Beat Procrastination: Your Guide to Reading Week
Reading week is approaching fast. Usually it comes in the first weeks of November, but your dates might be different — all depending on where and what you study.
When yours comes around, it gives you a great opportunity to shed some weight off your workload. And your student accommodation becomes a great base to do this from, so long as you can avoid the urge to procrastinate. We know procrastination can be a pain, so after thinking about it a bit, making a coffee, reading around, and browsing Reddit and Pinterest, we got our sleuthing hats on and collected all the best information we found around the internet.
5 Reading Week Tips
1. Buckle down with books
By now you’ll be familiar with the library and where to get the books and resources for your course. Take a list with you and collect what you need. If you need help, there are always plenty of friendly librarians around so don’t be afraid to ask them for the intel.
2. Clear out clutter
Some of the big brains at Princeton recently conducted a study that said clutter hinders your ability to think with clarity. When you’ve got a lot of information to process, the last thing you want is your environment making that job any more challenging. Declutter your physical space and free up your headspace.
3. Make a map
Plan and map out everything you need to do over the week. Reading week gives you a great opportunity to catch up and nail down any areas you might find a little tricky. And if you put a little plan together of what you need to do, psychologist Robert Cialdini believes that you’ll find your inner desire to be consistent helps you stick to it.
4. Balance with breaks
Another study, this time by the brains at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, says that the common maxim ‘it’s important to take breaks’ is right. If the study is correct, then when your mind starts to wander a little break will help you refocus on the task at hand. But don’t let this turn into procrastination and equally don’t feel the need to stop if you’re on a roll!
5. Max and relax with music
As the guys at Lifehacker point out, when we ask if music makes us more productive the research is so conflicted that we often hear either “Listening to Mozart makes you a genius” or “Just be quiet and work.”
It turns out that if you’re the kind of person who gets a boost from music, it might be a good idea to experiment with your tunes and see if any particular style provides you with more focus, so you can get your research done.
Find Your Focus
During reading week, if you find yourself propping up a bar, give a thought to how you could tackle that procrastination and use these tips to help you focus on the task at hand.
No matter where you set up base for your own research and sleuthing, if you follow a plan, we’re sure your reading week will be a success. And if you’re lucky enough to be based down south at our accommodation in London, or way up north at our accommodation in Edinburgh, you’ll have a stylish room to study in too.
To find out more about our accommodation, talk with us via the internet tubes.