Plan out projects and studying

      Most of us love to procrastinate. We just do. We want to put everything off to the last minute so we don't have to do it now. But on the last day or very last minute we have to do work, we make a mad scramble to finish it. This isn't efficient use of time and we forget to take the time to review and evaluate what we just done and learned.
      Say you have a big midterm in two weeks. You choose to wait the very last day to study for it. Cramming one-two months of work in one day doesn't seem possible but you make it possible. Here some of the issues with this...

      As you are skimming your notes, you come across something you don't understand. You can't ask your teacher for help since it's the last night. You may be able to call your friends for help but they may be in the same predicament as you. What now? Essentially, you are left on your own to figure it out... Bummer...
      You are skimming your notes in a rush because you are on a time constraint. You only take seconds to glance at something that took your teacher one hour to explain to your class. The problem with this you don't take the time to actually understand the material. But most importantly, you don't how to apply the material to real world situations. In reality, my question is what have you really learned?
      Say you succeed in cramming before your test so you have learned the material but can you comprehend what you learned it? When your final exam comes up, you will have to recram rather than if you took the time to understand the material, you would know most of it already.
     My father is a great/horrible example of this. Once the meteorologist on TV gives him the green light for great weather, he quickly dashes into our garage. He gathers all his planting tools to get to work immediately. He gets so much work done early on and makes all the spring sales at Loews, Home Depot and Menards. Here's where he's productive and getting work done efficiently. On the other hand, he's horrible with getting work done around the house. My mother will rant how he never does anything to fix our family room. One year later, he will finally rip out the carpet. Moral of the story, if he got it done earlier on, he wouldn't have to listen to her constantly bug him about it but at least they are happily married!
      Here's where a part of my life where I was successful. My friends called me an overachiever for getting school projects done early. But by working on it early, I didn't have to scramble to get the help of the teacher. I could plan out small increments of time to work on my project rather than one long interval in the end. It's not time consuming, if I just spend thirty minutes per day on it rather than being on Facebook and Twitter.
     For example, I have a paper to write about for introduction to ethics and morals. The paper has to be at least 1500 words(5 pages double-spaced) and its due in one week. The first day, I would just brainstorm ideas for my paper. Most likely, I will get a piece of paper and just list out my ideas. The second day, I would try to connect my ideas to develop an argument by just outlining my paper. The third day, I would look at my outline and write my paper continuously without stopping. The fourth day, I would look at my paper and evaluate any structure errors I had and edit that. The fifth day, I would read through my paper again and checking for any minor errors. That's all that's necessary to planning out a paper. The extra two days would be a cushion, if any emergency came up or I didn't have time during some days. See it's just that simple. Yet, you are being efficient with the use of your time.
      You don't have to plan out your life to be successful. Planing out your major tasks can be helpful though. Ironically, this blog will be posted on Tuesday, October 20th yet I wrote it Friday, October 16 since I have mid-terms coming up soon. Take this piece as a suggestion because this has been successful for me. But other methods may have been successful for others.