Desires cause us to do things. A desire for thrill may stem from a need to prove oneself or to feel central in one’s own story. Where it comes from, or why we have it isn’t as important as being aware of it. Desires can operate in the background of your mind and influence your choices in subtle ways. We navigate ourselves into situations where our desires can be expressed, and often this is done without conscious awareness. We literally create reality by how we think.
One of the easiest ways to create a high-stress dramatic situation is to forget to do assignments in a timely fashion. As a teacher, I made a point of reminding students of an impending deadline, yet because it wasn’t at the critical stage, they refused to see it. With only three days left, they would snap out of their trance and be surprised they were in that time-crunch situation again.
It takes no special intelligence, nor effort to avoid procrastination; simply start early and make a habit of consistent work. However, in doing so, you are thwarting the intense emotional roller coaster ride that procrastination brings.
Procrastination is a Bad Thrill
If the goal of your desire is to get a thrill, then, when you think about it, the ugly time-crunch situation created by procrastination isn’t a very good or positive way to go about creating a thrill. Along with damaging your academic qualifications, it shatters your opinion of your own abilities and leads to depression. When an instructor assigns a term paper 3 months in advance, it means you have 3 months to do it. No one said you had to wait till the last second and try to cobble something together in one night. It is ridiculous to consider yourself a lesser student by comparing your haphazardly created F grade paper against an A grade paper.
How can anyone believe that work done in a frantic, last minute panic, pulling an all-nighter and overdosing on caffeine can compare to work done by another student done over a leisurely 60 days? A paper where the student budgeted time for research, delineated an outline and composed a first, second and third draft before handing in a polished piece. You may as well be comparing an avocado to an elephant. Yet students think an assignment is an assignment and a mark on one paper is comparable to another. This perpetuates the illusion that A+ students are somehow smarter than F students. Sacrificing your academic goals, your sanity, and often your health, isn’t a good way to get your endorphin rush.
Life is full of situations that generate drama. Wild teen love triangles and weekly breakups are full of drama. Stealing your parent’s car and going drag racing late at night is full of drama. Getting wasted on alcohol and having sex someone at a party who later turns out to be your cousin is full of drama. Leaving all your shit to the last minute is full of drama. Your unconscious choices may have lead you into the situation, because you were seeking a thrill, but once you are in the thick of it, you are along for the ride and there is no getting off. There are better ways to satisfy your thrill desire.
Choosing a Better Thrill
There is nothing wrong with a desire for excitement. Teen life is an emotional roller coaster ride, which is a natural part of becoming an adult. Accepting a need for excitement, rather than being ashamed of it, means you can make better choices of how to get your freak on.
You have the option to be proactive and choose your thrill rather than passively accepting whatever comes along. Some say they wish to live life on the edge, they want to be spontaneous; they want to go with the flow. More often than not, unplanned activity leads to no activity, which is why so many teens get so bored. Such boredom is dangerous as teens find themselves involved in a variety of illegal and dangerous activities to ease their boredom.
When thrill seeking activities are left to chance, they include things like playing chicken in stolen cars, becoming involved in a gangs, or smoking crack. There are a lot of advantages to consciously choosing where you get your thrills from. A conscious choice allows you to tailor them to your personality so they have a stronger impact than ones that come along by chance.
The specific activities you choose depend on your personality, experiences, preferences, financial capacity and time. It depends on what you think is risky. If you need some ideas for activities, make a list of things that scare you. From this list, determine positive activities that put you in those “fear situations” and go do them.
For example, if you are afraid of getting into a fight, then join a competitive martial art dojo. If you fear arguments, then join a debate club at your university. There is a sizable percentage of the population who are more terrified of public speaking than death. If that includes you, consider joining an organization like Toastmasters and learning the art of public oration. Chatting with attractive members of the opposite sex is scary for all young adults as the risk of rejection feels like the world has ended. Go chat up a few cuties and see what happens and see if that gets your thrill on. You may or may not get a date, but the attempt will not be boring.
