“Hi! My Name Is ______, and I Am a Procrastinator”

You Sparklers must up to your hipster bangs in tests, exams, and presentations, because procrastinating on schoolwork has been a big theme lately. What we like about this post by SongByrd94 is that it offers different advice than previous Sparkler posts on dealing with procrastination. We hope one method works for you! —SparkNotes editors

While procrastinating is easy to do and allows us to go do fun things with our life, let’s face it, it also SUCKS!  But by taking a few simple steps, we can quickly prevent ourselves from entering the never-ending cycle of procrastination.

1. Use that free planner
Most high schools and junior high schools give you a planner at the beginning of the year. Rather than filling up each day with a big fat number counting down how many more days until the sweet freedom of summer, (hey, I’m not saying don’t do a countdown, just make sure it doesn’t fill up the whole space!) actually use it.

For those who don’t receive a planner at the beginning of the school year, you can get cheap ones at Walmart, Target, or pretty much any store that sells school supplies. Don’t want to buy a planner? Just use a notebook you have lying around, or the calendar in your phone. Write all your class periods down, and the homework for the class. Every day before you leave school, look at your planner so you know which textbooks and notebooks you need to take home with you. Doing so will rob you of the old “Oh, I don’t have my textbook/notebook” excuse for putting off the assignments you got in school that day.

Tip: If you don’t have any homework in a class, write down “nothing” rather than leaving the space blank. This way, if you forget to write down your assignments, you will know you forgot rather than thinking you have nothing.

2. Prioritize
Make a list of all your homework and the order you are going to do it in. Start with the hardest/most annoying/longest assignments and end with the easiest/most fun/quickest ones. After you finish the really long, boring, hard stuff, everything else will seem easy, short and, fun!  (Okay, maybe not “fun,” but at least more fun than the homework you just finished.)

3. Not even a little!
I know that your favorite TV show is on right after school and it's only one hour long, or the book you are reading is really good and you only have one chapter left, or that you are this close to beating the level on your favorite computer game, but DON’T DO IT!!! One hour, one chapter, or one level, will soon turn into two, then three, then before you know it, it is ten o’clock at night and you haven’t even started any of your homework. Start your homework as soon as you get home. Since you just got home from school, your brain should hopefully still be in “work” mode, and the lesson from class will still be fresh in your mind. You can do all the fun stuff after your homework is done.

4. Split things up
If you have a long term project due in, say, a week, split up all the tasks you need to accomplish and tackle them one at a time. Work on the project little each day rather than all in one sitting.  Not only will your final result be amazingly better, but you will also spare yourself the horror of going to school after getting only a pitiful half hour sleep the night before. (...Last year, Romeo and Juliet paper worth two hundred points, not a pretty sight.)

Write down in your planner what you plan on doing each day, and make sure that you have evenly distributed the work over the time that remains before the due date. (No, rewriting your thesis statement for four days and then writing the rest of your research paper on the last day is not evenly distributing your work.)

Before you know it, you will be completely finished with your huge end-of-term project and have plenty of time to watch that TV show, finish reading that book, or beat that computer game.

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Related Post: Studies Show: Procrastination Is Good for You!