It’s important to have life order and routine incorporated into your life if you want less stress and more happiness. Here is my list of three items to create a better start of fixing bad habits you might possibly have.
#1: PLANNER OR CALENDAR
Calendars are so important in college. Can you imagine memorizing every single thing you need to do? No thank you. There are many different apps and ways you can do a calendar. There’s a physical planner that you carry everywhere or a white board in your room or even an app on your phone. The best thing of these multiple options is you can also use multiple at the same time.
I’ve tried to incorporate the physical book planner into my life but it didn’t work past high school because throughout my college career my daily tools are my iPad and Apple Pencil. Though I enjoyed marking each thing in my day in a different gel pen color I found the second-best thing to a colorful planner. TIMETREE! It’s an app I found in the Apple App Store that has so many different tools within to make my everyday life easier. You can switch and label the different colors available for your calendar, create reminder alerts for a time before each task, create memos for yourself, and the best function: sharing your calendar with another person!
Another option you have if you prefer writing it out vs. typing it out is a white board placed somewhere you pass each day. Now mine is on top of my desk in my dorm room because there is nowhere else, I will rather be then in my bedroom. Having a white board is beneficial as it lets you get a broader day to day plan while being still satisfying to the eye with all the different dry erase marker colors. White boards are also beneficial as others are able to see them and know what you’re up to throughout your day.
#2: SLEEP ROUTINE
In September 2021, Apple introduced a new feature to IOS 15 called Focus. I’m sure you can search up more information on the focus feature if wanted but I will only be speaking on one. The sleep focus: a feature that allows you to track your sleep health. Entering my freshman year, I quickly found out that staying out late and not giving myself discipline like in high school was not the way to succeed in college.
The sleep focus has three main functions: Allowed, Schedule, and Wind down. Allowed is short for allowed notifications. Think of it as a do not disturb for certain apps and people. When sleeping you don’t want your phone blowing up to a 30-person group chat you have with your sorority or sports team instead you want them to be on do not disturb through certain hours throughout your night. Do you not want to put every single person on do not disturb? You can allow calls and messages to come in from your parents, best friend and significant other. You’re allowed to have as many people enter your notifications as necessary. There is another part to this allowed option: apps. This is for people that want their regular notifications to enter from a specific app on your phone.
Schedule function is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to schedule your bed time and wake up time. This function allows you to see how many hours you’re getting of sleep and allows you to set a bed time and wake up time for certain days in the week. If you’re worried it won’t let you create different schedules for each day.. don’t worry you can be as specific as you want for each day of the week.
#3: PLAY DRESS UP
This is by far my favorite. This one also works really good for those who like to stay in bed until the last minute or night showerers. It is also a very simple task you can do in 5 minutes. This task is to plan your clothes out the night before. Now this is probably the most unnecessary thing you can do that’s on this list but it really does work if you incorporate it into your daily life.
I can think of multiple times in which this came in handy for me and I’m sure you can think of times in which you wish you didn’t have to stress about picking an outfit to wear for the entire day of tasks and errands. Though this might seem unnecessary it is also the most beneficial and easiest thing to pull into your good habits.