Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
Some habits feel smart and productive simply because we’ve done them for so long — or because they look like the right thing to do.
But not all school habits are created equal. In fact, some of the most common strategies students rely on can make school harder, not easier.
In this post, I break down 10 “good” school habits that seem smart, but they might be holding you back.
10 “Good” School Habits That Seem Smart (But Are Actually Bad)
If you’re guilty of anything in the following list, you’re not to blame. Most students are not taught how to do school. If you don’t learn how to study, take notes, or annotate properly, it’s no surprise that bad school habits can seem good.
1. Taking Notes But Not Reviewing Them
Hear me loud and clear. If you already have the good school habit of taking notes in class, you’re so far ahead of students who aren’t taking notes in class.
Taking notes in lectures is one of the best ways to understand and remember the material later.
But here’s the reality. If you’re taking notes during class and never looking at them again, you’re leaving money on the table. Well, not real money, but you know what I mean. Taking notes is only the first step. But the ultimate notetaking strategy involves a second step: review your notes later that day.
You may think reviewing your notes is unnecessary or even impossible to fit into your busy schedule. But I assure you, this is something top students do.
Here’s the Process:
- Take notes during your classes (here are my best tips for doing that).
- Later that day, spend about 10 minutes reviewing your notes for each class.
- Clarify things you wrote down that don’t make sense to you now.
- Reorganize your notes if you typed them.
- Fill in missing information that you missed in the moment.
- Type up your notes if you handwrote them messily.
- Find definitions for words that you wrote down that you don’t understand.
- Add graphics using dual coding to cement the information even more.
I want to repeat that taking notes in class is a great school habit. But you can make it even better by reviewing and completing your notes afterward.
2. Annotating Without a Purpose
Annotating is another good school habit that can increase your comprehension of what you’re reading. In high school, you may be told to annotate texts. But often, no one shows you how. You just get vague advice like, “highlight what’s important.”
In college, you may be committed to annotating because it’s helpful. But even the most dedicated students often forget this important point: Annotate with a purpose.
Annotating without a purpose is like getting in your car and driving down the road with no destination and then being bummed out that you didn’t get there. But where is there?
This is what annotating with a purpose looks like:
- Figure out why you’re reading the text. Is it to find evidence to support a thesis? Is it to understand a concept better? Is it to learn something that you’re going to be tested on? Is it to find evidence of figurative language as instructed by your teacher?
- Whatever the purpose is, you annotate for that thing.
- When you read the text, stay laser-focused on the one or two things that you want to extract from the text.
If you’re reading a text without a purpose, then my question to you is this: Why are you reading it in the first place?
3. Studying with the Wrong People
I love friends. I have a whole bunch of them. I’m sure you do too. But even our bestest friends can make the worst study partners.
Studying with others can be helpful in certain scenarios and for certain kinds of students. So please don’t take this tip to mean that I don’t want you to study with others. That’s not true. The important thing to consider when you’re studying with friends is to study with the right people. Studying with others doesn’t necessarily mean studying with friends.
If you’re going to train for a marathon, would you rather train with a strong runner or with your best friend who has never run a day in their life?
If you want to learn how to build a house, would you rather learn from a carpenter or from your best friend who has never built anything before?
When you’re choosing people to study with, choose smart. Choose people who know the content slightly better than you. It’s never great to be the smartest one in the room.
Here’s a tip for studying with others: Do your solo studying first. Then, save group study sessions for later. Studying the material by yourself first lets you assess what you’re still confused about. Those are the questions that you bring to your study group.
Here are my best tips for how to study in a group.
4. Studying for Hours at a Time
If there’s only one single tip you pull from this entire blog post of bad school habits that seem good, I want it to be this one. Long study sessions of over 90 minutes are a waste of time.
Due to something cool called the primacy recent effect, our brains are most alert at the beginning and end of a span of time. If you study in a long epic study session, you only give yourself one beginning and one end. But if you break up your study sessions into multiple shorter sessions over 5 to 10 days, you give yourself exponentially more beginning and ends.
