What To Do In Your Free Time As A Student: 14 Impactful Activities

When I look back to the free time I had as a student and how I used it, I know I could’ve used it better to have a better now.

If you are a student reading this, please know that I’m coming from the future, telling you that you can have a better future than the one waiting for you with how you’re using it now, if only you used your free time at school or college smarter.

There are 14 basic activities covering all 6 WellBeing dimensions, with an easy to do levels of 4/5 on average,  that you can do in your free time as a student to have a better future.

Note that there are other activities you can do in your free time as a student other than the 14 mentioned here. The idea is to keep in mind all the 6 wellbeing dimensions when you come up with other things you can do.

Below is a handy table that ranks those 14 activities and shows how easy they are to do, their impact on wellbeing dimension(s), and if there’s any special requirements for them.

1- Build a productive system

In my opinion as a productivity trainer, this should be the first thing you should be learning today.

Learning how to be more productive and being able to organize your whole life is going to be the corner stone in your wall of successes in life.

Most people associate being productive only with work, or emails, or organizing desk, and this is not true at all.

Being productive involves your life as a whole because you are a whole person. You don’t have a work person and another separate personal person.

Being productive is simply doing what you need, when you need, where you need, and feel good about it.

This is one area of personal development I label “required” to anyone asking me what to improve first.

Special Requirement:

To have an EFFECTIVE and COMPLETE productive system to use in your life for managing both work and personal life, you’ll need a coach to:

• Guide through all steps
• Explain each part of that system and why it’s important
• Provide you with needed tools
• Follow up with you till the habit is part of your life.

That’s why the special requirement for you to build your productive system are:

1. List of potential coaches
2. Money for the coaching sessions or the material you’re going to study on your own.

(I’m a productivity trainer and I’m happy to work with you on this and I provide very special deals for students and if you want that, you can contact me)

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

This will mainly impact your mental wellbeing by improving your productivity toolkit which will have a profound ripple effect on the rest of your wellbeing dimensions. Take my word on that.

2- Reading

Building the habit of reading is a strong activity that you can start doing as a student in your free time.

Obviously reading here isn’t related to your school or college material. Here I’m talking about reading for personal development purposes to improve your wellbeing dimensions and upgrade your life.

This is one part of achieving the level of mastery in anything

Following the reading rules for personal development reading, I advise reading for 30 minutes a week initially, and when you feel you want more, you can increase bit by bit.

One learning you can do is to study wellbeing and its dimensions to understand how to upgrade your life.

The initial books I highly recommend you read are listed in the books page under the required section

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Special Requirement:

Reading doesn’t require anything. Just grab any book and there are tons of books available for free online both to read or to listen to.

Even if you’re buying books it costs very little

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Reading is one of the activities that have an impact on all 6 WellBeing dimensions.

The benefit is mainly to the Mental dimension since you’re activating your brain, and you will improve the rest when you read about them.

3- Learn or improve a skill

The keyword here is learning. As a student leaning usually refers to our school or college material and that’s only part of it.

Learning should be a continuous thing to do inside and outside school and college.

You won’t get all the life skills inside your school or college walls, and you have to pursue them on your own.

Trust me on this, if you don’t start learning voluntarily, it’ll be forced upon you later.

To benefit from this, you can come up with a list of skills you’d like to learn and start learning them one by one.

Or, once you decide on your potential dream job, you can identify the skills needed for it and start learning them now, as a student.

This can be totally free using free courses or learning material available on the internet.

Special Requirement:

You’re going to Research for free yet solid material if you can’t afford paid courses and this could take time and effort.

You’re going to need money if you’re looking for paid courses or if you couldn’t find anything useful that is free.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

The benefit here is improving your mental wellbeing through the learning and activating the brain part.

And it also improves all the other wellbeing dimensions depending on the skill you’re learning. Job skills means better financial wellbeing, social skills mean better social wellbeing, fitness skills mean physical , and so on.

4- Speed typing and writing

Whether it’s using keyboard or just pen and paper. You’ll need both in your future.

Keyboard is now considered an essential tool in life, specially for getting work done. That’s why learning how to be a fast typer on the keyboard is going be a big support in saving time and getting more work done.

There are lots of tools and online services where you can measure your writing speed and learn how to improve it.

I used typing master and improved my speed from 20 WPM to 55 WPM and increasing.

This hugely impacted my work by responding faster to emails which enabled me to declutter my inbox faster and more effective.

