This is How I’m Resetting my Life for the School Year

It’s THAT time of year again. The time of year that’s both deeply loved and passionately hated by students everywhere.

You guessed it: back–to-school.

Since the school year is quickly approaching, I wanted to get myself back on track. So I decided to do a little “life reset”, where I basically went through the disorganized mess that has been my life ever since quarantine ruined all of my put-together-ness.

This “life reset” has been underway for the past week as I scramble to get myself together before school starts, and the following list is a kind of amalgamation of things I have already done, things I am going to do soon, and habits I want to form.

Without further ado, let’s get into the list of what I’m doing to reset my life for the school year!

1. Buy a new planner and keep track of commitments–

My planner came about a month ago, but I kept forgetting to use it! This week, I finally got around to writing down all of my meetings and plans. I am trying to make it a daily habit to check my planner and thus quell my procrastination habits.

2. Start using Duolingo again/listen to French podcasts

I have French in first semester. The problem? I don’t know French anymore. Je ne sais pas comment parler français maintenant. Aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît. C’est bon grammaire ou pas? Parce que je ne sais pas.  

I found a bunch of French podcasts- including the Duolingo podcast, which I didn’t know existed- and I’m going to try to listen to them once a day.

3. Clean my desk/room–

I always feel better when my desk isn’t sloppy, and it was honestly transformative to have a clean desk after a few months of compounding clutter.

I also am going to set up my online school desk location soon. (I wanted to make my routine as normal as possible, so I am going to have an online school room set up that’s across the house from my room, and I’m going to take my backpack up there every day and pretend it’s school.)

4. ACTUALLY pre-schedule blog posts

This entire week, I have been prewriting September posts so I don’t die when school starts.

I think I was pretty successful in this respect because I have a few posts pre-written, and I actually, for the first time ever, have some kind of a plan for when I will post each one.

I’m not sure if I will be able to keep up with a biweekly posting schedule; in fact it’s very likely that I will need to switch to Saturdays only at some point, but I promise I will try to keep the posts coming as often as possible!

5. Delete social media off my phone

This week, it began to dawn on me how severely overcommitted I am this year. How can I fix this? I thought while panic slowly set in. Then I had an epiphany. Aha! Why not delete the apps I waste 5 hours on every day!

The only “social media” apps I’m keeping for now are WordPress and Snapchat because 1) I need WordPress and 2) I literally never use Snapchat except for my private story, so it doesn’t exactly suck up irredeemable amounts of my time.

6. Tape my study schedule to the top of my desk

I wrote this one back before my August SAT was canceled, but it can still apply to the upcoming year.

EDIT: I have now rescheduled my SAT to October. So now I can do this one right now. Wonderful! I am so exhilarated.

I have never been one to write study schedules (I only ever study for tests the night before the test, unless it’s a midterm, in which case I start 2-5 days before, or an AP exam, in which case I start 3-4 weeks before) but since it’s my junior year, maybe I should try to start making them.

7. Go to bed early/fix my sleep schedule

I’ve never been good at this. I had a really unhealthy lifestyle before quarantine, where I would stay up until midnight with homework, be absolutely exhausted when I had to wake up at 5:30 for school the next morning, drink a huge amount of coffee, drink more coffee when I got home from school, procrastinate my homework, get a random burst of energy at 10:30 at night, and then repeat the whole cycle over again.

I have been going to bed sometime between 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM for all of quarantine, so… I should probably fix that. In fact, last night I was up until 1:30 and now I have a headache. I no longer have to wake up super early for school, so I can relax a little! (#onlineschoolpositivity) but maybe let’s bring it down to 11 PM.

8. Get new school supplies

I LOVE back-to-school, and I am really really upset that we aren’t having a real first day. Treating myself to new supplies will make me feel a little better though. I already have some notebooks. I just need some mechanical pencils and highlighters now. I lost all my highlighters and now I only have a yellow one, which is the ugliest color. And an orange one, which I don’t like either. I love my highlighters but my friends make fun of me for highlighting entire lines of my notes. I memorize things when I highlight them. It works.

Am I the only one who gets really stressed thinking about how I will organize my classes into all my notebooks? I never know how to organize everything because I am not organizationally gifted, and teachers never tell us the right kinds of supplies to get.

9. Declutter my phone/laptop

My school Google Drive was an absolute mess, and since we’re going online this year, I thought I’d benefit from organizing it into folders. Then I realized that my personal Google Drive (the one full of old writing) and my tutoring Google Drives were also messy.

Then I realized that my phone and computer were all cluttered as well, so I started going through those and organizing my apps and deleting unnecessary things.

10. Reach out to my friends

Even for a fairly introverted introvert like me, five months without seeing my friends is too long. It makes me feel like I have zero friends anymore. Which I don’t, because I don’t talk to them. No one texts me anymore either. Considering that I don’t text any of them, though, this is partly my fault.

As counter-productive as it sounds, maybe I should try to spend MORE time on Snapchat; it’s about the dumbest waste of time out of all forms of social media, but at least it allows you to start conversations. Kind of?

Since school is starting soon and everyone is exchanging schedules, this has gotten better; however, I should probably make an effort to reach out more.

That’s all for today. Thanks for checking out my blog! Best of luck in the new academic year.