I understand how weird this advice is. People consciously avoid what they fear, yet if you have an unconscious desire for a thrill (to prove yourself) then you will cause those fear situations on your own. The difference here is the “spontaneous” situations created by unconscious choices are uncontrolled and often not very good. Consciously created thrills are far better.
More Options
After going to a few lame parties, it occurred to me that I should always think up a few activities to engage people rather than being at the mercy of whatever the host had in mind. If a fun activity happens by spontaneous chance, go with it. But if it doesn’t happen, then you have something ready as back up; you get the best of both worlds by having more options available to you.
Also because you are being proactive in placing thrills into your schedule, your unconscious desires realize they are being fulfilled with greater frequency. They no longer need to manipulate your behaviours to make them happen. Your adventures don’t need to clash with your study time or classes, so they won’t interfere with your academic objectives.
By consciously fulfilling your need for thrills with high quality adventure, you take away the need to create weak drama through time crunch situations via procrastination.
Replace Procrastination with Study-Time
Even after you defang procrastination by finding a replacement activity, you may continue to procrastinate out of habit. Bad habits are often pathological; they resist extinction because your mind is familiar with that way of working. Unlike computers, humans cannot delete bad habits, bad memories, or bad behaviours. However, we can overwrite them. Once the need which was causing the procrastination is satisfied, it is important to train yourself in a positive habit which is the direct opposite of the old one. Habitual procrastination causes you to get behind in your course work. The direct opposite would be a regular activity that leads to things getting done every day and never having a build-up of assignments.
While the following is designed with university students in mind, the ideas can be adapted to your situation.
Study-Time
For full time university students, plan on spending 3 hours per day on study beyond what you do in class and lab work. This sounds much more intimidating than it is. In actually it is three one hour-long sessions that break down like this:
One-hour session of reading textbooks in the AM
One-hour session of reading textbooks in the PM
One-hour of reflection and writing
Reading Sessions
The SQ4R is a fantastic system for going over text material. It means Skim, Question, Read, Reread, wRite and Review. In actual practice this means skim over the material and ask yourself a few questions about what’s going on. Then read with a highlighter and answer those questions. If you find you have other questions, then make notes in the margins. It is your book, it’s your education, it’s there to develop your mind; so scribble as much in that book as you want.
While the full technique of SQ4R suggests you should then reread the material a second time, make notes about what you read and then review those notes a week later. You shouldn’t worry about that unless you have already finished all your reading from all your courses for the week first. If you have extra time at the end, then you can spend it on the last 3 Rs.
Skimming the chapter before you start and thinking up a few comprehension questions allows your mind to engage with the reading. This means that when you start reading you will get more out of the session than someone who just opens up the book and passively tries to absorb the information. Remember, your goal is to get more done with less effort. What’s the point of reading something for three hours if it puts you to sleep and you don’t remember it? You will just have to read it all over again later.
If you disagree with an author, have a mental argument with them. If you find their style impossible to follow, etch notes in the side as to what the information means to you then ask your teacher to explain discrepancies in labs or tutorials. This takes text that most find soporific and turns it into an interesting challenge.
Find a regular place and a regular time to do your studying. In an ideal world, linking your study habits to a place and time will assist you in forming a body rhythm. If you find that you can’t set a regular time, do it where you can. You may find lots of free time working in a gas station job, waiting for friends to show up, or while riding the bus.
You will get more out of two single one hour sessions than you would out of a longer 2 hour session. It allows your mind to concentrate more fully for that hour. Also, because you know you have limited time, your mind knows you have to get down to business fast. At 10 focused reading sessions per week you will find it easy to not only keep up with the assigned reading but you may find you have extra time for the additional 3 Rs.
After a few weeks of these focused sessions you will find you have more time booked than assignments handed out. Don’t waste time, read further ahead in the text books and see where the course is going. By doing the reading in advance, you are creating a more comprehensive cognitive map where you can hang information which comes up in lecture. This can make difficult material much easier to comprehend and you can ask intelligent questions about it in class.
