By 12, after the third coffee, you might feel OK again – but by 2, your head positively throbs and your eyes are so itchy and bloodshot they’re basically half-closed. And in fact, if you’re going to stay up all night you can probably sneak off for a bit of a break now… At about 9pm, once you’ve eaten all your snacks and had a good long break, and started realise quite how much you’ve got to do, and how much you’d rather be doing almost anything else, the sense of smug resolution starts to disappear. on the day before you do them: you’ll gain an extra twelve hours you wouldn’t normally have, without distractions, and you’ll probably have to eat loads of junk food and drink gallons of fizzy drinks to stay awake. There’s always the danger you won’t manage to stay awake long enough to hand your work in.Īll-nighters always seem like a brilliant idea at about six p.m. Once there was a time I watched the sun come up, go down, come up, and go down again during a single session in the library (admittedly, this was in winter, when the sun was only up for about seven hours a day – but it was still a very depressing experience). We’ve all done them I’ve done probably hundreds in my time. The evil sister of working until the last minute and overdosing on coffee is the all-nighter, my least favourite of all study crutches. If you find it hard to focus, or sometimes feel like you’re operating from behind a brick wall of tiredness, try getting more exercise – it’s been scientifically proven again and again that getting your heart rate up for half an hour a few times a week does wonders for mood, sleep and concentration. Too much caffeine is also bad for your heart, and disrupts your sleep patterns. But any more won’t make much of a difference, and instead will turn you into a jittery, shakey, unfocused, ill mess. One cup of coffee, or even Red Bull in truly desperate times, can work wonders at sharpening your thinking and helping you power through great swathes of work. 2) Use caffeine to answer all problems Not actually the answer to all of life’s problems.
Make changes on the day before if you need to, but to a completed product that’s ready to go. If that means staying up late, or getting up super early – so be it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be complete – written all the way to the end, conclusion and all, referenced and formatted. Set yourself a deadline of 9am on the day before your work is due, to have something that you could hand in. If you’re a last-minute person reading this and cringing inwardly over all the terrible things you’ve handed in because it’s all gone to pot at the very last moment – this trick can help.
CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING BREAKING HABITS FULL
Or the hundreds of times I’ve handed things in full of spelling mistakes that I was too tired to see after staying up all night. Or the time I was going to finish writing a piece of coursework on the morning it was due, and then woke up with a migraine and couldn’t do anything. Like the time I decided to radically re-structure a 10,000 word essay the day before it was due and with 2,000 words still to write – and didn’t end up having time to finish the references. I’ve got examples too numerous to mention of times when I’ve ended up doing badly on something I should have nailed, because I planned to do far too much, too late. The problem is, even though being last-minute does not translate to being lazy or disorganised, it can and does get you into trouble. You end up working just as hard as everyone else, but later, and often more frantically. It isn’t, really, of course – it’s more like a completely different habit of mind, whereby you need the pressure of a limited amount of time, and plan to use all the available time up until a deadline for work. To those who don’t understand it, last-minuteness looks like laziness, disorganisation and often carelessness.
Over the course of my million-year-long career as a student, I’ve seen hundreds of teacherly, tutorly and fellow-studently eyebrows raised so high they disappear as I accidentally let slip that yes, I did finish writing that essay twenty minutes before the deadline and hope it’d be OK without a proof-read yes, I did go to bed with 500 words written and plan to write another 2000 between 3 and 9 am yes, I did think the bus into town would be a great place to write a bibliography. We last-minute people are badly misunderstood.
CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING BREAKING HABITS HOW TO
Top tips on how to be less like you and more like the brain-boxes whose grades we all envy. Stephanie Allen read Classics and English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and is currently researching a PhD in Early Modern Academic Drama at the University of Fribourg.
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