How to Study and Do Homework in a Time Crunch - College Info Geek

The great American writer Mark Twain once said to never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well. Of course, when we live by that advice, sometimes we find ourselves chugging concentrated coffee at 2 a.m. in a valiant attempt to stay up and finish a project that's due in six hours. I've been there. As productive as I'd like to think I am, I have been there. And if you've been there as well, or maybe if you're there right now, this video is for you. Now we're gonna look at some specific concepts related to planning and willpower in a minute, namely the impact effort matrix and ego depletion. But first, I want to talk about the foundation here, location selection. I think your location is incredibly important when you're working under pressure. And personally, I like to pick my locations for studying based on vibe. That is, what's going on around me. I tend to favor coffee shops and libraries. In fact, I still go to my university library at times, even though I've graduated, because I like to be in an environment where the people around me are also working. It motivates me. Also, close proximity to caffeine does help. The most important part of location selection, though, is avoiding the call of the pillow. When you're working under a time crunch, it's likely you're gonna be working late into the night, so you want to pick a location that's as far away from your bed as possible. Call up James Cameron, go study at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or go to the summit of Mount Everest. Don't worry about the lack of oxygen, that's not a big deal. Seriously, though, the later it gets, the more you're gonna start rationalizing how good a nap might be, and the more you're gonna start deciding that certain aspects of your project maybe aren't all that important. So, just make sure you pick a study location where it would be more effort to go to bed than it would be to just finish your project. Now, with that piece of business taken care of, it's time to plan your efforts. Before you start working, it's a good idea to look at your workload and break it down into individual components, and then to assess those components to figure out which ones deserve the bulk of your attention. Dwight Eisenhower often remarked that, what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important. In the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey popularized the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, which is based on this principle. Within that matrix, tasks are categorized based on their importance and their urgency, and that matrix is used in a lot of time management systems, but when you're studying under a time crunch, everything can seem urgent. Because of that, the main factor you should be focusing on is importance, and to that end, we're gonna use a similar but more fitting tool, which is called the Impact-Effort Matrix. Here, tasks are given scores based on their impact to the overall success of the project and the effort that it's gonna take to implement them. To give an example of this, when I was a senior in college, one of my final projects was to build a web app, and my idea was to build something I called A.M. Panic. It was an app where you'd have to log in before a certain time each morning and tell the app you were awake, otherwise it would send an embarrassing email to someone like your mom. This app idea was actually the precursor to the early wake-up system I use now, which I detailed in this video, but when I was working on it, I found myself in a time crunch. So, to help me finish it on time, I broke the project down into the individual sections I needed to code and then prioritized them based on this Impact-Effort Matrix. The core functions, the code that ran the scheduling and email delivery systems, and the code that let the user tell the system they were awake, those things took a lot of effort to build, but they were also the most high-impact parts of the project. On the other hand, some parts of the site, like the About page, the FAQ page, the Contact page, those things were lower-impact, but they were also really easy to implement. They didn't take much time, and because of that, I made sure to include them to make the project seem more complete. The main element of the site I chose not to focus on as much was the registration and login system. A good one should have functionality to reset passwords, but I felt that I didn't have time to do everything, so I focused more of my time on the alarm functions, because that was rather the point of the project, and I just grabbed old code from a previous project for registration and login. And this decision did pay off. The code that ran the alarm portion of the system was more advanced than most of the other projects in the class, so I ended up getting an A. Taking this back to you, to assign impact and effort scores to each component of your project, or to each assignment if you're juggling multiple, consider the following factors. What the core deliverables are, the grading criteria for the project, which components count for the most points, what percentage of your grade each assignment counts for overall, and how much each component will contribute to the knowledge you need to have for tests, which usually impact your grade the most. Once you've assigned a score to each component of the project, I think it's a good idea to tackle the ones that have the highest impact, but also the highest effort first. This is due to something called ego depletion, a phenomenon described in Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Citing research from the psychologist Roy Baumeister, he reveals that an effort of will or self-control is tiring. If you have to force yourself to do something, you're less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. So use the bulk of your willpower to deal with those high-impact, high-effort tasks first. That way, later on, you'll only have the high-impact, low-effort tasks to tackle when you're feeling drained. And that is where we're going to wrap this video. If you select your location wisely, plan based on impact and effort, and tackle your tasks in an order that utilizes your willpower effectively, you're going to get through this time crunch in one piece. If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful, then give it a like to support this channel, and I would love to hear any additional tips you have down in the comments. And of course, we will cover additional strategies in the future, especially regarding how to deal with procrastination. Well, that's all I got for you guys, so as always, thanks for watching, and I will see you next week. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to get new ones on being a more effective student every single week, then click that big red subscribe button right there. I also wrote a full-length book on earning better grades, and if you'd like to get a free copy of it, you can click the picture of the book to get one. You can also find a summary and additional resources at the companion blog post, which you'll find by clicking the orange logo right there. And in last week's video, we talked about what to do if you feel you have too many interests and need to prioritize your time. So check it out if you didn't see it. Lastly, if you want to connect or ask questions, I'm TomFrankly on both Twitter and Instagram, or you can leave a comment below.