Work Now, Play Later

We all remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper. The grasshopper played all summer long while the ant worked at setting aside food. When winter came, the ant survived because he had food, and the grasshopper died a horrible and slow death of starvation and exposure. Maybe the story you were told had a gentler ending, but when you’re a college student, reality is harsh. Getting bad grades will severely hinder your future. Bad habits of procrastination and too much play are among the culprits.

Habit #14: Work now, play later

Procrastination is a problem that plagued me throughout high school and college. I would get an assignment in class and swear up and down that I would finish the assignment well before it was due so that I could make changes and polish my work to a level near perfection. Nearly always, even with these good intentions, I would later wonder why I was staying up for forty-eight hours straight to finish a project. The end result was never what it could have been had I paced myself and spent time earlier working on the assignment. Worse, I knew this, and had only myself to blame. Despite telling myself that the hastily assembled project was my best work, I knew the truth.

Even while I was “playing”—goofing off, really—I also knew in the back of my mind that I had schoolwork to do, so I could never fully let go and actually enjoy the leisure time. It was a Catch-22, where I wasn’t getting things done and I wasn’t enjoying extracurricular activities to the fullest. Thankfully, I was able to get my head on straight toward the end of my time as an undergraduate and made concerted efforts to finish assignments before they were due. In law school, this became a requirement, not just a “good practice.”

Procrastination was hardly unique to me. This hinders most students. We have the best intentions, largely because we know deep down that college is good for us—and we might even enjoy the project. I was in a screenwriting class one semester, doing something that I absolutely loved (and still love), yet I still had issues with putting assignments off. Maybe it was the fact that I lived less than half hour away from some of the best ski slopes in the world, or maybe it was those college parties everyone hears about, but I simply didn’t make the time to finish projects and assignments in advance of their due date. The result was always something less than it could have been.

Finally, after many failed attempts to overcome procrastination, I decided simply that if I was in college, I was going to do college to the best of my ability. I made a goal to make a daily schedule for everything I had to do, including a well-paced schedule for finishing large projects well ahead of their due dates, and I promised myself that I would do everything on my daily schedule before doing anything else. And when I say anything else, I mean everything else: I didn’t watch TV, play games, read books, hang with friends, chill with my girlfriend…I did nothing until my work was done.

I had a few missteps, of course, but it mostly worked—and I found that the quality of my schoolwork increased greatly. Because I naturally wanted to be doing things other than studying and finishing assignments, I made the time to get everything done that pertained to school as early in the day as possible, freeing up the rest of the day for whatever I needed to get done (or just wanted to do).

Crucially, there was another benefit: I found, to my surprise, that once I buckled under to get the work done, I could actually get the work done faster than I thought I could, so I was actually not spending that much more time! I was getting high-quality work done, earlier, and I was able to watch TV, play games, read books, hang with friends, and chill with my girlfriend. This is the efficiency part of being effective and efficient.

The trick is to schedule easily manageable chunks of work to do each day—then finish every item on your list before you tackle anything else. If your list includes items that are too broad, such as “Do 25-page paper” and “Study ch. 4-8 in Sociology,” then your list is not sufficiently precise. Instead, write “draft outline for paper x by Monday noon.” That’s something that can be done, allowing you to move on to the next item, perhaps “Study ch. 4 in Sociology.” The next list will have “Edit draft of sections I-II in paper” and “Study ch. 5 in Sociology.” Everything in school (or anywhere else) can be done—if it is sufficiently broken down. Even if it’s harder, it can be done. Actually, especially if it’s harder, it must be done. And it must be done in chewable bites.

You should take it one step at a time. You will succeed.

Make it a habit to work now and play later. Not only will your school work improve, but you’ll also be able to produce high-quality, time-intensive projects. You will enjoy your “play” even more, knowing that after working hard and making real progress, you really can play…without guilt.

As an important side note, it’s useful to emphasize just how much everything in your college career will stick with you for the rest of your life, and especially for your early career. It’s not that you’ll walk around your retirement villa boasting about your GPA (or at least I hope not), but it is true that how well you do in college will make a difference to your graduate school prospects and in your efforts to secure your first professional job, whether or not you do go on to graduate school first. These are highly interdependent: admissions committees and recruiters both care about grades, not just for the grades themselves but more deeply for what they represent. Each individual grade, while not vital in and of itself, contributes to your GPA. Your GPA, because it is important in getting that first job or getting into graduate school, is a piece of the whole pie and will play a part in determining your future.