There is one very valuable trick that you cannot explicitly put into your written weekly schedule. It is recognizing that there are many minutes when you are engaged in some highly routine type of act, one that really doesn't require very much of your cognitive capacity. My favorite example is brushing your teeth. Now you probably spend about 1-2 minutes twice a day brushing you teeth, and it surely isn't a drain on your mentality to do so. Yet almost every student admits that s/he thinks of nothing but brushing while s/he is brushing.
If you put some vocabulary words on cards and put the cards near the sink, you can glance at a card and rehearse a word at the same time that you are brushing your teeth. By doing just that, you added over a half-hour study time at no expense. And I hope it is obvious that tooth-brushing is only one illustration of the notion of getting full mileage out of each minute. If you plan ahead, many otherwise wasted minutes can be filled with productive learning. While you are waiting in line, walking across campus, nd performing other bodily functions are opportunities to learn.
I urge you to try this trick. To do so, you first need to find some materials that you have (or want) to learn and that are amenable to short learning episodes. Any task involving associating two items is especially appropriate: vocabulary (including foreign), capitals of countries, dates of events, names of important people, and various special items such as chemical symbols. Make up slips with the items on front and back. Then put these slips in appropriate places and/or carry some around with you for use when opportunities arise. I can almost guarantee that this trick will pay off very handsomely because it is an essentially painless way to increase the time that you spend learning/thinking/remembering. Which means more time to play!
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |
| 6:00 | |||||||
| 6:30 | |||||||
| 7:00 | |||||||
| 7:30 | |||||||
| 8:00 | |||||||
| 8:30 | |||||||
| 9:00 | |||||||
| 9:30 | |||||||
| 10:00 | |||||||
| 10:30 | |||||||
| 11:00 | |||||||
| 11:30 | |||||||
| 12:00 | |||||||
| 12:30 | |||||||
| 1:00 | |||||||
| 1:30 | |||||||
| 2:00 | |||||||
| 2:30 | |||||||
| 3:00 | |||||||
| 3:30 | |||||||
| 4:00 | |||||||
| 4:30 | |||||||
| 5:00 | |||||||
| 5:30 | |||||||
| 6:00 | |||||||
| 6:30 | |||||||
| 7:00 | |||||||
| 7:30 | |||||||
| 8:00 | |||||||
| 8:30 | |||||||
| 9:00 | |||||||
| 9:30 | |||||||
| 10:00 | |||||||
| 10:30 | |||||||
| 11:00 | |||||||
| 11:30 |