This strategy also taps into the power of spaced repetition. Here’s my spaced repetition tutorial. If you’re not planning your study sessions using spaced repetition, you have to start now.
Some students I work with seem almost “proud” when they tell me they studied all night or locked it in for six hours at the library. But let me repeat: This does not work. Why? Because building the neurons related to learning takes time – as in, multiple days.
Also, sleep is key for forming memories. The more nights you rest after studying, the better your memory will be. This is another reason spaced repetition is so much more effective than epic long study sessions. Not only are you giving yourself more beginnings and ends, but you’re giving yourself more overnight opportunities to solidify what you’re studying.
5. Doing Assignments Just for Credit, Not to Learn the Material
I can hear you rolling your eyes. I don’t really know what eyrolling sounds like but if it made a sound, I’d be hearing it. And that’s because I know this bad school habit might be the hardest to stop – because it’s so eeeaaasssy to do.
And I get it… I really do. I’m sure there are many assignments that you could just do for completion and be just fine. But that should not be your default mode of operation.
If you rely on Google or ChatGPT for homework answers, or if you ask a friend for their work, you still get credit. But when the test comes, you won’t have learned anything. Why would you do that to yourself?
The entire point of a homework assignment is to learn the material so you can be tested on it. If you don’t do your homework assignments for real, you don’t learn the material. That means when you’re tested on it, you’re out of luck.
Believe it or not, the hack is to do the work. Doing the work is the shortcut. If you do your homework assignments with at least some intention of learning the material, you’ll have to study so much less before the exam. Why? Because doing your homework assignments is studying.
6. Highlighting Without Adding Notes or Context
Highlighting without adding notes or context is like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly. Please don’t.
One of the hardest bad school habits to break is the highlighting habit. How do I know? Because I’ve worked with over 3000 students one-on-one and I collect data.
When we read an academic article, a textbook, a novel, or any kind of academic text, it can be helpful to highlight as we read. But highlighting is only half the strategy.
I teach what I call my highlight and rewrite strategy. You can read about it here or watch it here. In a nutshell, whenever you highlight text, add a short note in the margin. This explains your highlight.
- Why did you highlight it?
- Was it interesting?
- Is it going to be useful for a future essay?
The bad school habit is to believe that when we highlight something in a text, we’ll remember our reason for doing so later on. But this is not true.
If you highlight a section but don’t write a note in the margin, you’ll forget why it was important. Later, you’ll have to reread the paragraph to jog your memory. This takes too much time! But if you include a short, simple note in the margin, all you have to do is skim your margin notes to remember why you highlighted what you did.
There is only one scenario in which it’s okay to use only highlights: When you’re annotating a text for only one single thing.
For example, if your teacher or professor asks you to annotate a text for all evidence of pathos, you can simply highlight those parts. But the minute you annotate for one more thing (for example, now you’re annotating for pathos AND ethos), you’ve got to use margin notes.
7. Using “Busy” as a Measure of Productivity
Being busy means you’re spending your time doing a bunch of things. On the other hand, being productive means you’re working efficiently only on the right things. Therefore, being busy is not the same as being productive. But that’s what so many students think.
I see this happen with my clients. They come home from school, stressed out by a thousand things to do. They do a little of this, a little of that; then they move on to this thing, and then move on to that thing. But by the end of the night, they still haven’t done the hard stuff that’s due the next day.
The good school habit that seems smart is being busy and assuming that because your time is full of tasks and activities, you’re being productive. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The good school habit is to get clear on what truly deserves your time and then focus just on that.
College students, especially, need to be ruthless with cutting out junk busyness that distracts them from their true academic goals. For example, your college may offer incredible opportunities and clubs, but if joining them distracts from the work you need to do to satisfy the requirements for your major, don’t sign up for them
The same can be said for assignments. If your main task is a 20-page research paper due at the end of the month, but you find yourself researching one more topic instead of writing, you’re confusing busyness with productivity.
