Sydney Life

After goodness-knows how many years attempting to perfect the technique of studying, I have finally mastered the art.

Read on for my words of wisdom (if you can’t guess what it is from the title of this post).

So, my StuVac has drawn to a slightly unwelcome close today. With my first exam tomorrow, for which I feel I am completely underprepared, the official study vacation is gone.

StuVac began with the long weekend. Which, naturally, I decided to take off. After a slippery slope down the wicked road of procrastination, I ended up not studying for the first three entire days of the official StuVac (that is, after the long weekend). On the Wednesday afternoon, however, I bumped into a friend of mine, and while taking a break (from what was actually an entire day of “breaks”) we decided to do some study(!).

We sat down and didn’t let ourselves talk to each other until we’d done 20 full minutes of study.

And it worked.

Now, 20 minutes doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but to someone who had been using any excuse to avoid study for the past week or so (eg bumping into ANYONE and roping them into the longest conversation possible) it was a refreshing taste of what was to come. During my recent study-escaping escapades, I basically came to uni each day and still managed to not do any work. Once I got myself invited to a lunch which ended up taking two hours and consequently the day was completely lost for study purposes. I practically started dating Lauren in attempts to get away from work, so much so that we had dinner twice at the Lansdowne in one night.

Anyway, after this miracle 20 minutes we were hooked. We planned to meet up on the Friday and attempt our new technique, all day.

The “20 minute” thing died pretty quickly, but in a good way. We studied for longer periods of time with the occasional 5 minute break. We planned lunch, email-checking breaks and coffee breaks. It went so well, we came in to uni on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and lastly today to continue the trend.

The funniest thing is that we have no subjects in common (he does engineering/commerce) and in fact this is a bonus. Had we been doing the same subject, we would have inevitably started chatting about it with the pretext of it being study related, and then gone off onto a tangent and realised some 3 hours later that we were discussing Facebook groups. Bad plan.

The mere fact that someone was there next to me studying, made me plod along to do my own work. Though we have noted an alarming trend otherwise known as the “4pm silly hour” during which everything anyone does is completely hilarious and we can’t concentrate on anything work related. We can trace this back to concientious studying for nearly 7 hours straight.

The CRAZIEST thing is, I don’t feel tired of studying, or lethargic due to over-studying. I am actually amazed at how well this has been working, and I truly don’t think I’ve studied this much for a set of exams ever before.

Believe me, I am the most insane procrastinator ever to live. No, I know you think you are, but I’m sure I can trump your efforts (or lack thereof). So if I can turn a new leaf and implement this regime, so can you!

Furthermore, because of how much study I’ve been doing during the day, I don’t feel bad taking the evenings off to watch some of my favourite quality tv shows (eg Greys), or even spare some time to go on a couple of dates on the side (still up for this Thursday, Lauren? I owe you that second dinner.)