My schoolwork/studying technique

Since I've posted my essay-writing technique, I thought I'd also post my approach to schoolwork and studying.

I spent a designated amount of time on schoolwork per day per class.  Extrapolating from guidelines in my high school student handbook, I started with 15 minutes per day per class in Grade 9, and gradually increased it to 30 minutes per day per class in university.

Note that I worked with the total amount of time, rather than distributing it evenly among all my classes.  This means that, for example, in a university semester where I was taking 6 courses, I'd do a total of 3 hours of schoolwork each day, but I wouldn't necessarily do an equal amount for each course, or even do work for every course every day.

I'd decide what to work on by simple chronology.  I wrote down every deadline (reading, assignments, tests, projects, exams) in my calendar, and would spend my designated hours of schoolwork on whatever was due next.

If the next thing due was a test to be studied for (as opposed to an assignment that can be definitively completed), I'd do one round of studying for the test, then go on to the next deadline, then do another round of studying for the test, then do the next deadline, then do another round of studying for the test, and so on and so forth until I wrote the test.  What a "round of studying" actually was would depend on the nature of the test.  It could be reading through all the relevant parts of the textbook, it could be quizzing myself on the material that would be on the test, it could be doing practice exams.  

If the next thing due was a group project and my group hadn't yet sorted itself out enough for me to know what exactly I needed to do for the project, I'd work on it anyway.  I'd just open up a Word document and start typing up reasonable content for the project.  Then, at the end of the day's session, I'd email what I had to the rest of the group.  I'd frame it as "I've been thinking about the project, and I think better by actually writing stuff down, so I threw together a partial, very rough draft.  Feel free to critique whatever you don't like, or appropriate anything you do like, and we can maybe use it as a basis for discussion and planning for the rest of the project."  I didn't think of this approach until university, and by then my classmates most often appreciated my work (as opposed to earlier grades, where they'd reject my work because I'm not cool, even though my work was objectively correct), so the end result of this was a not-insignificant chunk of the project was done, anyone who was worse than I am could see what needed to be done to get the project up to my level, anyone who was better than I am could catch anything I needed to improve early on, and the entire group would be nudged into a "time to do the project" mindset without having to actually schedule a meeting.

The most important thing about this method is to always do the designated hours of work, starting on the day you receive your course syllabus and every single day until you've finished your last project or exam, even when you don't have any imminent deadlines. What would usually happen is I'd get way ahead on my reading in the first couple of weeks when there weren't many assignments yet, which would pay off when assignments picked up later on in the semester, when deadlines started catching up with me and I spent most of my time working on the next day's deadlines.  I'd pull ahead again during reading week, where I'd make some progress on final projects and studying for final exams, which had the added advantage of letting the material fester in my head for a bit once classes resumed and I was getting more imminent deadlines.

What was most valuable about this technique for me personally was that it gave me a definite point at which I could stop studying guilt-free.  I'm naturally inclined to feel the burden of everything I have to do ever ("OMG, I have to pay off my mortgage! And save for retirement!  Right now!"), so it's beneficial to me to have a system where all I have to do is study for three hours, regardless of how much or how little I get done in that time, and after the three hours are up I'm Officially Done for the Day.