How to survive your last holiday before trials

With term 2 coming to a close, trials are just around the corner. Not to freak you out or anything but they’re kind of a big deal.

It’s no secret that to be prepared for trials you have to start these holidays. But it’s also no secret that doing work in the holidays is easier said than done.

The endless temptation of unwatched episodes, exciting holiday events and on demand food seems like a good excuse to ‘study tomorrow’. But sure enough ‘tomorrow’ becomes the day that school goes back, and you’re left staring at that pile of work on your desk wondering why you even bothered bringing it home in the first place.

Lucky for you, studying in these winter holidays is going to be a lot easier. To start with, ‘Game of Thrones’ is now over so TV won’t be as tempting. In terms of exciting holiday events, unless you’re that enthused by the election or are one of those ‘Christmas in July’ type families, there aren’t too many excuses for celebrations. When it comes to on demand food, we can’t really do much to help. But we can give you on demand study advice instead.

Without further ado, here’s our 5 step plan of how to work in the holidays (and actually do it):

Step 1: Make a to-do list

To-do lists get a bad rep. After all, writing a to-do list is the best way to get something done without actually doing it: guilt free ineffective study at its finest. It might seem odd then, that I suggested such a procrastination trap as step 1 on our ‘How to actually do work’ guide. You’re right, it is odd; but as they say, you’ve got to be odd to be number 1!

The secret to making an effective to-do list is to keep it short, specific and realistic. When you’re writing your to-do list for the holidays, think of just one thing for every subject that you have to get done. This could be something like finishing your syllabus notes or writing a particular English essay.

The point is it has to be urgent: something you know you can’t return to school without finishing.

Once you’ve written this, your to-do list is complete.

Don’t get too excited. This doesn’t mean you only have to do one thing for each subject in the holidays. But if you write down every little thing you want to do before school goes back, it’s going to get overwhelming and you won’t know where to start.

By keeping it simple, you’re giving yourself a manageable first step to actually get something done. After this, you can write a new to-do list with your second most important task, and then another one after you’ve finished that.

All in all, writing a to-do list is like going to a buffet breakfast: the less you eat in one go, the more you eat overall. You might start with a bowl of cereal, but sure enough you’ll go back for bacon and eggs, followed by one of every little pastry they have, and suddenly you’ve eaten an entire degustation without realising – what an accomplishment!

If you set smaller, manageable tasks in the short run, and you’ll end up getting through more in the long run!

Step 2: Have a holiday

You’ve worked hard all term and you deserve a break. Just because it’s trials, you shouldn’t deny yourself the little things in life like spending 48 hours in the same pajamas.

Okay, I just told you to write a to-do list, and now I’m telling you not to do it?

You’re probably wondering whether this is a trap or some weird reverse psychology thing, but I have a point.

For the last 10 weeks your brain has been working non-stop; if you keep tiring it out it won’t work as efficiently and you’ll only burn out. If you start studying straight away, you’re only going to crash earlier and let the rest of the holidays be a complete write off.

Allocate yourself between 3-6 days of doing absolutely nothing. Go out with friends, sleep all day, do whatever you want but don’t think about school. You’ve already set yourself what you need to do, and you know that it’s going to be manageable.

Put this list somewhere where you won’t forget about it, and come back to it after you’ve returned from your sabbatical – you’ll have a fresh mind and be more motivated to start working.

The other benefit of having time off at the start of the holidays is that you’ll get all your distractions out of the way and be able to focus more when you go to study later. If you’re someone who finds yourself getting sidetracked from studying by important tasks such as organising your iTunes library or Wikipedia-ing how Bitcoin works, now is the time to get those important tasks done and dusted.

That way, when you find your mind wandering off, it won’t be able to go very far: you’ve already procrastinated before it counted as procrastination.

Step 3: Organise your time and make a plan

So the last week seems to have gone by in a flash and suddenly your ‘holiday’ is over. You’ve made your to-do list and, as the last week has flown by, you’ve spent sufficient time not doing it.

