Tons of papers due tomorrow, exams just a sleep away, the kitchen cupboard licked clean of coffee and your favorite chichiria (snacks), barely three hours of sleep. You wonder how time seemed to have flown so fast—it seemed as if it were only yesterday when you’ve written “Les Miserables” term paper due next month in your chic Moleskine planner.
Procrastination—we’ve seen the symptoms: the classic haggard look, the bulging eye-bags, a slightly overweight physique. But how do weary academic warriors get out of this trap? Here are the top tips collected from people who have been wised up by four years of swimming in that big ocean they call college.
1. Think long-term, act long-term. After each lecture, do whatever it takes (in fact, be ruthless!) to understand even the smallest details before the next lecture starts. This will help you distribute your workload over the whole semester by forcing you to digest small chunks of information at a time. Imagine falling into the trap of “deep procrastination”—postponing studying for a class until the middle of the semester. That paper on “Don Quixote” that’s due the next day may never see the light of day (you’re still on page three!). The next day’s math classes will inevitably be a blur, AGAIN, because you still haven’t gone past chapter two (chapter seven was so yesterday)—and the worst part is you only have a day before the test (a hot thermos of coffee would do the trick, hopefully) to make sense of that mysterious thing they call the Pythagorean Theorem.
Rule of thumb: Conquer that killer subject two days before the BIG DAY. Having your first peek at that 80-leaf spiral notebook deep into the night before your exam would not give you enough time to develop connections between concepts, and patch up all holes in your understanding. You need those two days to strategize for the exam, answer practice tests, do things that would boost your confidence and, last but not the least, to relax—get some sunlight!
2. Stick to the 10-minute rule. Let’s face it: Sometimes you just can’t stomach that bitter pill, err, study for that calculus exam, or get that term paper out of the way. That’s where the 10-minute rule comes in: Pick your dreaded activity of choice, then get down and dirty with it for 10 minutes—even if you don’t feel like it. Once your 10 minutes are up, take a break, then decide on whether to continue doing it or not.
Why does it work? Simply because it gets you moving. “It’s easy to procrastinate when goals are large and the path to them is long and fuzzy,” says one writer, Hara Marano. Once you’re through with your first 10 minutes, nine times out of 10, you slowly start to get hooked, and you’re more likely to continue working on it.
3. Set your weekly schedule to autopilot mode. Finding yourself with a clean unchecked to-do list you’ve written over three weeks ago? Can’t get anything done simply because you’re intimidated by that stack of books written in plain geek? Author cum Study Hacks guru Cal Newport (https://calnewport.com/blog) tells students to set their schedule on autopilot mode.
Here’s how you do it: First, Newport says, we need to identify things we need to do every single week and pair up each one of them with a specific date and time. It could be something like Tuesday, afternoon: Break down math homework. Thursday and Friday, evening: Go through thick readings for history class. Saturday: Clump up nonurgent, yet important things like e-mail, submitting applications, paperwork and picking up laundry here.
Next, keep the golden rule: Do whatever you can to avoid shifting out of autopilot. Sometimes, you may not get it right the first time—too little, or too much time—may have been set aside for one particular task. In that case, tweak your autopilot schedule accordingly.
What makes this really neat is that by autopiloting your decision-making, you’ve gently nudged yourself to accomplishing whatever was on that clean, unchecked to-do list you’ve written three weeks ago, a little at a time. You give yourself room to focus on one specific task each time—and do extremely well in it. You take baby steps to take care of big things you would have otherwise found intimidating had you decided to tame them with a classic all-nighter.