How to Avoid Procrastination in College

Procrastination can plague college students more than anyone else because it's easy to be distracted by parties and friends and end up putting off your assignments until the night before.

There are easy ways to prevent this with careful planning and important tools. One of these is a calendar. In order to keep your deadlines and test dates organized, you should get a wall calendar and at the beginning of each semester, write down all the tests and assignments all the way through the end of the semester using your syllabi from all your classes. This can help you visualize your schedule. Because it is often hard to truly see how busy you can be when you have a lot to do in one week.

When these dates are approaching, and especially on a busy week, you should begin planning how you will handle your workload. First you must prioritize. For some, this means working on more important assignments first but often it can just boil down to what's due first. If you complete assignments in order, you have more room for scheduling mistakes because if it ends up taking longer to finish it all than you expected, you at least have the ones due sooner first.

Problems can arise when you have assignments like research papers due around the same time as a test. This might change up your order because even if the paper is due first, it's probably not smart to study a week or two in advance and spend the time before the test writing a paper. When these deadlines coincide, you should make a judgment about which to work on.

So now that you have a plan, it's all about getting down to business. This is easier said than done and it's where the procrastination can take over. So you have to figure out what under what conditions you can be most focused. Some people work well in the morning when they are feeling refreshed. Others find it peaceful to work at night. So you should try to do more work when you will be more focused. Location is also extremely important. If being at home makes you too prone to wasting time on the internet and to watching TV instead of working, then go to the library. Sometimes it helps to go study with a friend and you can motivate each other to do what you're supposed to do.

Some people are motivated by making a to do list. Aside from giving you a sense of everything that needs to be done, it also feels really good to be able to cross things off your list.

Even though it seems like working on your school can pull you away from fun social activities, chances are all your friends have to study just as bad and are also procrastinating.