By now, trials are on the very near horizon. With the stress of this, it is excusable for you to spend a moment regretting having so much time off and getting irritated at me for making your life harder than it needed to be.

But instead of dwelling on those thoughts for too long, consider the words of Leonard Bernstein:

‘To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.’

Now that you have one of those two things, it’s time to make the second and write a schedule for how you plan to spend the rest of your holidays.

When organising your study, you need to firstly consider how much time you plan to spend studying. Studying for 10 hours a day might seem like a good idea, but allocating too much time a day to do work is a sure fire way to dig your own grave. The more time you spend chained at your desk, the less productive you’ll be and the more likely you are to sack studying tomorrow.

Similarly, allocating too little time per day is equally as dangerous: you’ll struggle to establish a routine and won’t have a balanced focus on all your subjects. Instead, we recommend studying for around 6-8 hours per day, breaking your study up into 2-3 hour chunks and having a 5 minute break every 30 minutes.

Pre-planning your time will help you make a routine you can maintain whilst alleviating the temptation sponty study break that lasts the rest of the day. We also advise studying at the same time each day, getting started in the morning and having the evenings to relax.

When it comes to planning the study you’re going to do to fill up these 3 hour chunks, the key is to keep it balanced and keep it specific. If you have a whole day to do ‘Chemistry’ you’ll end up tip-toeing around the stuff you don’t want to do, jumping back and forth between topics and generally lacking direction.

Lucky for you, you’ve already got specific tasks on your to-do list, so you can slot those into your plan.

You shouldn’t spend all day on only one subject – no matter how much you might enjoy it or think you need to spend time on it, everyone gets sick of too much of the one thing after a while.

So to summarise Step 3:

• Plan 6-8 hour days, starting in the morning and having the evenings off.
• Give yourself allocated 5 minute breaks every 30 minutes, and larger breaks every 2-3 hours.
• Work through your tasks on the to-do list with 1 subject per 2-3 hour block of study.

Step 4: Get out of the house

During the term, studying from home works reasonably well. Having a good study space can be a distraction free way of getting as much work done as possible, without even needing to put on pants.

Holidays, however, are a different story.

No matter how productive you think you can be at home, cabin fever is very real. When you’ve been chained to the same desk in the same room for days on end, it doesn’t take long for you to realise that there’s nobody around to judge you if your quick trip to the kitchen takes you on a journey to the couch and eventually back to bed.

Lucky for you, there’s an easy fix: go to the library.

Believe it or not, studies show that studying in a public space can double your productivity.

When you’re in the library, you have a lot of people holding you accountable for doing work. If you sat down at the library, did nothing for 15 minutes and then got up and left, you have a lot of people watching you, silently judging as you do the walk of shame on your way out.

Likewise, sitting at a desk where everyone can see your computer screen tends to make you feel pretty self-conscious if you spend the entire day on Facebook.

At the very least, if you’ve made the effort to get dressed and trek to the library, you’ve already overcome the first hurdle of motivating yourself to do work for the day. Apart from looking at local history archives or participating in your council’s elderly discussion forum there isn’t too much else to do at the library: you may as well study.

Step 5: Remind yourself of what’s coming

If you’ve made it through the first 4 steps and are still facing the all-too-familiar battle of chronic procrastination, you aren’t alone.

Without the pressure that comes from constant nagging from teachers it’s easy to forget the importance of doing work: out of sight out of mind. To keep yourself on track, it’s important you remind yourself of what’s coming and why you need to try. Of course, putting too much pressure on yourself is never a good thing, but a little bit of stress is enough to keep you motivated.

All in all, studying in the holidays doesn’t have to be the uphill battle it’s made out to be.

With our 5 step guide you can minimise distractions, be productive and give yourself a holiday at the same time: everyone wins.

So follow this guide to a T, and come day 1 of term 3 when everyone’s complaining that they got nothing done, you’ll be smugly smiling to yourself knowing that you had the most productive holiday ever.