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My #1 Secret to a Low Stress Semester
No matter how you slice it, a semester of high school or college is a lot of work, which means planning enough time to get it all done is imperative. One such time management plan, affectionately known as “cramming,” consists of putting everything off to the absolute last minute and then hastily completing the work in a panic. While the act of rushing work to complete a deadline can be detrimental to the work’s quality, I want to emphasize the mental side of this. While the quality of the work you complete may be lower than if the work was steadily evenly out over a longer period of time, it is the higher amounts of stress you will face that will be really taxing. Especially when sustained over many semesters, your physical and mental health can decay more quickly than you’d imagine.
The secret is the following: a lot of people say the first week of classes (in any given semester) is for getting ramped up and “back into the swing of things.” While it may take a week or two for the workload to get to its maximum levels, that instills a false sense of comfort in students. It makes it seem OK to take the first week off and start your assignments and studying at the beginning of the second week. This is a deadly trap because you are putting yourself a week behind, right at the start of the semester, for no good reason. You had all summer/winter break to recharge, so in my opinion…