Homework — one of the most dreaded words that a student can ever encounter in his life. Assignments, projects, studies and preparation for examination — with so many tasks to complete, it indeed becomes difficult for a student to complete his homework. You might have to spend time with your family, have some events and other commitments to fulfil or even go for a sport practice.
Though you do not get enough time or have the willingness to do loads of homework every day, there are teachers, who will assign tasks anyway. But, homework completion can be easy and can be done fast with these simple and easy steps.
- Get organised:
The first step for getting started with anything is to get organised. As you are going to complete your assignments, you need to make sure that you have everything at your stretch. Students often do not realize that they waste a lot of time in finding their books, notebooks, assignment details, pens, papers and other accessories that they might be in need of.
Have everything organised all at a place. Spend a little time in thinking what you might be in need of. Rushing to the school time and again, asking your dad to drive down to bring something from your school locker isn’t cool at all! You can have a binder to have your notebooks and assignment details all clubbed together in a single folder.
- Start your homework as early as possible:
This is a very important tip and the second step for homework completion that I always recommend to my kids. As a teacher, what I have seen is that most students fail to complete their assignments and homework on time, as they haven’t started it on time. The earlier you start, the sooner it will finish. It is even more useful that you start on the very day as you get the assignment.
What most students make a mistake about is to delay in doing their assignments. The burden and tension that you have to complete your homework will diminish all the fun for that evening. Hence, it is very useful and effective that as soon as you come back from school, college or university; take a little break and start your homework at once.
If you are intelligent, you would start your assignments right at the end of a class, when your teacher gives you 5 extra minutes to complete your task. Rather than talk with your friends or line up at the door, you should start to utilize this time. Think — 5 minutes of extra time after every period, that would make about 30 minutes of extra time every day. Now that is indeed useful!
- Find a suitable place:
Homework completion often requires a suitable environment and setting. If you choose a place, where there is too much noise, chaos and events happening to distract you, it is not an ideal place for completing your task.
I prefer and recommend that you have a study room of your own. It is not just any room without TV or social networks. A study room must have a carefully designed setting and ambience that makes you feel better. Make sure you do not plug in the headphone to your ears. Rather, you can choose to turn a calm and soothing music in the music system. This often helps in concentrating more.
- Sit comfortably:
It takes quite a lot of time to complete assignments and projects. Comfort plays a big role in ensuring that your task is completed faster. It is not yoga that you are practicing. The purpose is to do your task, fast! Sit as you like — in any manner that you feel comfortable. Just make sure that you do not lie down. You might fall asleep, if the assignment is boring.
- Choose the easiest task fast:
Homework assignments can often be quite boring. In such a case, you will often try and escape your tasks for the day and hold it for the next day. But, if you start with the easy assignments first, unknowingly, you will find a number of your assignments getting completed on time. It is a very useful step that will take you towards completion of your assignments.
When it is your turn to do the tough assignments, do not consider it as a TASK! Rather, think of it as an alternative for “active learning”. The more you dig into books, references and the more you work hard to have a tough assignment get done, the better will be your learning.
- Make a timetable:
It is a very important step that you make a timetable for yourself to complete the tasks. The timetable will help you to plan beforehand, how much time you must assign to each and every assignment, in order to complete them on time. If you have more than one assignment, planning before you start will ensure that you manage time well. Otherwise, you might end up spending an entire evening with many projects still left undone.
- Take a break:
When you do your homework, you are not doing it just for the sake of doing it. The purpose is to learn from it. Continuously being engaged in a same task makes your mind dull and unable to come up with useful ideas. Taking a break every hour is a very good idea and a step that you must take after every hour. You can take a break of about 15 minutes.
In this time, you can watch something light hearted, listen to music or even search something over the internet that will help you complete the project. But make sure that the break should be a short interval and not a never-ending or long one. Otherwise, it will kill your time and you will be left with too many tasks to complete.
- Seek help:
There can be time, when you are absolutely helpless and clueless about how to proceed with the assignments. In that case, you need to find out people, who can help you. It can be a senior or someone in your family, who knows about the very subject. If none of these are an option for you, the best way is to seek for a professional help.
There are homework and assignment help companies that offer affordable help services for completing your assignment. But, if you want to try on your own, you can visit a library. A librarian will be able to answer your questions or recommend books that will be useful for you. You can even ask for help from your teacher. Teachers are there to help you, not to threaten you or prove you unworthy.
- Keep an incentive at the end of every assignment:
Incentives are always very helpful for the completion of any task. You can have a video game session at the end of every assignment that you complete or you can have something that you like most. Even a little time with your phone, a chat with your friends can be an incentive. It is up to you what you need to set as an incentive. It could be a little indulgence for your sweet tooth or a walk or cycling session down the road.
But, incentives are there only to encourage you and inspire you to complete the task faster. You must not be tempted with these incentives and decrease the quality of your task. You can have a monitor at home, who will control the incentives and knock you time and again about how much you are supposed to indulge in the incentive.
- Do not multitask:
I have often seen students doing a great mistake and that is multitasking, in terms of trying to complete more than one assignment at a time. If you think that doing too many tasks at a time, concentrating on too many homework assignments at a time will complete them faster, you are absolutely mistaken.
Start with one assignment first and do not let it go unless and until you complete it. Distributing your concentration into too many projects will drain your ideas and you will be confused about how to proceed with either. What you need to do is, concentrate on a single project and with your entire stamina, try and complete it. Handling too many subjects at a time will lead to forget the earlier and while trying to remember how much you have completed, you will lose a lot of time.
With these easy steps, you will be able to complete your homework, not just fast, but better! Congratulations on your success. You should reward yourself at the end of a stressful and homework-full evening. Watch something that you like; indulge in a bit of gaming or social networking. Once you have completed your homework, you are free to do anything that you like. So, store all these things and tasks that you like, as a reward at the end of your homework session.