Completing Homework on Time: The Art You Can Master
Have you ever wondered why there is so much difference in the way different students cope with their homework? While some always seem to breeze through whatever tasks they get from teachers and professors and manage to do it on time even when they have a lot on their plate, others keep lagging behind and miss deadlines. It is not just an issue of spending a lot of time on your homework and being assiduous about it. More often than not, students who successfully complete all their assignments do not spend their every waking hour on this work. They somehow manage to be on top of their homework and still find time to do other things. Completing your home assignments on time is not about spending more time on them. Usually, the secret is in the way these students treat their homework – and if you know how they do it, you can emulate it to your advantage. In this article, we will cover some of the most important ways to better, faster homework.
Spend Your Downtime Studying
How often do you find yourself just waiting for something and looking for ways to kill some time? Waiting for a bus, standing in a line, expecting a class to start, taking a break at your part-time job, having lunch. These days, most people have an automatic response to these sorts of situations – we tend to take out our phones and fiddle with them. However, why not treat these periods as free time you can use for something useful? Take some of your homework with you wherever you go and make use of these short periods of downtime. While they are not much by themselves, they do add up in the course of time.
Do Not Shy Away from Assignment Assistance when You Need It
Not every task can be successfully done at your current level. A smart student is the one who realizes it and recognizes such assignments before he/she wastes too much time trying to brute force them. We suggest that you find an online academic assistance service where you can hire professional helpers so that you have somewhere to turn to if you encounter an assignment you cannot deal with on your own. It is best to find such an agency beforehand – this way you will not spend time looking for a suitable service when the need arises.
Do not Multitask
It has been proven time and again that human brain is just not wired to deal with several issues at the same time. When you believe you multitask, in reality you rapidly switch between several tasks, without paying your full attention to any of them. However, what is so bad about multitasking, you may ask, if you still get the job done eventually? Unfortunately, this is not the case. When you constantly switch between several tasks, you actually spend more time on each of them than you would have spent if you dealt with them in succession. Therefore, when you do one task at a time, you do not just get deeper into it – you also do it faster.
Take Regular Breaks
While taking breaks from work may seem like a counter-productive idea when you have to complete a job quickly, it is exactly what you should do. The longer you spend on a task without rest, the less effective and efficient you are. Different people can work effectively for different periods, but most authorities suggest that one’s efficiency starts to diminish after 45 to 90 minutes of uninterrupted work. Try out different work period lengths and find what works for you.
Never Do Anything More than Once
For some mysterious reason, many students tend to repeat the same assignment multiple times. For example, they take notes in class only to rewrite them later at home or read the same study assignment multiple times. Usually, they justify it by saying that it allows them to better understand or memorize the material; however, there are many better and faster ways of doing it. Rewriting one’s notes or rereading the same text multiple times may improve your understanding a little, but it is also a tremendous waste of time. What is even worse, it conditions you to make only a token effort when you do something – after all, you can always rewrite or reread it later. To improve the efficiency of your studies, you have to teach yourself to do things once and once only. When you make notes, tell yourself that you have to do the best job possible because you are not going to get back to it. When you read a text, read it attentively because it is the only time you are going to do it.
Eliminate Distractions
Procrastination is the worst enemy of any concerted effort, and studying is not an exception. The secret of successfully beating distractions back is not in supreme willpower – it is in not fighting them at all. You should not fight the temptation to distract yourself – instead, you have to create an environment in which surrendering to this temptation is going to be more difficult than not doing it. For example, if you often switch to playing with your phone, turn it off and put it somewhere as far away as possible from your workplace. This way, to take a look at your social media feed, you will have to get up, go to another room and turn on your phone. It is, of course, not impossibly difficult, but it creates a sufficient gap between an impulse and an action to think better of it.
Completing your homework is not about working harder – it is about working smarter. And we hope that now you know how to do it!
