Thinking yet about how you are going to become a new improved version of yourself next year? Improvement doesn’t mean big changes, rather more about the small changes in your everyday life which will eventually give a compounding effect over time. So here are some suggestions.
#1 Read through before bed
Does it feel like you never remember how to do a specific type of exercise?Then look through how you did the exercise right before you go to bed. This is way more powerful than you think. Everything we don’t forget so easily has to go through our subconscious mind first. When you read through your notes and think about the subject right before bed, is this the easiest pray for your subconscious mind to store in our brain's knowledge bank when you are asleep. Next day, you encounter the exercise again and you will see that it was way easier than yesterday. You also confirm to your subconscious brain that this information was exactly the crucial information from the day before to store, which further strengthens your memory
#2 Have a side hustle
Keep building your experience with the guitar, consider exploring other hobbies and skills that interest you. You have chosen a study which is hopefully in line with your interests. But, to be honest, you have just come 25% into your life yet so I’m doubting you have fully understand what you want to make out of your life yet. University is partly about the privilege to deepen your knowledge in a field, but it’s also when you have got the time to diversify your skills, so new unforeseen opportunities open up.
Look at university as a playing-ground where you can try out what kind of job or purpose you want in your life. Always dreamt of being an influencal person in Amnesty for example? Maybe start your own non-profit organisation. You have plenty of young fantastic co-students and university to help you achieve your dream!
#3 Try to live your life through the calendar
Ever felt like you don’t have time for everything? And maybe you are worried that at some point you will regret not doing the things you said you were gonna do?
Setting up a calendar is a great start. First, set up a calendar of your ideal week and secondly, how a typical week looks nowadays. These two calendars are your starting point and your end goal. From here you can gradually be more intentional with your time and timeblock in the activities you have always wanted to do, while you also know that the studying, exercising and sleeping are on point. Idling in life is something everyone “wastes” a lot of time on. A typical example is that you feel like you need up to 3 hours every night before bed for “calm down time” (watching insta reals and cooking those round small pizza kinda slices.). By planning ahead and having a clear plan of what today's adventure is, will you be much more likely to finish what you want to do. Then you also have more likely time for the “calm down time” in the evening. “The moment you live through your calendar, is the moment you are free to do whatever you want”.
#4 Use gray-scale on your phone
Everyone of us is guilty of taking up our phone while we study just for a minute to see some messages or scroll a bit on social media. But with grayscale are you effectively reducing the urge to do this. The phone is a dopamine machine, full of colours and fast satisfaction. Grayscale reduces the dopamine from the colourful screen by easily letting you switch to a screen just in shades of grey, thus less attractive to look at while studying. Under is a guide on how to use grayscale.
Open Settings -> Open General -> Choose Accessibility -> Choose Display Accommodations -> Select Color Filters -> Toggle Color Filters On -> Select Grayscale.
Conclusion
I know most of us reading this article above will probably not implement anything of what’s written. These tips would probably have been implemented if we lived in the ideal world of some really boring person. Instead, we live in a fantastic world where you, as well as me, love to lay in bed watching instagram reals and eating pizza for 36 hours straight with a short pause of clubbing and puking in the river. And that’s how student life should be. So maybe the real tip is to just don't care at all.