Inevitably, you will face a school project that gives you fits. You have no ideas; you have bunch of other easier work that you can do instead; you don’t fully understand the assignment; you hate the course or the instructor; etc., etc., etc. Anything else seems like a better activity than finishing up this essay/research paper/project. We all have been in this situation and it is the worst. Here’s the extremely obvious, yet incredibly brilliant secret to overcoming it: just sit down and finish the thing.
First, find a location where you are most productive. I usually go to the library with my laptop because it is quiet, I have to manually connect to the WiFi (so internet access is less convenient) and there are no roommates around to distract me.
Second, just write (or whatever it is that you have to do). Don’t worry if it’s sloppy, imperfect or incapable of earning you an A. Even if you think that it makes no sense, just keep going. Here’s the thing, even if the first draft/try is terrible, at least you have something done and something to work with. After all, on the day before a deadline, what sounds better to you? Editing a draft or writing the entire thing from scratch in panic-mode? In my experience, handing in a paper that has been looked at a couple of times usually gets a better grade and a lower stress level than one that has been written and sent with no additional work in between.
If that process is too weird for you (or you just can’t work that way), try this plan on for size. Find everything you want to put in the paper. To keep using the literary essay scenario, type out all the quotes from primary and secondary sources that are useful to your topic. Then order them in the following fashion:
Main Idea #1
• Outside support and direct literary quotes
• How the two connect
• What you think this means
Main Idea #2
• Outside support and direct literary quotes
• How the two connect
• What you think this means
…and so on.
This is a fairly easy way to keep all your information in one place and is a way to generate an automatic outline. If you let that outline rest for a day or so, and you like what you wrote, fill in the gaps, write an intro and conclusion and revise the thing later. This method is productive and actually makes the assignment feel much smaller and easier to manage.
So, the next time you find yourself checking your empty inbox for the tenth time (my personal mode of procrastination), tell yourself this: JUST SIT DOWN AND DO IT!
Written by Rachel Montpelier. Rachel is a senior at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y. and is the editorial assistant at NextStepU.
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