Procrastinators Unite!

Cody Rewis
Phi Kappa Psi

We’ve all been there. No matter how hard we fight it, no matter how hard we try and prevent it from happening again, it always seems to be staring us straight in the face during finals week. College students worldwide deal with the problem of procrastination. Personally I find procrastination to be one of the hardest things to deal with when I am studying, so I wanted to do some research to see if there were any helpful tips to prevent my procrastination problem.  Now that the first semester of the year is finished and we finally have finals out of the way, we can now prepare ourselves to become procrastination-free students for the remainder of the year with these three easy tips.

Tip #1:  Eliminate Facebook.

Facebook has become the top social networking site known to every college student, but everyone knows it is a major problem when it is crunch time. If you have a big project, paper, or test coming up, you may have a hard time balancing your time between getting the work done and pulling up a web page to check how many people have liked your picture from last weekend. One of my friends, who lives in the dorms, told me that the way she rids herself of the social networking world is she made her roommate change her password so she couldn’t check it anymore, and then after she was done her roommate would simply give her the password.  This allows her to get her work done because she simply cannot log on and waste her time.  If you are dealing with setbacks from other social networking sites I would suggest doing the same thing.

Tip # 2: Make yourself a schedule.

If you are like me, schedules make the world go round. I found out that if you create a schedule for everything you do, you would find yourself less likely to fall into the temptation of procrastination.  In your schedule I would suggest you include your class schedule, when the best time to study is, your gym time, etc. If you have a set time everyday that you know you need to study, you will most likely fall into routine and begin studying everyday. With technology these days it could take less than 10 minutes to make out a schedule for the week on your computer or IPhone.

Tip #3: Force yourself to do It before you actually have to.

Before I came to college I used to tell myself, “I work better under pressure,” but the first semester became a sort of awakening for me. I would always wait until the last minute to start my projects or papers, and because of this I was always stressed out. In college, to achieve a desired grade, you simply cannot wait until the night before. I figured out that when you get an assignment it is best to go ahead and do it the week of the assignment, rather than waiting until the actual due date. By the time you actually have to turn something in you can forget the material and have to refresh yourself, which causes a waste of time. If you go ahead and make yourself do it, that’s more time you have to focus on your other classes, which results in better grades throughout all of your classes.

These tips can be used as guidelines to achieve the appropriate GPA that you want to have. Although it may seem painfully rough to give up your Facebook password, or even to find a way to motivate your self, it will pay off at the end of the semester when you see your final grades.

Cody is a senior studying criminal justice. You may contact him at rewis10@uga.edu.