Getting back into the full swing of school after a break is hard. How do you keep yourself from falling into bad behavior? Follow these tips to cultivate and maintain a healthy school and life balance during busier times.

Learn to Plan

Find a planner that fits your organization needs and make it a habit to check and edit the planner on a daily basis.

Planners are great tools for tracking assignments and deadlines but they don’t work unless you view the planner daily. You might find that looking at your assignments as a whole helps better than glancing at individual assignments.

Plan out time to work on bigger projects each week leading up to the due date. Place assignments under each day and write daily to-do lists to accomplish tasks.

You have a multitude of planning methods at your fingertips, such as Google Calendar, apps, traditional pen and paper. Find out what works for you and get to it.

Set SMART Goals

Doing this monthly, weekly, daily, or yearly is a great way to keep yourself on target and to hold yourself accountable.

Peter Drucker, a leader in business management education, says that goal setting is necessary and vital to an organization’s success. Why not set goals for your own personal success?

Document your goals so you can revisit, adjust, and remind yourself of your purpose. If your goal is to create a website by the end of the year, each month you would research creating websites, and maybe each week you would create content to publish.

Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T., specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive.

Organization

This is the most important part of maintaining balance!

There is no right, or wrong way to organize but discovering a system that works for you is best.

Over the course of a week, take notes on how you naturally organize things in your life. Pay close attention to patterns of behavior that add to clutter, like leaving dishes in the sink to clean “later,” not writing down important deadlines, or waiting until the last clean shirt to do laundry.

Also, pay attention to areas of your life that are already well maintained. Maybe you have an organized desktop or a clean car. Whatever area you excel in, apply this framework to other areas in your life.

If you’re good at something, such as budgeting, you might notice you constantly remind yourself not to spend money daily. By applying this mindset to other areas like doing homework, you would end up remind yourself every day to do you homework.

When the week is complete, look over your list and adjust problem areas and implement behavior that is successful to different areas of your life. Organization does not happen overnight. It’s a habit you have to work on every day.