Identify the thing that’s important. Put your blinders on. Do the thing that’s important.
8. Making a To-Do List But Not Scheduling The Tasks
No one loves a to-do list more than I do. Sometimes, I make them for fun. But you’re a busy high school, college or graduate student with a lot on your plate, a to-do list is not usually enough.
Every item on your to-do list takes time to complete. It might be two minutes, or it might be five hours – regardless, these tasks consume very real time that we need to account for.
I don’t think you need to put every two-minute task on your calendar. However, I do suggest scheduling most of your bigger to-do list items. You can be flexible with this. But it’s not enough to say, “I have to write a 20-page paper.” The good school habit is to figure out WHEN you’re going to work on the paper. Put that date in your calendar.
9. Watching Videos Without Doing Anything with the Information
Watching academic YouTube videos or reviewing lessons online can be super helpful. In fact, I often recommend this method to my own students. So no, watching videos is not the bad habit.
The bad habit is watching videos passively — without doing anything with the information. And this one is sneaky because it can feel productive. You’re watching a YouTube crash course on photosynthesis, so you’re definitely learning… right?
Not necessarily.
Learning isn’t the same as exposure. Just because the information hit your eyeballs doesn’t mean it’s going to stick.
Here’s what you need to do instead:
- Obviously start by reading my article titled How to Take Notes From Videos: 19 Tips.
- Take notes while you watch. You don’t need to write everything — just get the main ideas, definitions, and questions you have.
- Pause the video occasionally and try to summarize what you just learned, either aloud or in writing.
- Use dual coding (draw a quick diagram, flowchart, or mind map to represent what you just watched). If you’re taking digital notes, you can pause the video, do a screen capture, and insert that image into your notes.
- After watching, test yourself: Can you explain the concept to someone else without looking at the video?
Watching videos feels easy, and that’s why we trick ourselves into thinking it’s enough. But learning happens when we interact with the content. Watching without action is just entertainment in disguise.
10. “Looking Over” Your Notes Instead of Studying Them
There’s a bad school habit that tricks more students than almost any other: “looking over” your notes and calling it studying.
Let me be clear. Looking at your notes is not studying. Reading through a page of information — nodding along like, “Yep, I remember that… yep, that too” — doesn’t mean the information is locked in your brain. It means you recognize it. That’s very different from being able to recall it.
Here’s an easy test. If you think you know the content, close your notebook and try to explain it — out loud, on paper, or to your cat, I don’t care. If you can’t teach it, you don’t know it.
Active recall means pulling the information out of your brain without seeing it first. This is what strengthens your memory. Looking at your notes only puts the info in front of you — it doesn’t pull it out of you.
Here’s what to do instead of “looking over” your notes:
- Cover them up and quiz yourself
- Use flashcards (or make your own)
- Teach the concept out loud
- Do practice problems or sample questions
- Use the blurting method (write down everything you know from memory, then check your notes)
If you’ve ever felt like you studied but then bombed the test, this habit might be the reason. It feels like you’re working, but you’re not doing the right kind of work.
Final Notes About Good School Habits
Here’s the thing about school habits: They’re just that — habits. Which means they take time to build. You’re not supposed to get them perfect from the start. And you’re definitely not supposed to feel bad if you’ve been doing things “wrong” up until now.
Good school habits aren’t about what looks impressive. Good habits are about what actually works. And what works will be different for everyone — depending on your classes, your goals, your schedule, and your brain.
So what’s the ultimate school habit? It’s not highlighting or reviewing or even active recall (although yes, please do that). It’s the self-awareness to pause and ask: Is this thing I’m doing actually helping me?
If the answer is no — change it.
If the answer is yes — do more of it.
And if you’re not sure? Try a different strategy, test it out, and see what sticks. That’s what learning how to learn looks like.
