How to be more efficient in college?

Are you procrastinating? Do you want to be more efficient while you work? Read this blog to understand some ways to increase your efficiency at work.

It's really important to be more efficient when you work. It becomes really hard to complete your work after you pile up everything at the end. Especially in college days, we tend to procrastinate a lot and this leads to piling up of work to the last day, which brings in sleepless nights, working our ass off to complete the work, which hardly showcases our best work.

Become Organised

You can't start your work if you don't know what work to do. So, organize your work properly. Prepare a planner for yourself to keep track of all your work, deadlines, etc,. You can use the Google calendar app to organize your work. You can switch on notifications so that you keep receiving notifications when a deadline is near. I personally use my in-built mobile calendar app and Google calendar app to add all my deadlines, class schedules, and more.

Apart from these, I use Microsoft Planner which is really good to organize your work. You can create different buckets so that you can dump different tasks into different buckets. You can add a new task by entering the task name and setting a due date for that task. You can even assign the task to different people in your organization. So, many people can use the same planner to plan for the team project together. You can move tasks from one bucket to another.

There are a ton of other apps on the internet to try for organizing your work. You can find some of them in the following links,

Create a schedule

It's really important to have a schedule. Without a schedule, you feel there is a lot of time for the assignment deadlines, and hence you procrastinate. So, it's good to prepare a schedule and follow it strictly.

Time management is really important here to make a schedule that can actually be followed. So, you need to spend some quality time analyzing the workload of different assignments and schedule your day or week accordingly. It's important to have some breaks in between so that you don't burn out your fuel. I usually keep assignments in the evening when I can work peacefully without any distractions. And I schedule some reading stuff in between classes.

But you need to sit down and analyze your current schedule for classes and then decide upon when to plugin different components so that the overall efficiency is improved.

Set intermediate deadlines

This tip is super important to avoid procrastinating. Setting intermediate deadlines help you complete subtasks early and hence boost your work progress so that you can skip the sleepless nights in the final days.

I break down my assignments into subtasks. Then I prepare a schedule and plan deadlines for these subtasks. If I complete any subtask early, then I replan the remaining subtasks so that I don't waste my time waiting for this completed subtask's deadline to pass.

And this helps you look at a large take as a bunch of small tasks which doesn't deteriorate your interest when you look at the work. Any large task will make our mind lazy. This is human nature, we can't help it. So, instead of complaining about our mind, we can break down large tasks into smaller subtasks which our mind can digest easily and we can avoid procrastinating.

Get away from distractions

College students are very much prone to distractions. They have a whole lot of freedom given which makes them circled with distractions. But it is important to have self-control and avoid these distractions. You need to be dedicated to your work to complete it successfully with your best efforts.

I generally keep my mobile in silent mode before I start my work so that any notification sounds don't disturb me while I work. This is very important for me because I have a tonne of WhatsApp groups for different courses and hence a lot of notifications.

Some people can concentrate on their work in noisy areas also. But background noises can be very distracting to some (like me). So, you can switch on some soft music to avoid these background noises from distracting you. I generally put on my headphones and listen to the chill mix to work without noises. It's important to choose smooth music.

Take breaks

Taking breaks is really important when you want to work for long hours. Without breaks in between, you exhaust your fuel and will subsequently postpone the work.

I usually follow the 5:1 ratio, which means I work for around 50 minutes, then take a break for 10 minutes. During the break, I usually take a nap by closing my eyes to give some rest to my eyes as I'll be working mostly on a laptop.

But this is not always the case. Sometimes, when I'm very much involved in my work, I don't take breaks in between. I keep working until I feel like I'm losing interest. Then I take a bit longer break than usual, have something (mostly juices from the canteen when I'm on campus), and then resume my work.

This is what I follow and it works out well for me. There is another famous time management technique called the Pomodoro Technique. This technique says to divide the tasks and work for 25 minutes cycles taking short breaks in between (usually 3-4 minutes). And after 4 Pomodoro cycles, you can take a long break (usually 15-20 minutes). You can buy a Pomodoro from here.

However, it's not necessary to follow the exact same work intervals as the above techniques. It depends on your capacity to sit continuously on work and how much interested you are in completing the work. So, you can always adjust the intervals and break durations to your comfort for increasing the efficiency.

Finish hard tasks first

Hard tasks are the one which makes us procrastinate. It is usual for any human to get demotivated when we start doing hard tasks. So, it is important to finish off them first so that we will be left with easier ones which we can finish easily.

I'm not a person who follows this tip every time, but this can be useful to some sometimes. I usually finish tasks in order. But I think its important to go through all tasks and understand their difficulty levels first so that we can order them and start working on them.

Start early

This is really important. You have to start as early as possible on your work so that you can put in your best efforts. When you start early, you get a lot of time to understand the work in depth which allows you to put in your best efforts to improvise your work.

I used to postpone my work before, but now I go through the assignments as soon as they are released so that I can start early and improvise my work. As I start early, it's obvious that I finish my work early. Which means I still have some time to improve my work. It can be improving the formatting of the project you're doing, or improving the accuracy of your trained ML model, or vectorizing your code to make it look clean or anything else which makes your work look better.

Conclusion

I think I've listed some important tips to increase work efficiency. But it is very important to sit down and decide which tips work for you because the tip which worked for me doesn't need to work for you also.

I'm dropping some links below which talks about some more tips which can help you increase your efficiency.

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