Writing Sessions
Schedule one hour every day to work on written assignments. This is variable work that depends on what you’re studying. It could mean you are listing off books you may need for your term papers, it could be writing outlines, doing edits, written assignments, or practice exams.
As perverse as this sounds, spend one hour every day writing. If you have an official assignment, you can spend time on that. If you don’t, make up your own assignments and write about those. Use your writing block to review notes and write out questions to pose to your professors. Reflect on what you’re learning by recording your thoughts in a journal. Write out a dialogue between yourself and one of the historical people you are studying. Don’t wait for someone else to assign something, be proactive about your education. With the small cost of 5 hours every week, you will find:
1) You never get behind on any written assignments, which means you are never going to find yourself in the horrible time-crunch situation where you are struggling and panicking to catch up. Also, you become use to working at a steady, consistent pace. It becomes your standard. When assigned a 10 page paper, it gets dropped into your “do it” machine and in a couple of no stress weeks you will find you have a well-polished draft. Some of your reading time may be spent on research and taking notes, which get used in your writing session.
2) You get better at expressing your thought on paper. This will give you a huge advantage on essay exams, and short-answer questions. When homework becomes more challenging, you will spend less time struggling with your words. The more familiar you get with writing, the easier it becomes for all your academic courses.
3) You learn to apply yourself proactively, not just reacting to what others tell you to do or think. By assigning yourself an hour of activity every day, which will usually go beyond regular homework, you are cultivating a leadership skill. Many people attend university to qualify themselves for higher positions and higher paying jobs. These 1 hour proactive writing assignments will have a massive impact on your personality. These one-hour sessions will be some of the most valuable time spent in your educational experience.
Consistency is Key
Creating a study habit means you are taking charge of your education. Your study time is now “yours.” You took ownership of it, not your teacher, nor your external circumstances. Worrying about whether you should study, or trying to get out of it becomes a thing of the past. Study time is no longer controlled by extrinsic shit.
You have made the internal decision that study time will happen for 3 hours every day whether something has been assigned by the teacher, or it is proactively assigned by you. And if you fuck up? You miss a few sessions due to relationship drama or life events? Well the next day carry on with your three hours. Life is never perfect. The choice to do study is a daily choice.
The trick here is to keep those blocks of reading and writing consistent every day, especially for the first 3 weeks. It takes about 21 days to establish a new habit and get used to it as a standard way of going. The first week is always the hardest. Distractions will hit you from everywhere… your system which likes to procrastinate will throw everything it’s got against this new habit. You will experience your greatest resistance in the first seven days; most new habits fail in the first week. Make it a top priority and cancel all other events to establish a solid study habit. If you manage to keep to the program for seven days straight, you will find the second and third week significantly easier.
Distractions will still pop up, your old ways will try to reassert themselves. Old habits die hard.
Something weird happens in the fourth week. All distractions and effort and trying seem to go away. Your brain, mind, and body got used to a new rhythm. Now you feel comfortable to just settle down and go into study mode three times per day. In fact, it will feel weird when you miss your study time.
You may have noticed that habit doesn’t require being born with the right brain. It doesn’t matter who your parents or who your friends are, it doesn’t matter if the teachers are fair or not. It only requires the decision to read two times today and write once today.
It is a rare decision. Most students do not bother reading and writing sessions in the first week of class and the week right after mid-terms.
After the first week of classes, all other students will be screwing around because they weren’t assigned anything and deadlines seem light years away. It will feel like you are the only person who is reading or writing in the first week. Except you should know they are all acting on extrinsic motivators, they are being controlled by what the world tells them to do.
In making a choice to be intrinsic, you are establishing a work flow on the outset and keeping a consistent pace every day. The pay-off comes very fast. After a couple of months, your friends are in a mad panic cramming for midterms. On the other hand, you are so far ahead on readings that you spend a few of your reading sessions reviewing previously read material. Being your second or third viewing, your hour long sessions are just a matter of skimming course material as to refresh your memory. For your class mates, it may be the first time they are looking at the material, and in the haze of examination stress they are less likely to comprehend it. Not to mention that they have the added worry of the term paper they were procrastinating on. With your daily writing sessions you already have a first draft complete and you don’t have that hanging you’re your head.
