We’ve all heard of the ever-procrastinating student, the last-minute maven. Their tales of submitted a term paper at 11:59:59 ring through our ears as we put off our reading for just one more day. Then, low and behold, it’s a Sunday night and a week’s worth of work falls into our laps, begging like a hungry dog for scraps of attention.
Well, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, this weekly catastrophe is something most people opt into by default. Sure, you can complain all day about your classes overloading you — sometimes they do — but more often than not, you’re failing to acknowledge you have opted into a lifestyle which requires organization and planning for success.
If that sounds harsh, then you probably need to deepen your critical thinking about success: it requires hard work. It doesn’t matter if you were labeled gifted or talented in high school, took tons of Advanced Placement courses or were always the teacher’s favorite, and it doesn’t matter if you got a GRE years after dropping out, failed high school algebra or could never quite master the SATs either. By identifying goals and laying out the steps to those goals, you’re being proactive and that’s honestly half the battle. Your professors give you syllabi for a reason, so use them. That huge test won’t sneak up on you after a night out if it’s been written on your calendar for two months and if you study a little every day, taking it won’t feel so daunting.
Organization isn’t just for academics either, it’s for making sure you don’t forget about that date with that one really cute girl you asked out or miss the interview for a potential job at Whole Foods. Your checking account would probably be grateful if it wasn’t always emptied in five days or less and your future won’t seem so scary if you have a Plan A and Plan B scrawled out on paper. Neglecting to think about your future, short-term or long-term, might feel nice now, but it will come back to bite you when you need to apply for graduate school or plan your retirement.
You can shout to the ends of the earth that you prefer to remember the 15 assignments you have due over the course of the next three days or about how going with the flow is the answer to life’s problems, but at the end of the day, you’re at a transition point in your life which demands you put energy into maintaining family relationships, forging new friendships, working, studying, discovering your identity and much more. Without a little bit of planning here and there, you’re bound to spread yourself too thin, and it might be too late to bounce back.
