Introduction
You may have heard it before and hated it every time your parents said it but education is the most important thing today. Many employers, today, use the academic performance of a student to measure how good he or she is. Keeping this in mind it is important that you understand that last minute studies or studies without proper practice will not be effective enough. If you want to get the top rank and the dream job then you have to be organized in how you study.

Follow up:

In most cases, students will be relaxed all year round till the time for exams comes close. When there are only 2-3 months left for the exams, they will start running around all confused about what to do next and how to make up for the lost time. Well the simple situation is that there is no making up for lost time. However you can avoid this situation all together. Here is how you can go about it.

The only thing that will help you in getting those marks and ranks is by following a proper schedule. This is not a schedule for those last minute studies but how you should study all year round. A schedule will help you track your progress and will tell you just where you stand in terms of preparation for the exams. It will also keep you informed of the time you have left before your exams start or the time that you have left to finish a particular topic. It may seem tedious but schedules can make the difference between a good rank and the best rank.

So how do you go about making a schedule?

Making the schedule
The first step in making a schedule is to identify the activities you spend time on. List them out and the amount of time that you spend on them everyday.

Activities	Time
Sleeping	8 Hours
Personal care (bathing, getting read for the day)	1 Hour
Breakfast	45 Min
School/college	6 Hours
Lunch	1 Hour
Recreation (socialising, TV, games, reading, etc.)	2 Hours
Family commitments (Spending time with your parents, going out with the family, etc.)	1 Hour
Study at home	4 Hours

Once you have identified the activities, you will need to assign specific times to them and that will be your schedule. For example:

Activities	Time
Wake up	7 am
Grooming (Freshening up, Bath, getting dressed for the day)	7-8 am
Breakfast	8-8:45 am
School/college	9 am-3 pm
Lunch	As per school timetable
Get home	3:30 pm
Recreation (Meeting friends, playing games, etc)	4-5:30 pm
Family commitments	5:30-6:30 pm
Studies	6:45-8:30 pm
Dinner	8:30-9 pm
Studies	9:15-11 pm
Sleep	11:15 pm

Conclusion
The schedule mentioned here is just an example of what it should look like. The best thing to do is to make your schedule for the entire year and have it evaluated by a teacher. They will be able to tell you if you have assigned too much/not enough time to a particular subject/topic.

Even though you have taken the pains to create this schedule, you must keep in mind that any schedule is utterly useless if you don't follow it.