9 Ways to Keep Your Back-to-School Motivation Alive All Semester

By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.

You’ve got to admit that the back-to-school season has a vibe to it. It’s kind of like New Year’s Eve, minus the confetti.

For many students, September means crisp notebooks, new pens — and the motivation to do this year better than last year.

If you’re inspired (even just a little bit) by the idea of a fresh back-to-school start, you’re my people.

But let’s be real: Once the novelty of a new school year wears off and the work begins to pile up, it doesn’t take long for that motivation to fade.

In this blog post, I share 9 ways to keep your motivation alive all semester. The more tips you use, the longer that back-to-school energy will last.

9 Ways to Keep Your Back-To-School Motivation Alive All Semester

The common denominator of all 9 tips in the following list is sustainability. The key to keeping your back-to-school motivation alive all semester (and beyond) is to build sustainability into your days and your systems. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to avoiding academic burnout.

1. Get Total Control and Clarity Over Your Schedule.

If you’re in high school or beyond, you need a grasp on how you’re spending your time. If you don’t yet have your own digital calendar set up, start there. Here’s my tutorial that walks you through exactly how to set up Google Calendar for school.

The reason setting up a digital calendar keeps your back-to-school motivation alive all semester is that a calendar is the only way to make time visible. And I say this all the time, but we can’t manage what we can’t see, so time management begins with a calendar. When we have a good time management system to rely on, our days are less stressful and we procrastinate less – and this is what leads to lasting motivation.

2. Have a Task Management System You Trust.

Task management is essentially your one job as a student. Your ability to track, manage and complete your tasks on time is directly related to your grades and your stress level — which makes it the most important tip on this list.

Here’s what you need to know about student task management: Your learning management system (LMS) is NOT sufficient.

Your online assignment portal, whether it’s Google Classroom or Canvas or something else, is not for tracking and managing your homework and school tasks. Your LMS is for retrieving the links and resources needed for assignments, as well as the place you’ll ultimately submit your assignments, but it’s not for managing them.

Here’s why: Your LMS doesn’t allow you to add your own assignments and tasks. Only teachers can do that. But as a student, you’re going to have many, many tasks to track and complete that are beyond what’s posted in your LMS.

The reality: You need an assignment notebook of some kind for writing down your study sessions leading up to tests, the smaller steps of longer assignments, and other reminders to yourself.

Let me give you an example that might convince you: Your teacher may post an assignment about your essay being due in two weeks. Great, but you need a place to write down your plan for working on that essay in the days leading up to the due date. You can’t write that in your LMS. So in your assignment notebook, you’d write “make essay outline” on one day, you’d write “draft essay intro” on another day, etc. The plan goes in your assignment notebook and the submission is through the LMS.

3. Set Up Your Ideal Study Space.

A crummy and uninspiring study space can tank your motivation so fast.

You don’t need anything fancy, but I strongly suggest creating a workspace at home or in your dorm that is used just for school work. When a space has a single purpose, it becomes a positive trigger and can motivate us to do the work we intend to do there.

(That’s why walking into your kitchen can make you hungry even if you weren’t hungry before walking into your kitchen.)

I have multiple blogs, videos and podcast episodes with tips for designing a study space that matches your learning preferences, so I’ll leave those key resources linked below.

4. Figure Out What You Really Want.

Don’t roll your eyes or skip this step if you think it’s cheesy. This is one of the most important tips in this list for maintaining motivation for school (besides #2, task management).

We’re not motivated to do things we don’t find relevant, and so if you don’t see something relevant about school, your back-to-school motivation will probably fade within a week.

Each of us has a different reason to succeed in school. Some students want personal achievement, other students want external recognition, and other students know that a certain level of excellence is required for the next step, whether that’s access to a good college or better career options.

Whatever your reason, tap into it and let that drive you through the periods of school that feel boring, difficult, and irrelevant.

For example, if you’re a high school senior and you’re losing motivation after the first few weeks of school, you have to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

What’s the bigger picture? If your grades tank any time in your senior year, you can ruin your prospects for college – yes, even if you’ve already been accepted. So the relevance you’d focus on is your college future.

Sure, you might want to tap out while you’re doing a tedious homework assignment because you’ve already been accepted to college and you don’t see the point, but that mindset is a slippery slope. Yes, that “pointless” little assignment matters. Because if you convince yourself that an assignment is pointless, you’ll probably get away with it and nothing catastrophic will happen, but then you’re training yourself to believe that mentality has no consequences.

The reality is that in college, that mentality has massive consequences, and once you establish a mindset, it’s really tough to undo.

5. Set a Process-Based Goal.

Sustaining your back-to-school motivation throughout the semester is easier when you have an actual goal. Otherwise, what are you working toward? Some general sense of “be a good student?” That doesn’t cut.

This tip is different than Tip 4 because figuring out what you really want is about seeing the larger picture. On the other hand, this strategy requires you to get granular and specific.

You’ll have a better chance of reaching your goal if it’s process-based and not outcome-based. Outcome-based goals are more common, but they’re nonsense.

Example of an outcome-based goal: Get A’s in all my classes.

