Writer: Aisha O’Neil
It is late, the moon casting shadows in your yard, stars twinkling outside your window. There is a seemingly impassable mountain of schoolwork piled on the desk in front of you. You would rather be anywhere–literally, anywhere–but here, studying for your test the next day, but what choice do you have? You couldn’t study last night either. So you pick up the first piece of paper and stare at it, pencil in hand. Yet, when you glance at the clock a few minutes later, a half-hour has passed, and you have gotten absolutely nowhere.
We’ve all been here. We all have, and always will, face days when we simply don’t want to. But there are three straightforward strategies we can all use to minimize those times when we come to a test unprepared or spend an afternoon accomplishing nothing.
1. Keep your goal in mind. Grades do matter. They help you get into college and be awarded scholarships so you can go to college. The college itself, there is no doubt, matters as well. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the employment rate for those who have only a high school completion is only 69%, compared to 86% of those with a Bachelor’s degree or higher. But even more importantly, the Pew Research Center finds that those without a bachelor’s degree are three times more likely to be living in poverty. And the National Association for College Admission Counseling announced recently that more than 1,450 colleges and universities in the United States have adopted test-optional policies, making grades more important than ever. Remember this, as you study, do homework, or choose to do neither: each step you take now is a small step towards your future.
2. Plan ahead. Use a planner or notebook and try to keep track of what you need to do each night, distributing your study before a unit test to a half hour each night for a week, or rationing the pages you must read from your textbook to only a few each night. This will make your mountain of work seem a bit more surpassable and it is less likely you will remember homework five minutes before its due date. Not only that, but writing items on your to-do list, whether or not you complete them will, according to Psychology Today, help you encode, or remember, pieces of your list significantly more efficiently than if you did not write them down or wrote them on a digital device.
3. Know yourself. This comes in two parts: knowing you can accomplish this and knowing your limits. If you do not believe you can accomplish your goals, you will not. It may sound cliché, but it remains undoubtedly true. As stated by Inc. Magazine, “belief that you can accomplish something is essential to your ability to do it. Optimism is the foundation of progress.” Remember your goals and know you can reach them. Keep on telling yourself: I’ve got this! Yet, while telling yourself this, don’t push yourself too hard. Sometimes, when it's dark out, and that test tomorrow looms, you’ve studied, but aren’t sure if it is enough, let yourself quit. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to get a good night’s sleep. A study published in the journal of Science of Learning found that good sleep accounts for about 25% of the variance between students' test scores. Don’t let yourself make up the bottom of that variation, and sleep!
There are, of course, other techniques you can use to stay focused, including providing yourself incentives after completing tasks and allowing yourself periodic breaks, but these three strategies have all been extremely helpful in keeping me focused, and I hope they will help you as well. Try them this next week, and see what happens. It will not be easy initially to change your habits, but these are the first steps to heightening your grade and allowing yourself fewer nights when you just don’t want to.
