A Procrastinator’s Guide to Passing Class

It’s the end of the semester, AKA crunch time! Exam period is a whole month, so it seems like we have forever to open textbooks and get to work. If you’re like me, you constantly tell yourself “I’m too busy to study,” and never even start your title page of your paper until you will actually fail if you don’t. The good news is that I always pass my classes, but only because of these helpful tips from what I call “The Procrastinator’s Guide to Passing Class.”

1. Schedule studying around Netflix

Do you find yourself a slave to Netflix? There are so many good shows lately and it’s easy to spend an entire 8-hour day staring at your laptop enthralled with your favourite characters instead of writing your paper. This tip integrates both Netflix and studying by limiting your watching to half an hour at a time.

To do this, pick one of your fav shows that have half hour episodes that you usually plow through and follow the rule: one hour of homework for every half an hour show.

2. Feed yourself

If you’re a super procrastinator like myself, you procrastinate so hard you put off even getting groceries, and then feel guilty for eating out. However, you NEED to feed your brain and you can integrate this into studying as well.

For example, place a gummy bear at the end of each paragraph that you have to read and by the end of the chapter, you’ll be buzzed from the candy and ready to regurgitate what you learned for your exam. You can also do this with trail mix as a healthy alternative, but finger food is the key.

3. Figure out the percentage of each assignment

Sometimes you procrastinate so bad that you literally left no time for your assignments at all. In this emergency stage when you have, say, 12 hours before everything is due, it’s time to weigh your options. Figure out which assignments are worth the least, and skip those (usually participation assignments). While it’s not good to skip any of your assignments, sometimes it’s worth working on the big ones that will affect your grade. Then, if you have time left over at the end, complete small assignments that are worth 2% because sometimes that’s the difference between a B and an A.

4. Dedicate an entire day to one subject

This tip is especially important around exam time when some of your exams can be extremely spread out. Dedicating an entire day (or a few hours) to a single subject will keep you focused and cause you to forget all the other millions of things you have to do before Christmas.

If you don’t have the luxury of a whole day for a subject and you have two exams on the same day, dedicating whole hours works too. For example, if there are only 6 hours left before both of your exam days, then schedule 45-minute study sessions, where you use the 15 minutes between to eat, go to the bathroom, or shower (please remember to shower this study season), or just use the time to procrastinate.

5. Be real with yourself

If you know that you’re a procrastinator, then you must be honest about deciding when you’re going to study. You’re not going to study the day after a party when you have a brutal hangover, no matter how much you convince yourself you will, so plan to procrastinate ahead of time.

Try making a schedule where you set your assignment deadlines a bit early, giving you leeway time for unexpected events and more time to revise your work if need be. By tricking yourself into believing in an earlier deadline, you can still procrastinate, and not have to worry about meeting the real deadline because you’ll already be finished.

While I would never condone procrastinating, sometimes you just can’t fool yourself– this is who you are, so use it to your advantage. You still pass your class and do well if you know yourself and plan around your personality. These tips may be coming a bit late but I did say I was a procrastinator, didn’t I? Maybe you can use these tips next semester.

Good luck with finals!