So now you go into the exam. Confident in what you know, free of worry about other projects, you are in control of your shit. And with no stress and a full night’s sleep, you have an almost unfair advantage over other students who haven’t slept for the week before mid-terms. To add insult to injury, you gain A grades with no apparent effort.
Everyone starts thinking your some sort of genius, but try not to let it go to your head, you really aren’t any more or less intelligent than anyone else. You are just making a proactive choice about study where they are making reactive choices.
So what happens right after the exam? While all your friends spend the next two weeks relaxing and recovering from mid-term stress you are back on your 3 hour routine with 2 one hour reading sessions and 1 one hour writing session.
Three Hours is a lot… Really?
You have 24 hours in a day. Assuming you are a full time student, this means you should be in lectures for 6 hours per day. Beyond that we have booked 3 single hour study session and you will require 8 hours of sleep. Sleep is how your brain recovers and not having enough sleep is one of the primary contributors to stress, illness and academic failure for young adults. So plan on having regular sleep, especially during exam times. That comes to 17 hours per day devoted to academic commitment. Subtracting that from the total hours per day (24 – 17) leaves you with 7. 7 hours of time to screw around every day. This includes eating, transportation, thrill seeking, going out with friends, having romances, doing young adult drama, and the variety of other activities that make up student life style. And that 7 hours is on week days, when you are actively going to lectures. The weekend is free and clear for 100% screwing around time.
In chapter 9 (the art of wasting time) we talked about how you can use dead time constructively. You can do your reading blocks in any dead time (between classes, waiting for the bus, while drinking coffee) so they really shouldn’t ever become a big deal. With a portable electronic device, writing time can also be done anywhere, at any time. You can go to a library, but I don’t recommend it. If you can only study in a library, what happens when it is closed? What if it becomes inconvenient to get to the library because of rain? You may have ideal places to do your reading and writing, but understand you should still do your sessions even when the time or place isn’t ideal.
So what’s the difference? Your friends get to have 11 hours of screwing around time vs your 7 hours per day. Are you really going to miss a few hours of TV? If you are consistent, then every week from Monday to Friday you will get 10 hours of focused reading done and 5 hours of focused writing done with the weekends free and clear.
A paradoxical problem
“But… I can’t get all my reading done in one hour… I need more time.”
It is very important to place a limit on your study time and strictly follow it. The mind is not a mechanical process and learning isn’t a simple linear equation. Three hours spent studying in one session does not yield three times as much learning as one hour. Those who claim to study 8-10 hours back to back usually get less done than a person studying for one.
Let’s imagine you are a student who doesn’t place any limits on your study time. You may say something like:
“OK, gotta study! Got 2 chapters to do and I blocked off the whole evening for it.”
Suppositions are background beliefs which are not spoken, but make up your reality. Did you notice the hidden suppositions of the above statement? One is that reading a text book is a big, undesirable job that will eat up an evening. The other is that time for a student isn’t valuable (ie there is nothing better to do with my evening than study a boring textbook). Both set up the frame for the study session.
Believing it is a big job, you need to spend time to “get ready” to study. This involves going to 7-11, loading up with snacks, making sure your phone is charged up, making coffee, and adjusting the chair for maximum ergonomic efficiency and comfortable long term reading. After 2 hours of preparation, you are now ready to “start studying.”
Then you crack open the text book and read the first page. Your eyes glaze over as you come to an unfamiliar term. You re-reads the same paragraph a few times before deciding you’re stuck. So you message a friend who is also in the same course. The friend just had a major break up, which led to an hour and a half discussion about his love life and girls in general. When you finally get back to the reason for your call and ask about the term, they admit they don’t understand it either. This doesn’t answer your question but you feel much better not being alone in your misunderstanding. You decide it isn’t that important so you press on.
