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.

Procrastination can plague college students more than anyone else.

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