Example of a process-based goal: I want to use active recall study strategies and spaced repetition to study for every single one of my quizzes and tests.

The reason outcome-based goals don’t work is that you can’t control them. There’s nothing about “get A’s in all my classes” that you can hold yourself accountable to and measure. There’s nothing for you to control.

On the other hand, you have total control over whether or not you use active recall and spaced repetition to prepare for your tests and quizzes. These two methods give you the greatest chance of anything out there to get A’s in your classes.

Another downside to outcome-based goals (in addition to the fact that they don’t work) is they’re entirely disconnected from our motivation centers.

Our motivation increases when we feel in control of a situation. And the one thing you can control about getting A’s in all your classes is what you DO to get those A’s. The studying is the process, and the A is the outcome of you taking action on the process. That’s how you sustain motivation for goals.

Still confused about how to set a realistic academic goal? Here are 8 goal-setting tips for students.

6. Regularly Assess What’s Working and Not Working.

A key step for maintaining your motivation throughout the semester and beyond involves taking a regular inventory of what are you doing right and wrong.

Academic success is not “set and forget it.” Sometimes we create a system and it works for a while, but for whatever reason, it stops working. This is normal. The students who expect to set something up at the beginning of the year and have it work flawlessly all semester long are the students who end up losing motivation, giving up on their goals, and falling behind.

Let’s look at an example of a self-assessment:

Scenario: You create a new study system at the beginning of the school year. You decide to go to the campus library each day from 5 to 10 PM to do work. At first, you’re excited about your routine, but after just two weeks you realize that you forgot to account for dinner. Halfway through your study sessions, you’re hungry and unfocused and end up leaving by 7 PM.

Self-Assessment: You realize a 5-hour study session (from 5-10 PM) every day without dinner is not sustainable or effective.

Correction: Instead of giving up altogether, reevaluate and adjust. You decide to eat dinner first and head to the campus library from 6:30 to10.

It’s not just study goals you need to assess regularly. It’s also your personal systems, how you spend your time, who you spend your time with, and your daily habits. Top performers who have minimal stress are regularly looking at what they’re doing and asking themselves is this working for me?

If you’re not sure where to start, use my student self-assessment quiz. It’s free and the results will tell you which areas you should focus on to see the biggest improvement.

**7. Figure Out Your Best Study Methods**.

There is such thing as legitimate study methods that increase knowledge retention. In fact, about 80% of the content I create is all about how to learn and how to study. My online study skills course teaches you exactly what these study skills are so you can stop wasting your time using fake study methods and wondering why your grades aren’t what you want them to be.

Which study methods work for you depends a little bit on your learner preferences, but no matter what your profile is, the only study methods that truly work are those that involve active recall.

Here are my best resources for how to use active recall to study.

Figuring out what study methods work for you keeps your motivation even throughout the school year because nothing kills your motivation faster than feeling like your efforts aren’t paying off. If you’re studying for hours before every test and you still don’t know the material and your grades aren’t what you want them to be, I would absolutely understand why you’d lose interest in school.

But when you learn how to study correctly, you can study less and learn more, and your efforts are reflected in your grades. Yes, please.

PS: A strong sign that your study methods aren’t working is failed tests. If you fail tests, that means you don’t know the material. (No, it’s not the teacher’s fault; no, the test wasn’t exceptionally hard. It’s that YOU didn’t know the material well enough.) Here is the exact process to follow if you fail a test so you don’t make the same mistakes twice.

8. Stop Doing So Much.

I see this mistake all the time with my high school and college students. They start the year full of enthusiasm for all of the things: they want to sign up for this club, that club, get an afterschool job, play a sport, and get all A’s.

And I love this ambition but it usually doesn’t work out well for students.

The reason why the first tip in this list was about time management is because how you spend your time is the foundation of quite literally everything in your life. And I’m not talking just about school.

If you follow the strategies I teach you in Tip 1 about making time visible, you’ll have very real mathematical data about how many activities you can cram into your school week.

You have to take some time upfront to calculate how much time your activities will take, including transportation to and from activities. Then you factor in the hours you spend in class and studying and doing homework. If you truly take the time to make a visual schedule, you might realize that there’s no way in heck you can cram everything you want to do in a day.

It’s better to learn your schedule is impossible before you start school than it is to figure out two weeks into the semester.

Here’s a bonus tip for college students: You don’t have to take the hardest classes possible. As long as you satisfy the credits for your major, no company on earth is going to care if you take the harder version of a course or the regular version of a course. That’s not something hiring managers even consider when they’re assessing applicants. They’ll consider your college, your major, your work or internship experience and your skills, but they don’t care if you took the hardest courses or the easiest courses that your school offered.

9. Get Enough Sleep.

There’s not a single tip on this list that matters if you don’t get enough sleep. Sleep deprivation, even in small amounts, will destroy your mood and your cognitive function. Quite literally, you cannot learn if you’re not getting quality sleep. Here are 20 tips for improving your sleep.

If you argue that you have too much work to do and it’s impossible to go to bed any earlier, then you need to go back and read Tips 1, 6 and 8 again.