With today being the first day of 2014, I’m sure many of you have already set your new year’s resolutions. Being a better person, eating healthier and improving your grades are all great goals, but I feel like there’s one bad habit in particular that often gets overlooked, especially in high school – procrastinating.
Procrastination is something that most teenagers brush off as natural and almost expected of them, but what they don’t realize is how much easier life becomes once the habit is broken. Every day from the second I walk into school, all I hear is people complaining about how they only got four hours of sleep the night before because they were up all night scrambling to finish their APUSH homework or frantically searching Yahoo! Answers to get that last green check on their WebAssign.
And you know what? It makes me kind of sad to hear stuff like that, but what saddens me even more is that people think I’m some kind of mutant because I not only manage to go to bed at a decent hour every night, but also because I manage to finish all my homework in the process.
A high schooler who can do that? Say it ain’t so! But it is so, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret as to how I do it – stop procrastinating. I know for you hardcore procrastinators out there, this might seem a little far-fetched to even be taken seriously, but I promise you, you’ll be thanking yourself once you stop.
When a teacher gives you an assignment and more than a day to do it, break it down into pieces. That 30 page chapter you have to read for history in three days will seem a lot less stressful if you do ten pages a night, and same for that 50 question math packet that your teacher has so generously given you a week to do. The reason why teachers give us more than a night to complete an assignment is because they know it shouldn’t all be done in one.
When you conquer the assignment piece-by-piece, not only are you making it less stressful on yourself, but you’re improving the quality of the work too. If you sit down for half an hour each night when you get home from school and write just one paragraph of that five paragraph essay, it’ll be a lot more put together than writing all five paragraphs at one in the morning the day it’s due after having drank more than the recommended serving of coffee.
Going along with that, sleeping also becomes a lot more common once procrastination has been cut out of the picture. You no longer have to worry about pulling an all-nighter to rush to finish your myriad of homework that you’ve deliberately put off to go play video games for. And what’s even better is that if you do an hour of your homework each night and promise to stick to that schedule, you can just as easily go enjoy your video game without the nagging thought of that pile of calculus staring at you from the table.
Procrastination is a bad habit and the consequences of it can be very overwhelming, but it’s not impossible to stop. In fact, it’s actually pretty simple, and I wish more of you would realize that. It’s not healthy to get so little sleep a night because of homework, and it’s definitely in your best interest to turn in work that was done a little less haphazardly. Make yourself a schedule and follow it, and I promise you that you’ll notice the shift in your overall happiness almost instantly.
If 2014 seems a little too early to embark on a journey this big, there’s always 2015 to make the change. And look at that, you just set your new year’s resolution 365 days early. It’s a step in the right direction of reaching destination no procrastination.
