While we may have laughed about a week or two ago that K-12 students had to return to school, anyone in college has probably done the same by now. While our winter break was long enough for us to get into a routine of not constantly worrying about schoolwork, it may not have felt long enough if you enjoyed it. However, just because we may still be in that vacation mentality doesn’t mean that we need to let it fester into our return to school. It’s crucial to maintain our diligence, but of course, not without a little help.

Even if your first week is just syllabus week, you’re most likely just going through the motions of your schedules, maybe not even waking up on time. First off, alarms are essentially. Set multiple alarms, if you have to and snooze your alarms instead of turning them off until you’re actually awake. Taking a look at this Forbes article, there are more than a few benefits of waking up early, such as a better average GPA, better attentiveness in class and proactivity. This can always go in tandem with getting plenty of sleep, which is unfortunately not a luxury everyone has access to. But from there, it’s a matter of adjusting yourself to your schedule, which itself will take time to get used to, unless you were working during the past month or so.

Getting past the morning coffee, alarms and a possible lack of breakfast comes the main part we might dread; the work. No matter what you were doing over the break, you definitely had a good amount of time from the school workload that you probably didn’t miss. As implicit as it may sound, it’s absolutely crucial that you end up pacing yourself with the work that you’ll be receiving soon. One of the greatest benefits of syllabus week is knowing how much your classes will weigh into your workload—and whether or not you should drop or transfer classes before you get too far in. Whether you keep a strict schedule for when you do classwork or handle things at your leisure, you’re still going to need some sort of plan of tackling the school work throughout the week. Assuming you’re working off a 12-15 credit hour schedule, definitely dedicate at least 2 hours in the day to get productive. Even if you just simply reviewed the material you just learned today for clarification, it’ll go a long way.

Finally, comes filling in the spaces in between. For most majors, your fall semester is usually easier than your spring semester, should you be in courses that essentially go into a full-year span. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be more stressful. Even if college isn’t a kickback like high school may have been, don’t start pulling your hair out yet, it’s still January. Catch up with friends, go eat some good food, play around, work out—anything to make the day a little more bearable. When things get stressful, it’s really easy to overlook the importance of allocating your free time. However, if you truly make use of the time that you use for schoolwork and studying, the organization will be greatly rewarding and the semester will be smoother than the winter break that just went by.