During high-school life, you perhaps had a strict schedule that was arranged for you by schools or by your  parents. Wake up, learn, make homework, sleep. These might be examples of your daily routine.
You didn't have much space for you to make a lot of choices on how you wanna spend your time. On the other hand, Â Going to college is one of the most awaited times in a student's life because college life provides a lot of freedom where you have to be fairly independent in using your freedoms. Â
In this time, you can choose how you would like to use your time to do activities that you want for the purpose of adding values that you might not obtain during the lectures' explanations. Knowledge and skills can be earned not only during the learning process inside the classrooms but it can be earned anywhere and anytime.
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These kinds of activities will help you to broaden your knowledge, develop your soft skills, and expand your networking that will be useful for you in achieving your personal and academic goals. Therefore, a good balance between academic and non-academic life is really prominent during college life.
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Or you might not take into consideration those options and go in a different way and dodge any additional commitments outside of academics. Either way, your first year at college may feel like a roller coaster of different activities, freshman weeks, finding the right club, and classes' assignments. But eventually, this roller coaster feeling will wind down as you begin to prioritize and balance your academics life and other activities.
Thus, to help you in maximizing your freedom while also keeping on the right track you need to do several things so you are able to allocate your time for academics accurately, participating and joining non-academics activities actively, and still having a healthy mind and body.
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1. Keep in mind your college purpose
It is crucial to be aware of why you are in college in the first place: to study. While you might feel exhausted from a night out or because you were part of the organizing team of an event, it is important to go to all of your classes and keep up with the work. Besides, before you jump into any decisions, for instance: you want to be part of a committee, you want to hang out with friends, try to think about  how it will affect your academics.  Make sure that your choices won't hamper your study. If you wanna have some fun with your friends and you have tasks to do,  try to finish your assignments first so you will be freer to enjoy your time without any fear of not finishing the assignments.
2. Compose a to-do-list
A to-do-list is one of the most necessary aspects in making an exact schedule. To make it more efficient, you can set your to do list according to urgency and importance in order for you to know which one you should finish first. It depends on you on how you want to create a daily to-do-list, weekly to-do-list, or you want to straight to monthly to-do-list. Once they have listed out all the tasks based on the urgency, you will figure out the tasks that are supposed to be finished first.
3. Â Do it Now!Â
Say no to procrastination. When students have a longer deadline, they incline to procrastinate on things, they will delay their tasks since they know that the due date is still far away which makes them wait until the very last minute to make their assignments or prepare themselves for tests. Procrastination hampers you to get more time for you  to review and do screening your work which also means that it could minimize your chance to get the good quality of your work.
You have to be disciplined, try to do it now ahead of the designated time.
4. Uncover your true potential!
It is undeniable that college brings various clubs from multi-disciplined fields. You need to know your full potential in order for you to follow the right activities so that you won't waste your time participating in an activity which is not in accordance to your passion as well as your potential.
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With that being said, as long as you are responsible with your duties, you stick with your plan and schedule, aware of your potentials, responsibilities and leisure can be acquired and balanced.