2024/11/23: early update to keep note of change to study routine.
After the discussions on the Textbook learners evangelize here! page, I’ve spent the last few days thinking about my study routine and decided to switch things up a bit to try to make it more effective and hopefully not burning out in the process 
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I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from @taiyousea (thank you again for the insight into your study routines!).
Due to my shifts and other commitments, I’ve only really got 3 days that I can use for long sessions of intensive studying, but worked out as long as I use the hour or two down time on working days to read/ listen to podcasts/ audiobooks, I may actually be able to make this work more effectively and pull my level up quicker than I currently am with my haphazard studying so far.
I’m thinking my biggest issue is that I currently don’t do a lot of deep intensive studying (analysing all aspects of it like I used to) and what I do do, mostly comes from the textbooks in the form of answering the questions and trying to figure out why my answer is wrong when it doesn’t match the answer key. But those study sessions aren’t as intensive as they could be since I’m just mentally noting the differences or the new words and grammar but not actively using them until much further down the line. Starting to wonder how I’ve got as far as I have considering how leisurely my studying seems to have been in the last 2 years with a lot of time spent but not much actual progress seeming to be made . Hence the need for a switch up.
I’m going to try to do 4 hours split into 2 long sessions (2hrs each) following a similar structure to taiyousea’s Tobira study breakdown but using みんなの日本語 (blue book since I can recognise the grammar but think I went through it too quick to fully grasp it, if it works, I’ll be working out a similar study routine for textbooks going forwards) and use an additional 3-4 hours spread across the day for working on writing practice/ Kanji practice/ additional vocabulary study etc using some of the additional textbooks I’ve got. I’ll also still be doing my language exchanges and my tutor lesson which should also show faster improvement if this works as I hope it will.
If the additional 3-4 hours a day is a struggle then I may switch part of those hours to reading/ listening and use some of the extra hours through the week for more intensive studying again.
I’ll review again in January (around 6 weeks from now) to see if I feel it’s working the way I expect it to or if I need to make any adjustments. 
