Doing Assignments and Studying Effectively

Part of the "Surviving College" series

Okay, now we've come to the hardest part of college: actually sitting down and doing your work. This can be quite difficult at times when it's a beautiful afternoon outside and most people are chilling and looking like they couldn't care less about their work. It's also hard when friends invite you to parties and you can't go because of projects. However, your work is the number one reason you are in college. You want to move forward with your life and with your purpose, and so you need to do the best you can by your assignments. You definitely can have fun, but you need to take care of your most important business first. So, from the Queen of All Procrastinators herself, here is some advice that actually worked for me, and I hope it will work for you.

One important tip that helps me a lot is to make a very specific to-do list. I list every teeny-tiny little activity I can think of, even just the random little stuff I have to take care of every day. This list may turn out looking a little daunting, but you have to make each entry as specific as possible. Like I said on "The First Year" page, you need more specific goals each day than "Work on science project" or "Write archaeology paper." Goals like "Develop the purpose and hypothesis statements of science project" and "Write the introduction of the archaeology paper" are more specific and will help you get moving on a project faster.

The second tip is to hold yourself to deadlines about every project you need to complete. Your deadline for a project should be at least a few days before the project is actually due--I used this trick to help me complete my final exams and projects in a more timely fashion, and to my surprise, I was actually able to fool myself into thinking that it had to be done by my deadline rather than the teacher's. This helped me so much in feeling less stressed when my finals actually came around, because I had so much less to do than if I had left everything to the last day like I had usually done.

A third tip is to set timelines for your to-do list. Example: "By 3:00 pm, I need to have the introduction to my archaeology paper written." If this is part of your deadline process (as outlined above), it is even more powerful for combating procrastination. You may miss your time deadline by a few minutes or so, but at least you will be progressing along. You can even set multiple timelines for one assignment--assign yourself to do the introduction of the paper by 3:00, the first paragraph by 5:00, the second paragraph by 7:00, and so on.

A final tip is to keep all your work for each of your courses together. Whether you choose to keep a three-ring binder, a file folder, or a portfolio folder, all your paperwork for one class needs to be all together so you can keep track of handouts you have received in class, notes from class sessions, and the work you have turned in. Trust me, this saves a lot of time, and knowing that all your work is together is a bit more incentive to actually getting up and doing work instead of playing Solitaire or Freecell for the eleventh time.