The reading is painfully dull, so you decide music will make it more enjoyable. Your turn on the music app, but it wants an update. You hit the update button, but to your horror you discover the bloody update just deleted all your favourite study-time play lists. Now you have to search through all your tunes and recreate them. This eats up another hour.
5 or 6 hours go by, you have plowed through 2 pages and you feel you deserve a break. So you watch You-Tube. 3 hours later your parents pop up on a video call and ask, “How’s it going?” You say you have been hitting the books all night. Your parents see your open textbooks at tell you how proud they are of your diligent commitment to your education. You give them a weary smile and go back at it for another page or two. “No pain, no gain,” you think to yourself.
Humans are not machines and attention has limits. As the mind gets fatigued, distractions amplify and draw you away, sapping productivity from the task at hand.
It is important to remember that “effort” and “productivity” are not connected. In our previous example, we see a student who is working at reading a chapter for 10 hours, and they honestly believe they have been “hitting the books” hard.
Except they forget the purpose of study is to produce comprehension, understanding, and integration of the topic. After their 10 hour reading, do they have a reasonable understanding? Can they talk intelligently about the material? Do they have their own opinions about it?
When I go to parties, I often try to engage students in a discussion of their field of study. Sadly, 85 to 95% of university students cannot carry on a discussion about their field of study. Most students have difficulties remembering what they learned in the previous semesters.
What does 10 hours of back to back study mean? Usually it amounts to half an hour of passive reading and 9.5 hours of drooling on their text book.
One Focused Hour Beats Ten
If you focus on your reading for one solid hour, make notes from your reading, ask questions to your text book, and are engaged in your reading, you will be more productive in that one hour than 10 hours of passively looking at meaningless words. So devote yourself to a solid hour of reading, then fully turn your attention to watching movies or playing games. After you your movie is finished, do another hour study session, again only for an hour.
Ensure that every study session has a specific start and end point. In doing so the supposition is that your time is important, it is not to be wasted. It is time to get down to business and stay focused till the end. Having an end point offsets mental fatigue. No human can concentrate for 10 hours, by lying to yourself you set up a situation where your mind wanders off in the first five minutes. But if you only have one hour to study, then you keep your attention sharp and focused for much longer. The boring chapter has an end point, and it is only for an hour. Just a small job. Let’s see how much we can get done in this session.
When you start this method, you may have 10 to 20 minutes of effective concentration time. As you perform more sessions you will bring your effective concentration time up to 30, 40 and even 50 minutes. If you consistently preform 3 one hour study sessions every day, you will be amazed at how your concentration improves within two weeks. If you persist, you will find it not long before you are able to fully concentrate for the whole hour. Proactive study will allow you to read more, write more and understand at a much higher level. Ironically, this method requires less time, less effort and is far less stressful than procrastination.
The Advantage to Limited Study Time
Just for fun, let’s imagine you are a student and you have given yourself only one hour to study. You may start your session by saying, “2 chapters, 60 pages and only one hour. Wow, Ok, that’s not going to happen, but I probably can get it done in two or three study sessions. Let’s see if I can get 20 pages done in the next hour. Yeah that’s doable. Let’s do it!” You look down check your watch, set a timer for one hour, and you’re off.
Unlike our previous situation, when time is limited the suppositions are completely different.
Supposition #1: Limited Time is Valuable.
When time is limited, you acknowledge time is a finite resource and not to be squandered. You also don’t waste time on B.S. activities like “preparing to study.” Bathroom breaks can wait till the end of the hour. Study time takes on the quality of a foot race, where seconds count. Ready, Set, Go!
Limitation also places a higher value on the act of quality. Your mind starts to look for ways to get the most bang for your buck. You may find yourself asking:
- How many pages can I read before the hour is up?
- Can I get through more text in this session than I did in my morning session?
- How many study questions can I answer before my time is up?
- Where is the author going? What is his ultimate point?
- How does this improve my understanding of the topic?
- Do I agree or disagree with the author? How does this information improve my opinion?
