By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
One of the biggest challenges students face when transitioning from high school to college is adjusting to differences in their weekly class schedule.
Most high school students are accustomed to attending class for seven straight hours a day, five days a week.
In contrast, college students often have just one to three classes a day, and may even have one or two no-class days each week.
In this blog post, I share five ideas for what to do when you have a no-class day on your weekly college schedule. The tips will help you maximize your class-free days so that you’re less stressed out and overwhelmed the rest of the week.
Five Ways to Use Your Weekly No-Class Day Wisely in College
While it’s tempting to use your no-class day to sleep until noon and take a three-hour nap at two o’clock, don’t do that.
Trust me – I absolutely understand the appeal of using your no-class day as a freebie, as a day to do nothing and to take a break from anything related to schoolwork.
But at the college level, using your no-class day smartly can dramatically improve your grades and decrease how overwhelmed you feel at school. Get in the habit of using some (or all!) of the five strategies below if you have a weekly no-class day on your college schedule.
1. Review, Complete and Revise Your Notes
I say this a lot in my podcast, YouTube videos and blog posts, but note-taking is not a one-step process. This is where many students go wrong: they believe their lecture notes are complete once class is over. False.
A college-level note-taking strategy has two parts:
- take lecture notes during class
- review, complete and revise notes after class
Step 2 is really where the magic happens. When we take notes in class (Step 1), we often miss information, scramble to catch everything the professor is saying, and write messy. Additionally, we often write our notes down in the order that the professor delivers the lesson – but this isn’t always the best or most sensible way to organize our notes.
A smart use of your weekly no-class day in college is to take 20 minutes or so to clean up your notes from your lecture classes. Here’s what I suggest:
- Rewrite or retype messy parts or pages (pros and cons of digital vs paper notes)
- Add call-out features to emphasize key concepts (call-out features can include things like highlights, underlines, boxes, stars, or squiggles)
- Clarify concepts in your notes that you wrote down but don’t understand
- Move notes around and organize them in a way that makes more sense to you
- Add visuals to complement your notes
I understand the idea of rewriting or organizing your notes might sound like a lot of extra work. But the reality is that most people don’t take effective notes during class because the teacher’s pace moves too quickly to get the notes right the first time.
Taking about 20 minutes to review, complete and revise your notes for each class not only makes your notes more useful, but enhances the learning process. How? Because thinking about, processing and rephrasing your notes the day after reinforces the content. Why is this important? Because the more we think about and process the material we’re learning – gradually, over time – the less we have to study it before a test.
2. Make Study Resources
Another way to wisely use your weekly no-class day in college is to work on creating study resources from your notes.
For you to understand the value of this strategy, you need to understand that we don’t study our notes. Studying our notes is passive, and is nothing more than reading.
But reading is not studying. Studying involves DOING something with the material.
So, the school habit that top students have is to make study resources from their notes, which I teach you exactly how to do in this video.
As I explain in the video, you can make quizzes, flashcards, or a variety of other active recall study resources.
Below is a simple overview of the process from taking notes to preparing for a test:
- Take notes in class
- Review, complete and revise your notes
- Make active recall study resources from your notes (quizzes, flashcards, etc.)
- Study your active recall study resources for several days using spaced repetition
3. Make Progress on Long-Term Assignments
Long-term assignments in college tend to be a little trickier to manage than long-term assignments in high school. The reason for this is that professors often put assignment due dates in the syllabus and mention the assignment only a few times in class. Remembering to work on the project is entirely your responsibility.
On the other hand, high school teachers tend to give constant reminders about working on long-term projects and provide class time to make progress.
I define long-term projects as anything that requires multiple steps to complete and is due at least four days from the date it was assigned. Long-term projects can include essays, readings, lab reports, presentations, and traditional projects.
With effective time and task management strategies, you can complete long-term projects on time and without stress. But the emphasis here is on having effective time and task management strategies. That’s where using your weekly no-class day comes in.
In this video, I share an anti-procrastination secret of top students (hint: they work on things even when they don’t “have” to). Watch that video when you’re done here because I give concrete strategies.
The gist of the strategy is to first break down the long-term project into smaller tasks. For some students, this is the hardest step of the process, which is why it’s important to watch my tutorial that teaches how to do this (linked above). The next step is to schedule time on your calendar to work on each of these smaller tasks. It’s not enough to say “I’ll work on my essay on Tuesday.” That’s not specific enough. What part of the essay will you do on Tuesday, and at what time?
If you can effectively break down long-term projects into smaller tasks, you can plan to complete those micro-tasks on your weekly no-class days. For example, if you have no class on Wednesdays and you always have an essay due on Fridays, you can predictably make progress on your essays every Wednesday.
4. Preview Material for Upcoming Classes
Before you tell me, “Katie, nobody does this,” let me remind you that I’ve personally coached over 3,000 students, many of them at elite academic institutions. So please trust me when I tell you that the most successful students (who are the least overwhelmed) use their no-class days to prepare for upcoming classes.
Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting you do all your course readings ahead of time. I mean, you could do that, but that’s not what I advise. Instead, I’m suggesting you look at your syllabus, see what the very next reading will be, and preview or skim-read that before your next class.
You do not have to do this for all your classes. In fact, I suggest you do it only for your toughest, most reading-intensive classes.
Here’s why this preview strategy works: According to the Priming Theory, “Prior exposure to a stimulus can facilitate its subsequent identification and classification.”1 In other words, engaging with material in some way before you’re taught it in class can increase your understanding of the material as you’re taught it in class.
In this blog post, I teach you 3 ways to prepare for a college class. Please sincerely consider trying this strategy, especially for your harder classes. I never suggest school habits or study skills that don’t have the potential to have massive benefits – and priming yourself before a class is no exception.
5. Study
I’m saving the best idea for last. One of the absolute best uses of your time during your weekly no-class day is to study.
College tests require more time to prepare for than high school tests. How so? High school teachers often review material in class and offer after-school study help, while college professors leave all the test prep to be done on your own time. In other words, single all-nighter study sessions in college do not work. You simply need more time to prepare.
The best way to study information (so that you learn it and not just memorize it) is to study the material in multiple study sessions that span at least a week. This is a strategy called spaced repetition and it’s one of the most effective study methods that exist.
If you have a day of no classes each week, spend 30 minutes of that time studying for an upcoming test. Have no upcoming tests? Yes, you do – just look at your syllabus. There is always an upcoming test if you’re in college.
Additional Ways to Use Your Weekly No-Class Day
If you’re intentional about planning out your no-class days, you’ll have plenty of time to implement all five strategies I shared above, as well as use some of your day however you want (sleep, see friends, go somewhere new, etc.).
But if you’re looking for more ideas, check out the list below:
- Organize your digital files
- Declutter and organize your workspace
- Go through your email inbox and delete and/or archive old mail
- Clean out your backpack
- Reply to emails
- Exercise
- Set up or update/sync your digital calendar
- Do any of these 10 productive things
1 A.J. Horner, R.N. Henson, Priming, response learning and repetition suppression, Neuropsychologia, Volume 46, Issue 7, 2008, Pages 1979-1991, ISSN 0028-3932, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.01.018. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393208000535)
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