Also it helped me writing these articles in less time that I would’ve taken with my old speed.

Meetings represent huge part of your daily work and taking notes during meetings is easier and faster the old fashion way with pen and paper.

The problem you might face, is taking notes quickly with poor handwriting. This will make it harder to read and understand later.

One of my coaching session was with a person who wanted to be able to take notes better and when he showed me a sample of his meeting notes, I was blown away.

It was not readable at all, even to him. If those notes weren’t processed by him within couple of days, he forgets what was meant by them and they become totally useless.

That’s why improving your speed in handwriting while keeping it readable, is another crucial activity you can start practicing as a student.

Special Requirement:

Free programs that assist you in fasting your typing speed. This can be for free like the one I mentioned above, or it can have a cost to it.

As a student I suggest you use “typing master” since it’s free and really gets the job done.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

The benefit of learning to speed up your keyboard typing speed or your handwriting one are improving:

1- Mental wellbeing by being more productive

2- Financial wellbeing by doing more work which could result in more money or faster promotion.

5- Play IQ games

While PlayStation games can work too, what I advise younger generations now, including my kids, is to incorporate more IQ related games.

By improving IQ, I mean being more competent with one or more of its components.

This can be math, or memory, or language skills, or processing speed, or reasoning abilities, or visual-spatial processing

It’s not a requirement but a recommended one as it enhances the skills you’re practicing which leads to being more confident. Studies show that environmental factors like playing IQ games or practicing a skill can increase IQ

Special Requirement:

Either looking for free games or having money to pay or purchase the ones with cost.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

This will improve your mental wellbeing mainly and can have a ripple effect on other dimensions.

6- Learn about emotional intelligence

I know I could have included this in the “skills” or “reading” activities but due to its importance I had to make it a stand-alone activity.

Controlling your emotions and being able to understand others’ emotions is a must have skill in your life and you don’t learn it in school or college unless it’s your major.

If you don’t work on this skill voluntarily earlier in your life, it’ll cost you later many lost opportunities of finding jobs or many problems with your partner that could’ve been solved or avoided.

Special Requirement:

1. List of free courses
2. Having money for paid courses

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

This is one of the skills that will contribute to your happiness and emotional intelligence levels and both are basic components of your success in life.

7- Socialize

As a student, specially in school, social network may not be as good as when you’re a grownup. Back then it was full of bullying and unpleasant times

But you still can learn how to pick up your friends and strengthen your relationship with them.

You can setup a routine with your friends, like Saturday football game, or Sunday morning biking or Saturday night hanging out, etc.

Special Requirement:

None… All you need is to have similar students around you to be friends with.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Being surrounded with true and meaningful friends is the foundation of having a solid social wellbeing and will facilitate more effective social activities.

8- Sleep right

I am a big fan of sleeping, and my mattress is my favorite place in the whole world. Yet, there was more than one problem with how I used to sleep when I was a student:

I used to sleep more in my weekends which wasn’t right. Sleeping right means having solid schedule every day. Yes, you can still be flexible but within range (I think 30-60 minutes range is about right)

I used to stay up at night playing games or hanging with my buds with having little or no sleeping at all till next day. Sometimes I went 3 days in a row with only 1 or 2 naps.

This is not right, and one of the activities you can start looking after as a student is to improve your sleeping habit as follows:

1. Set up a routine of bedtime and waking time
2. Use that routine every day with no or very few exceptions
3. Aim to have 6-9 hours a sleep according to your body needs.

Special Requirement:

No special requirement. All you need is a bed and an alarm

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Improving your sleep will improve your physical wellbeing by having a healthier body and will also have an impact on your mental wellbeing by improving productivity and reducing stress levels.

9- Relax

Yes, you read right. You can relax as a student but in the right way.

Relaxing means to rest and recharge, while most students usually identify relaxing as sleeping too much, or playing games too much, or getting 200 kilometers away from anything resembling a book or sport in summer.

All of the above activities don’t contribute to resting your body nor causing it to recharge.

Yet, they are fine to do if you removed the “too much” part of them. You can sleep, play games, don’t read, but within normal levels.

For relaxing, I always advise to identify what kind of activities that makes you rest and recharge.

Then use it within range. If it’s sleeping, then sleep with the right quantity and quality. If it’s a hobby, then set a time to learn or practice it while keeping the rest of your day under control.

Special Requirement:

I can say none, but we can say you’ll need to come up with a list of activities that relaxes you so you can use it when planning ahead of time

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Relaxing and Recharging right improve your physical and mental wellbeing dimensions.