These sort of “bang for the buck” questions not only sharpen your attention, but it transforms an otherwise boring book into a game of curiosity, exploration and personal competition.
Supposition #2: You are Valuable!
This next supposition is an “invisibly obvious” one and relates to the value of time. I still find it hard to imagine how people can be unaware of this fact. Yet it is clear that when you see people wasting time, it is obvious they don’t see it.
Human beings are mortal creatures. We all have a birth, have a life, and die at some point. Your life is measured in time. When you spend your time on an activity, it means you don’t have that time for something else. Time spent is gone. It doesn’t come back.
So if you waste your time, what does that say about how you regard your life? If time is the currency of life, how do you value it? Everyone claims to have a good self-image. They try to see themselves in a light which gratifies the ego. But do you really believe they think that’s true?
As you practice getting the most out of your study sessions, you will come to appreciate time more. And as you appreciate and value your limited time, you start to value your limited life. This has a massive impact on the way you see yourself. “If my time is valuable then I have to make the most of it because I, too, am valuable. You learn to take “YOURSELF” more seriously.
You are important and you have many important intrinsic activities you need to do. Study shouldn’t take all night! By limiting your study to 3 one-hour sessions you can get focused, get everything done, and move on to other more interesting activities. How you regard time is how you regard yourself.
Supposition #3: Optimized Activity
Every time you go to study for one hour, you learn to focus your mind and get to work quickly. After all, an hour isn’t very long. 3 sessions per day, 15 sessions per week, 60 sessions per month. Within a month you can easily master getting into “study mode” any time you want.
By midterms you have an unfair advantage over your classmates. Regular reading will allow you to understand questions quicker, giving you an edge on multiple-choice tests. Regular writing will allow you to articulate ideas more easily; this will give you an edge on short answers and essay exams. With your well-developed “get down to it” attitude you aren’t going to waste any time starting the exam, nor second guessing yourself. This means you will easily finish the exam before you run out of time, and you should have enough time to sip your coffee and check over your answers before handing it in.
In 12 years of teaching, I have seen lots of students plead for more time. In my early years, I would grant their request, but it never made a difference. Students who don’t know the material within the allotted time still won’t know the material even if you give them an extra 15, 30, or 45 minutes. It only prolongs their agony. On the other hand students destine for A+ grades are usually finished at the halfway point.
Your Competitive Advantage
Why do you need a competitive advantage? Many universities grade on a bell curve. This means the number of students who will receive each grade is determined at the beginning of a course. It doesn’t matter if the class is full of geniuses, nor if the class is full of dullards; the class is graded against itself. Many teachers and students have argued against this system, claiming it would be fairer to grade against standardized expectation of ability, rather than comparing students against each other.
Despite the protests of teachers and students, bell curve grading remains popular with most educational institutions. While it is impossible to predict the behaviour of an individual, universities have charted the grades of hundreds of thousands of students, and noticed the distribution of grades had predictable patterns. In a well-designed course, scores on exams percentages should reflect grades of the class. Only a few students’ score over 90% so they would get A’s, then there are a larger handful of B students at the 80% range, a majority of C and D students between 60 to 70% and there are typically 20% who fail.
Teachers are a mixed bag of nuts and resist being standardized. Many teachers are generous, warm, caring people who would love to end a course on a good note by awarding A+ grades to all their students. Some teachers have grown jaded and have no problems failing a whole class because “They are all idiots!” Administration had to say NO to both types of teachers; NO, you can’t give everyone A’s just because you like them, NO you can’t fail everyone.
Curriculum is also not standard, some courses are harder than others. Yet a grade represents how well you did in the course. Say the top marks are 55 out of 100 with the majority of students being in the 30s. This doesn’t mean the students are slow, it means the exam was too hard. Using the bell curve grade, the top of the class would still get A’s, and those in the 30s would get C’s. Say on another exam, the average mark was 90%; well that would form C grade, and only the 5 students that scored 100% would get the A’s. And conceivably students scoring 80% could fail. It may not seem fair to the individual student, but the bell curve grading is an attempt to be fair to the student body as a whole; which is most likely why this form of grading system is still used today.
