With the weather improving and flowers blooming comes the long awaited Spring Break. This is your opportunity to catch up on those class assignments, or dissertation chapter you’ve been putting off. You have one week where you don’t have to go to class, so use your time wisely. Use those days and times when you normally would be in class to catch up on reading assignments, or to draft a class paper, or to write an outline of one of your dissertation chapters. If you are taking two classes that means you spend about 5 hours each week in class and hopefully you spend at least another 10 hours outside of class to do class related work, right? So give yourself 15 hours during spring break for studying and writing. Pretend that you actually have class and instead of going to the classroom go to the library, or find a quite room in your house where you can work without distraction. Break the task at hand into smaller pieces and just write or read in two hour intervals. Take Mark Twain’s advice "The secret of getting ahead is getting started; and the secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Having difficulty getting started? Use the 5-minute plan: commit to working on a task for 5 minutes, this tends to build momentum, so often you’ll continue way beyond the first 5 minutes. Or use the bits-and pieces approach and work on a task for small periods of time, commit to writing 2 pages every day, it is better than not writing at all. And at the end of each study session make sure to reward yourself for achieving your goal for that study session or that day. Finally, if all other things fail, come to the DSC for assistance. We’ll be at the DSC during the break<
The image included in this post was created by Kieran Lynam and can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kieranlynam/521435777/in/set-72157600264189754/
