Well let's be honest most of the time I procrastinate majorly to start working but once I start working I tend to become quite productive. My maths teacher once said to me, ‘When you want to start working just start for five minutes without any procrastination and automatically those five minutes will become 20 which will become an hour, so on and so forth.’ This really stuck to me and it is what I try to do when I feel like I am staying on TikTok for a bit too long and not in the mood to sit and work. This has actually helped me a lot, especially in writing for this blog because it gets me started, and once I start it is harder for me to stop without finishing the work I was doing because I don’t like leaving things half done. Along the same lines as this, there is another technique where you study intensely with no distractions for 25mins and then take a 5min break. This five-minute break is a reward for you getting on with the work and it should be taken as an actual break away from where you are studying because if you don’t then you will not feel like you got a break and will start procrastinating again. Maybe have an actual reward system for your work like every extra half hour you work you get a sweet or something. For the 25 minutes what I do is I put a timer on my phone and put my phone on my bed which is away from my desk; this makes me physically get up to switch the alarm off which makes me spend the five minutes break away from my desk but it also gets me from not going on my phone during that time. I also always have my phone on silent while studying and facing down so there are no possible distractions away. If you find you get tempted to go on our phone a lot while studying then I suggest you get the app, ‘Flora’. This is an app that stops you from going on your phone by growing a virtual tree for the duration you set, if you go on your phone and swipe off the app you end up killing the tree and you can put money on it as well which means that you have to pay how much ever money you said you would if you go on your phone and that money then goes to planting a real tree. It sounds like an odd and simple app but it is actually quite effective. You get similar web extensions for the laptop as well which basically stops you from searching up whatever websites you say you don’t want to, for the time being, I have never found that I needed to use these personally but my friends who have used them have said that it really helped them.
Personally, I use the 25min work and 5min rest technique to start getting into the flow of working, so I only really use it about 3 or 4 times on days where I feel really unproductive. This is so it can help me get into the rhythm of working but once I get into the rhythm of working I switch the timers off because I find it tends to break the rhythm and distract me more. What my biggest help for staying productive is having some sort of routine. Since I have been in boarding I have had timetabled prep times in house after dinner which means during that time we have to work and teachers will come to check what we were doing; in the younger years we would be in our common room and the teachers would sit there to make sure we are working silently and we are actually working, some teachers wouldn’t let us listen to music because they caught onto to us just watching Netflix instead of doing work. But as we get into the higher years we start to gain the trust from the house parents that we are doing work and if they find out we aren’t from our report cards then they will supervise us in their office. Since I have had such a strict routine for prep for the last few years it has really made me rely on routines and timetables. I don’t tend to timetable out my whole day but, especially for revision, I will assign certain days with certain subjects and when the day comes I will write a list of things I want to go over for those subjects and then I try to finish it all. For me, checklists really tend to work well because I want to get that feeling of accomplishment when I finish the list so I work my best to get everything done and when I don’t get something done it becomes my top priority the next time I am revising that subject again. I have found this to help an insane amount just because it gives me structure to my day and it gives me something to do. When I don’t do this I find that I don’t have anything to do so I waste my day.
That all was in terms of revision; when it comes to prep from class I have one rule and one rule only. Get it done the day you get it. I used to be the kid who would never do prep till the day before the lesson or in the lesson while the teacher in collecting the work in. I found this to come and bite me in the ass when I started boarding school. Like I said in boarding school we had allocated times to get prep done which meant that I would just be making my life worse if I didn’t get my work done then, it just didn’t make sense to not do it then because you would waste your free time doing catch up work but when I realized that I was too far behind to start getting it done the day I got it. Let's be honest as well I didn’t really care much about my subjects in year 9 either, I found them to not be important as I did not know that some stuff would actually carry into my GCSE syllabus. I got into the routine of not waiting till the last minute to do prep but starting year 10 I kinda just did a 180 and become really organized. That's when I started to try and get prep done the day I got it; it was hard as hell because to work step up from year 9 to year 10 was insane but so was the seriousness of the subjects. In year 10 we knew everything on here will come up in our GCSE curriculum and because the GCSE curriculum changed for me going into year 10 it made life a lot worse because things we should have learned the previous year were not taught to us because when we were in year 9 we were doing a different GCSE curriculum. This made life hell and honestly, it changed my outlook towards my subjects because starting year 10 we knew that the workload would be a lot higher than expected for that year. This made me get into the routine of getting the shit done the day you are told to get the shit done and don’t waste time. I started getting frees in year 10 as well which was lovely, it also showed me that the students who aren’t doing as well in my classes aren’t doing well for a reason which was cause they mucked about in their free’s. Basically, year 10 was the year where I got organized and learned that grades come through time and effort which I started putting in. This routine of getting prep done the day I get it has stuck with me till now and I am not even going to lie when I say it is pretty much the sole reason I can juggle 4 A-Levels; if I stayed unorganized like I used to be I wouldn’t have even managed 3 A-Levels and if you told year 9 me that I would be doing four I would have laughed.
This post didn’t stay on topic that much but if you could take away two things from this post then I would say take away these;
- stay organized which means get prep done the day you get it, this will give you a lot more free time which we all love
- create a routine that you work the most efficiently in because you learn better when you work efficiently and not for long durations of time, long periods of is not efficiency, efficiency is when you are working most productive and absorbing the most amount of information. Again will give you more free time as well :)
Hope this has helped in any sort of way. I know it is a rough time right now and exams and school are all over the place ras well which is why I thought I would post this because I find when I become more productive while working I start feeling more motivated to work since it doesn’t feel like I am wasted my day and honestly speaking we can all do with some extra motivation, I know I can for sure.
Till my next post my lovelies x