Like it or not, you (as a student) get to deal with it. If there are only going to be 5 “A grades” to be handed out in your class, then the real question becomes “How do you get one of them?”
Remember the old joke, “How do you swim faster than a shark chasing you?” The answer is you don’t have to be faster than a shark, you just have to be faster than the person you are swimming with. It would be nice if everyone was committed to their studies and decided to make a habit of studying 3 one-hour sessions per day. They don’t and they aren’t going to. But if you do, then that is your secret weapon, your secret advantage. You don’t need brains to get A grades. You need to make a decision to make a habit of 3 one-hour sessions per day.
Bonus: The Ding-A-Ling Trick
You may find it useful to set an alarm at the beginning of each session (especially in the first week). This has three positive effects.
First of all, you won’t be stuck watching the clock. Worrying about being late for another event will distract you from paying full attention to your studies. The more you engage with your reading or writing, the more you will get out of each session. Let your device worry about time for you; just make sure you turn your sound on first.
Secondly, the act of setting an alarm can serve you as an affirmation. It’s a mini ritual which tells you: “OK, baby, time to focus. Let’s get it on!” A ritual is a series of specific behaviours to bring about an associated mental state, traditionally used in spiritual practices. Your “Alarm Setting Ritual” can work in the same way. In setting the alarm you link the physical behaviour to the state of mental focus. There may be days where you are sick, tired, or pissed off about a romantic break up; life happens. But if you have established a ritual, it will act like night lights on a landing runway to guide your mind into your focused state. It is not always going to work, but making a ritual of setting the alarm will make it easier to access your focused state when situations are less than ideal.
Some reading you will be required to do in university will be boring as fuck. Setting an alarm also tells your mind that you only have to endure this shit for a maximum one hour (and not a second longer) and then you are off free to do something more exciting. The alarm gives you something to look forward to when the prospect of a dry textbook is still seen as an extrinsic motivator.
Study Time and Getting your Freak On
Up to now we have been focusing on “study time” and it may sound like I recommending a life devoted to study. Do you need to sacrifice everything for good grades? Do you need to become an academic acolyte, a social recluse, a nerd? No, that is almost the exact opposite of this philosophy.
Consider a regular work day in the life of a full time university student. An average of six hours per day will be spent in formal lectures, tutorials or labs. Two hours are spent on reading and one hour spent on writing as discussed above. Sleep is particularly important for the mental health of young adults; your nerves require recovery time, so plan on having 8 hours of sleep each night. Yes, spending an extra hour sleeping is more useful than eating up sleep time by cramming.
This leaves you with 7 hours for meals, transportation, socializing and entertainment. In these 7 extra hours, you can block off time for activities which stimulate your passion. Become involved in dirt bike or mini-cart racing, join an e-sports team, try working out, do modern dance, get involved in acting or theatre sports, learn a new instrument, or write romantic poems to attractive class mates. Go make some new friends, pursue a few romantic interests, dare your friends to go bungee jumping, do martial arts, do paint ball or laser tag, join a debate club, or a photography club. Make a list of things that scare you and get involved. There are literally thousands of different activities to become involved in. Beware of people who say, “I’m bored, there is nothing to do.” Those who spend a great deal of time not using their brain are generally unimaginative and suck the life out of fun activities. Avoid them.
One of the best reasons to make study time part of your daily routine, is that you will never have to worry about your academic responsibilities again. You will never fall behind in readings, your assignments will be done light years ahead of anyone else’s, you will get high grades and never feel like it’s a big deal. And the biggest bonus… once study time becomes a habit, you can devote your attention to those other 7 hours on exploring those other thrill seeking activities without any guilt.
On Balance
It is easy for students to get involved in the student life style and attend too many parties, engage in too many low quality diversions, get involved in too many turbulent relationships. Natural thrill seeking behaviour of youth often leaves studying ignored until cramming becomes the only option. This is imbalance.
