3 Ways to Screw Up Your Graduation Work Without Realizing
Avoid letting your graduation work become a horror
“Some people dream about success, while others wake up and work hard at it.” — Winston Churchill
The graduation is a part of the lives of many of us. Probably, the longest mandatory project you go through until graduation.
After finishing my Bachelor degree two years ago, I am now about writing my Master thesis until September.
Once I had a quite annoying feeling while thinking about writing down my results at the end of the semester. I just didn’t feel comfortable with writing such an amount of coherent scientific content.
But during the last two years, while entering the field of productivity and personal development, I found some very helpful methods which should help me a lot writing my master thesis and especially showed me how not to do it.
If you want to complete your graduation work without hard effort and still score a good grade in the end, quit making the following five huge mistakes easily which are made by the vast majority of the graduates.
“Easy choices hard life, hard choices easy life.” — Jerzy Gregorek
- You intend to finish the work on deadline
- You set your writing time to the last x weeks before the deadline
- You don’t make writing a priority
Set your own deadline
“The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.” — Nolan Bushnell
Most people take the date when they have to finish as the deadline. Unfortunately, they don’t know, setting one’s own deadline is a powerful tool to enhance productivity and the probability to finish on time easily.
Once you realize, you always finished your stuff on deadline, it gets clear that setting an own deadline is powerful.
Do you remember some time where you didn’t finish your task until this deadline?
Probably not. It might have been very close but most likely you still managed to do it somehow with the prize of a little extra late night stress.
Next time, you have some task for a well-defined time span, set your own deadline a day or a week earlier depending on the time span. The earlier you set the deadline the more you tend to work on your task.
While writing my thesis, I have the opportunity to hand single parts of my work to my professor. I told her before starting to work on the topic in March, I will give her the theoretical part of my thesis already in June although I have to finish not until the end of September. So to start, I set my deadline for June.
It worked easily.
Work AND write regularly
“Excellence is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle
In the heads of the most students a homework assignment works like this:
- Research
- Research
- Research
- Writing
Neglecting the fact they nearly never stick to that schedule and transform it more into a
- Thinking about the work
- Overthinking the work
- Research (a little bit)
- Panic writing
the, in their head, “optimal” approach isn’t the best way to choose.
It’s a matter of persistence. Learning and living persistence is one of the most important lessons in reaching any big goal. Make writing a habit over the full time of your work and you will achieve great results in a manner of simplicity.
Weekly milestones are extremely helpful for making progress in such longterm projects. Plan your week every Sunday evening or Friday afternoon and set your goals.
Furthermore, you should have a rough outline of the whole work from the very beginning. Don’t create your outline after your research. Always have an outline in the back of your mind to make your direction clear. Of course, you should regularly improve this outline, but waking up after months of research with a whole chaos of information only make the whole process more difficult.
Always focus on the whole thing and write in parallel on a regular basis.
Make writing your priority
“You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” — Jodi Picoult
If you want to write a high-quality graduation work or essay, writing should be your priority. For the most people, writing is the scary part of the entire work.
Especially if you are not really familiar with writing, you should write regularly and start as early as possible.
What I mean by “making it your priority” is especially, you should schedule your writing.
What worked as a wonder for me and made it possible to finish the theoretical part of my thesis not only until June but even until the end of April was to write directly in the morning every morning for about 30–45 minutes.
If you work on such a regular basis with a relatively small amount of time, it still sums up quite rapidly. In the end, I saved about 20 hours of writing, I don’t have to invest at a later point in time.
If you save everything up for the end, the 20 hours of writing might enlarge to 30 hours of writing because you already have so much content in mind from all the work you already did. Stress would be the logical next step and this disturbs focus and clarity. You want to have focus and clarity while writing.
By creating a small result of a long-term project directly in the morning, you do not only have a good feeling of making progress but also a general feeling of getting your things done. This feeling fuels yourself for a great day.
To be clear, write a little bit every morning in the first 60–90 minutes. It doesn’t matter if you write 10 or 100 lines. For the long term, the results will be huge.
Call to Action
If you like this article and want to get to know further valuable information and methods about improving productivity, focus, and clarity, subscribe to my private mailing list.