10- Exercise

I’m sure you know how exercise has numerous benefits on your body and memory that you need when studying and passing exams.

Exercise should be one of the main items in your week. Exercise 3-5 times a week of moderate to vigorous intensity and enjoy the benefits which are:

1. Healthier and more fit body
2. Better Stamina and endurance in your day-to-day activities
3. Being a better parent by being able to play with them after your long day at work or enduring the physical games they like which usually involves lifting and throwing.
4. Being more productive
5. Being happier

Special Requirement:

There are a lot of variables here and those are your special requirements:

1. Place: where are you going to work out? Gym or Home and where?
2. Time: when are you going to work out?
3. Tools: Will you need dumbbells, medicine ball, special clothes, bag, etc.
4. Sources: Videos if you’re working out at home, a private coach if at Gym.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Exercise mainly improves your physical wellbeing which will enhance the function of the rest wellbeing dimensions.

11- Explore your dream job and prepare for it

Most of students I come across today don’t know what they want to be when they grow up and they postpone the thinking on this until it’s too late.

This is an important decision to make when you’re in high school. Not doing it right will cause you to choose the wrong college, then the wrong job that will cause you to hate every day of your life.

Or maybe you’ll step up and decide to pursue your desired job and it’ll cost you more time and money to coarse correct.

All of this can be avoided early in high school if you devoted time to think about your future job or jobs and start studying them.

After you come up with the list of jobs you’re interested in, you can ask someone working in them and understand more about them

You can look for the skills and learning required for each job and think if it’s still a match or not.

You can also ask for an internship to try it yourself or ask to shadow someone doing that job and see how his day looks like.

Special Requirement:

1. List of potential jobs
2. List of potential people to interview
3. List of companies to apply for internship/shadowing

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Identifying your dream job as a student will save you time going down one of the wrong roads and can have better impact on your financial wellbeing by having more years of experience in your dream field.

12-Earn money

Earning money is one of the activities that you can do in your free time as a student that can provide a very stable future financially.

I recommend students to take action on this area as early as possible while maintaining their focus on their studying as their main goal.

The balance is easier to be made as a student since you don’t have to put in all the efforts grownups have to put to generate the income they need.

Also, most of the money-making methods are time dependent, and as a student you have that.

For examples, blogs usually take around 2 years to start generating enough income, so as a student, you can put little yet consistent effort and you’ll be ahead of most of your peers by the time you finish school or college.

I suggest you check the 5 powerful activities that you can do as a student to make money in your free time. I explained them in detail in that article.

Special Requirement:

1. List of ideas you can earn money from
2. List of things you can do that are needed from others.
3. Some skills will be required for some money-making ideas like website building
4. Some tools could be required for some money-making ideas like having a website

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Earning money as a student in your free time is going to have a huge direct impact on your financial wellbeing.

Since wellbeing dimensions are truly connected, then earning money can also have an impact on other dimensions as well.

For example, your confidence (emotional),  your interpersonal relationships (social), ability to afford gym or private coach (physical and mental), ability to give back money (spiritual)

13- Find your life’s purpose

Spiritual wellbeing is about understanding your purpose in life and is one of the basic dimensions that you need to look after if you want to upgrade your life.

Understanding your purpose can be done through different tools, and religion is an important tool you can use since most religions do call for fulfilling a purpose in life whether it’s serving others, or being in service to God, or do others good, etc.

Belonging to a religion doesn’t necessary mean you truly understand it and as a student you can devote time to read or study your religion better.

Other tools to find your purpose can include meditating upon your life and find an answer to the question of “why you’re here in this life and what are you meant to do?”

Special Requirement:

 None. All you need is reading or learning which are mostly for free when it comes to religion or meditation or asking an expert which also is available.

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

This will improve your understanding to your purpose and therefore lead a more meaningful life.

14- Give back

Another way of improving your spiritual wellbeing is to give back to others.

This can be by joining a charity organization to help others in need.

It can be by sharing your expertise with others even if you’re a student. If you know your material very well, you can teach it to other students who have hard time understanding it.

You can give back money by donating some of your profits if you started gaining money.

Special Requirement:

1. According to what you are giving back:
2. Knowledge
3. Effort
4. Time
5. Money

Impact on WellBeing Dimension

Giving back to society improves your understanding to your purpose and contribute to high spiritual wellbeing levels that also oozes to the remaining dimensions.