On the flip side, other students take course work too seriously and isolate themselves from friends and social activities. Their highly competitive drive to do well leaves other emotional needs neglected. While they are rewarded with high grades, simply because they spend a great deal of time with the material, they also are not using their study time efficiently. They tend not to recognize these problems because they are getting good grades, providing them with solid evidence that their obsessive strategy is working. Yet as their other emotional needs go unsatisfied, they become emotionally high strung, like an overly tight bow string. This becomes more obvious in later courses when the material becomes more challenging and requires a deeper level of understanding beyond memorization and regurgitation of facts. The emotionally frayed student never felt they needed to adapt their strategies and becomes inflexible and is prone to snapping. This is imbalance.
“All or nothing” approaches are not sustainable. The concept of “Study Time” suggests doing a little study every day. 3 hours is not much especially when you consider that it can be compounded with other activities (i.e. you can do an hour of reading on the bus, you can do a writing session in a long wait between two lectures).
The answer to thrill seeking procrastination is about awareness and balance. By becoming aware of emotional needs, you can plan for them, and fulfil them as part of your life style. By addressing these needs consciously, they no longer need to pull your unconscious strings and express themselves at the cost of your academic career. You can budget time for them, just as you can budget time for your academic goals.
On Routine vs Being Spontaneous
Many young adults like adventure. They want to be spontaneous, even if that means turbulent drama from time to time. Forming habits, developing daily routines, making a study plan may seem stuffy and regimented. It goes against a desire to be “free.”
All people have habits. You have habits. Being conscious of your habits and making choices about which to develop, does not mean you are rooted to them. There will be days when a spontaneous adventure, romantic drama, or an emergency happen. On those days routines get screwed. This is what older people call “life.” Honestly, don’t worry when life happens. I have seen so many students justify not studying by saying something like “Oh don’t worry, I’ll just spend twice the time on it tomorrow.”
This is PURE procrastination talking. You know you are BSing yourself. The next day, you’ll use the same excuse, “Oh I got time, I’ll just do three times as much tomorrow.” News flash: tomorrow never happens. It is always one day away. In no time, you will accumulate so much backlog it becomes impossible to do. You get overwhelmed, depressed and destroy a positive study habit.
You break your leg, and spent an evening in the hospital. No teacher would be so cold that they would pressure you for an assignment. You have an iron clad excuse. But, be honest with yourself, while you were sitting in emergency for 3 hours… did you really not have time to open your text book and read? Couldn’t you ask the nurse for a pen and paper and jot some notes down for your term paper? If you want to get shit done you will find a way to do it. If you want to procrastinate you will always find an excuse.
So, you fuck up, you miss a day of study. Do you beat yourself up and make unrealistic promises? Seriously, DON’T DO THAT TO YOURSELF! Accept that you’re human, you make mistakes, and it’s OK. Detach yourself from guilt, realize you have a free moment, pull out your text book, and read NOW. Even a 10 minute reading session will make you feel much better than 20 minutes of self-justification.
Habitual activities are default actions. As soon as you are done with your emergency go back to your regular routine. Sometimes your emergency screws your schedule for a few days in a row. This is annoying but not insurmountable. 10 hours of reading and 5 hours of writing per week is far more than you will need. If you are keeping a consistent pace, most of those sessions should be spent on self-assigned work. When you find “Life” screws your schedule, all you have to do is reduce self-assigned work until the regular class assignments are caught up. This should easily happen in 2 weeks.
Also remember how we had weekends free and clear. If you really need extra time, you can schedule another 3 one-hour long sessions on Saturday and Sunday in between your video game sessions. You can get an amazing amount of work done with 6 extra sessions.
Real emergencies happen might once per semester. They are the exception and not the norm. If you find emergencies are happening every other day you may want to re-evaluate your life and make changes to your style to reduce turbulence (aka stop dating three girls at the same time).
Creating powerful habits are not a chain that binds you to a desk, they are mental tools to organize your mind. They allow you to cover your academically responsibilities, while, at the same time, they free your mind to be truly spontaneous in the times when you are not studying.
