I know I know it sounds like so much work. Why would you do something when it’s not due for another two days? Well because you never really know what’s gonna get sprung on you at the last minute. I get it you’d rather watch Netflix instead of work on stats homework that’s not due till Wednesday, but what happens when Tuesday night rolls around and your friends wanna go out? You have this laborious stats assignment due the next morning, but your reeaaalllyyyy want to go out with your friends. So what do you do? Well I know what you are probably going to do but what should you do? Yeah you should stay at home and work on your stats homework, but instead you’re probably going to spend a short amount of time on your stats and end up getting a 75% on the assignment instead of a 100% like you should have. But this could have all been avoided. Had you just done this Sunday night when you were binge watching Netflix, you wouldn’t be in this situation.

Next homework lesson, don’t expect to be able to write a good essay all within one sitting. It doesn’t work. What published author do you know who sits down and writes a five page article all within one hour? They don’t, they sit down for an hour or so write what comes to mind and then come back to it again later that day or the next day, and then again, and again until it’s flawless. What I have found works for me is a few days before the essay is due I sit down and start writing, I write as much as my brain can think to put down on the page. Some days I’m really focused and can crank out an intro, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. But does that mean it’s done? Do I just turn it in? No I then save the file and come back to it the next day. Due to my planning, and not waiting till the day before its due, I have this luxury. So the next day I sit down again and read through it. This is usually when I find things that don’t make sense, or silly spelling errors. Then I’m able to perfect it, depending on how far in advance I wrote this paper I may be able to do this a couple times. Once I’ve read through it all, gone back to the criteria for the paper and made sure I’ve covered everything such as word and page length minimum, then I go online and turn it in. This again goes back to why you should not wait until the day before to work on things.

So what happens when you actually are overloaded with homework and can’t do the assignment until the day before its due? That’s okay, it’s one assignment. As long as you give time to every other assignment for that class, your grade should be fine. What I encourage you to do is to make a schedule for that night as to what you have to get done. So say you know you have an english paper due tomorrow that you haven’t started, you have some reading for your sociology class due tomorrow, and you have a paper due in three days. That means tonight your main focus is the paper due tomorrow, this sounds weird but I encourage you to do that second. First start with the reading, when you get tired it’s harder to read complex text. We’ve all had that moment where we’ve read five pages of a text and have no clue what it just said. Usually that’s due to your lack of interest in the topic, or lack of focus. So start with the reading first, when first starting your homework you probably have the most focus because you’re not bored or tired yet. Take notes on the reading, highlight, annotate whatever helps you retain the information. Once you’ve finished the reading then move onto the paper. But don’t just open a word document and start typing, first make an outline. Make sure you’re answering all the question that the rubric is asking you to answer. Remember you want to go to bed at a decent time, so you have to make this process as time efficient as possible. Once you’ve finished your outline then you can start writing. Use this outline to help guide your writing, I’ve found that when I make an outline my thought come out on the page a lot faster because I know where I am going with the piece. It also keeps you from going on unnecessary tangents, and or lose the main point of your paper, which tend to make your piece better. Now that you’ve finished the paper look at the time. Do you have two hours or more before you’d like to go to bed? For example I try to be going to bed around 11:30, so say it’s 9:30. Okay so I’ll spend an hour writing that paper that is due three days from now. That will probably get me about halfway through the paper. Once 10:30 hits I’ll stop writing, I’ll then use that hour before bed to watch a show so that I feel like I have had time to do what I would like to do that night without staying up past my bedtime. Then the next day and the day after I will continue to work on that paper that I had started working on for an hour.

So now you’re probably wondering but what if it’s 1030 not 930 and you still have that paper due in three days that you haven’t started. That’s okay you can start it tomorrow, but you really need to start it tomorrow so that you have two full days to write it. Taking time for yourself and not overloading your work is better than staying up to start writing that paper, chances are good the paper wouldn’t have been that great if it was written that late anyways. So now that it’s already 10:30 you can stop your homework and watch some tv or whatever you would like to do until you are ready to go to bed.