numerous items off your task list

Batch similar tasks

This saves plenty of time prevents mundane work from piling up.

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