You may already know that getting your sleep is important for your mental and physical health. But, did you also know that it’s important for writing papers too? Honestly, writing strong papers is hard in general. Now if you’re also not sleeping well enough to even function properly, then writing that strong paper is going to be even harder. The solution? Time management!
When I was a first year student, I developed the terrible habit of procrastinating on my assignments. Sadly, that led to pulling all-nighters on a regular basis. Sure, I got my papers done, but they were never the best quality (and, of course, received poor grades). In an effort to get better at my written work, I googled ways to improve my time management skills and came across the Time Management module developed by the Student Success Office. One strategy that I picked up from the module, which I still use to this day, is having a master schedule.
My master schedule has everything that I plan to do on a daily basis from going to classes to taking a break. To stop procrastinating, I make sure to regularly slot in times when I need to be writing and have a small goal that I plan to complete by the end of my writing session. On top of intentionally setting aside time to write, I have a fixed bedtime in my schedule with an hour leeway to unwind from my long day. The change did wonders for my concentration! The things that I started writing about were more complex because my brain didn’t feel like it had turned to mush after having stayed up all night. As a busy grad student, my master schedule helps to make sure that I’m not constantly groggy and am actually focusing my brain power on coming up with strong content to write about in my papers.
Source: steamusercontent.net
So what should you take away from all this? Well, you should note the importance of time management to writing productively and being able to produce quality written work. Even though time management was the star of this blog post, it is really sleep that is the main hero. Whether you get a good night’s sleep or not can end up determining how much you are able to concentrate on your writing and the complexity of your thinking in the writing process. It’s no wonder that sleep plays such an important part in our lives.