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11 Productivity Hacks For Students 2019! First Day of School Tips & Studying Tricks! Natalies Outlet

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Back-to-school season means one thing for millions of students: the procrastination clock starts ticking again.

Natalie Alzate, the DIY and lifestyle creator behind Natalies Outlet, dropped her annual back-to-school survival guide on YouTube this August, and this year the focus wasn’t dorm decor or outfit hauls — it was time management. “How To Stop Procrastinating & Be Productive! Back To School 2019” lays out eleven concrete habits aimed at students staring down a fresh semester, delivered in the same step-by-step format that’s built her channel to more than 7 million subscribers.

• The video breaks down 11 distinct productivity hacks, ranging from planner use to sleep habits, aimed specifically at reducing first-day-of-school stress.
• Alzate recommends moving self-imposed assignment deadlines earlier than the actual due date to build in a buffer against last-minute cramming.
• The guide leans heavily on time-blocking and calendar scheduling alongside daily to-do lists as the backbone of the system.

The Planner-First System

Alzate opens with what she treats as non-negotiable: a physical or digital planner paired with a daily to-do list. The logic is simple — if a deadline isn’t written down somewhere visible, it doesn’t exist in a student’s mental schedule until it’s suddenly due tomorrow. She pairs this with time-blocking, carving out specific calendar windows for specific subjects or tasks rather than leaving study time vague and open-ended, a distinction she frames as the difference between intending to work and actually working.

The to-do list isn’t just a dump of tasks, either. Alzate stresses prioritization — ranking what actually needs to happen that day versus what can slide — so students aren’t burning morning energy on low-stakes busywork while a paper deadline creeps closer.

Beating the Deadline Instead of Racing It

The hack that separates this video from a generic organization list is Alzate’s deadline trick: artificially move due dates earlier on your own calendar. If a paper is due Friday, she suggests treating it as due Wednesday. That two-day cushion absorbs the inevitable delays — a printer jam, a group project partner who flakes, a source that falls through — without blowing the real deadline.

Set your own deadline before the real one, so a bad day doesn’t turn into a missed assignment.

It’s a small reframe, but it attacks procrastination at its actual mechanism: students don’t usually plan to fall behind, they just run out of slack when something goes wrong close to the wire. Building in that slack ahead of time removes the crisis before it starts.

Micro-Goals and Momentum

Rather than telling students to “study more” or “finish the essay,” Alzate breaks big tasks into micro-goals — write the intro paragraph, outline three body points, draft one section — each small enough to knock out in a single sitting. The idea is momentum: finishing five small, checkable tasks feels more achievable than staring down one massive, undefined one, and each checkmark makes the next one easier to start.

This ties directly back into the to-do list and time-blocking structure from earlier in the video. A blocked-out hour on the calendar labeled “history paper” is vague; an hour labeled “write history paper outline” is a task a student can actually sit down and start without hesitating.

Distraction Control and Recovery Habits

Alzate also covers the more physical side of productivity — cutting down phone notifications during study blocks, keeping a decluttered workspace, and building short breaks into longer study sessions rather than grinding straight through. Getting enough sleep gets its own mention as a productivity hack in its own right, not just a health tip, on the logic that memory retention and focus both collapse without it.

None of these individual tips are radical on their own, which is part of the appeal — Alzate isn’t selling a gimmick, she’s stacking eleven ordinary habits into one system a student can actually start using the week before classes begin. Readers who enjoy creators breaking down personal systems in plain, practical terms might also get a kick out of the takedowns compiled in Top 10 Celebrity Comebacks: Stars Silencing Disrespectful Interviewers, or the day-in-the-life extremity of WORKING OUT FOR 24 HOURS STRAIGHT!!, both built on the same channel-native, practical-content formula that’s made Natalies Outlet a back-to-school fixture every August.