It is that time of term again; classes are over, essays are in, and it is time to have a sit down with your lecture notes and get real friendly. Revision can be both dreaded as it signals your next 14 days chained to your laptop and happily anticipated as a checkpoint out of classes and into the last few weeks before summer. For me, I view our two weeks of revision as somewhat of a purgatory between the heaven of term routine and the hell of exams (9:30am exam on a Saturday? Is that really necessary?).
But many of us (all of us, don’t lie to yourself) get distracted. The Internet machine is a technological mind hack apparatus packed with procrastination techniques and baby animal videos. The option to open Word and type up your notes is quickly circumvented by the easier option to open Safari and check your queue of social media outlets.
For instance, it’s the first Monday of revision, you still have 12 days to pull your self together, so you treat yourself and sleep until 11:30am. At the crack of noon you pull yourself in the direction of the warm hum of your laptop and open up Facebook, email, and Twitter just to get a bearing on the day’s material. After a quick glance up and down your news feed, a clickety-click through your 50 or so emails, and a once over of your Twitter feed, it’s time to have a bowl of cereal and some caffeine, because “today will be productive”… Anyways, you are crunching on your cereal and you login to Tumblr and scroll through your dash. While your at it you open up Pinterest to look at everyone’s beautiful pretty perfect lives and Buzzfeed where you catch up on all the important news of, wait Oh My Gosh “24 Reason To Be Thankful For John Krasinski” umm yes, click! Scroll, scroll, scroll, oh look at that, you realize it’s time to recheck Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, email, oh and Reddit (almost forgot). Okkkk, feeling satisfied with your handle on life and your knowledge of such worldly events happening in far off countries you look at the time, 4pm! What?! Well I guess it is just time to give up now folks because you have another two notifications to attend to and you haven’t even caught up on American TV from last night.
As we all know too well, this is revision: two weeks of constantly attending to your social media obligations and repeatedly pulling yourself out of TV watching delirium to get a snack. Procrastination is, in my opinion, not an intentional delay that we chose to take action on at the beginning of each day, but it is the unavoidable result of the flurry of social media outlets that people of our generation keep up on. But never fear, there are ways to control the monster so that your afternoons do not fade into evenings, or in extreme cases, into the wee hours of the morning on Skype, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Firstly, set boundaries. From the moment you wake up you have 1 hour to frolic on the social media playground. Then it is time to eat something and buckle down for at least two hours.
- Every few hours have a snack, juice, or a cup of coffee to keep you satisfied and focused on things not concerning food. We all know the staring in the pantry/fridge shenanigans; it can be a black whole of time.
- Do not let your laptop even get close to the buttons on the seam of your fluffy white duvet. As soon as you take your laptop to bed you are passively entertained and your mind is absorbed into the false reality of the digital world.
- Do not ever type in the words DailyMailShowBiz into Google… the article feeder on the right is a never-ending stream of distraction and could in fact possibly be the end to your existence, or so I am told.
- Lastly, figure out how much sleep you need to be a happy person the next day and use that number to set yourself up with a consistent bedtime. I know it sounds juvenile, but it worked when you were four and it will hopefully mean that you can start waking up before lunchtime.
In addition to just studying, revision is a time for embracing the natural sleep cycle of teenage boys, traveling whenever possible, eating incalculable quantities of chocolate, and accepting the inevitable hours you will spend surfing the web. But by acknowledging all these faults in our study habits we can hopefully have the discipline to pick and chose a few (or one) to make an honorable stand against and say “absolutely not!” in the face of procrastination. So good luck young padawans, you are gonna need it.
P.S. If you finish reading this article and go straight to Facebook, I don’t blame you. I did the same thing…