Raise your hand if procrastination has a hold on you. You might be reading this right now because you’re procrastinating in writing a memo, starting an outline, or reading for contracts.
Procrastination happens for a number of reasons: fear, fatigue, and/or failure to plan. It can be a huge hurdle for law students, but it’s not insurmountable. By implementing a few key strategies, you’ll be able to manage your time and stress effectively for a more productive law school experience.
1. Break It Down
Make an overly detailed to-do list. You may not know everything you need to do to complete a memo (or outline or exam sheet) at that exact moment, but you likely know the next big step you need to take. Write down and put in order every piece of that next big step.
Notion is one place to compile a list of everything you know needs to be done on a project. Here, you can estimate how much time a task will take and schedule when that task should be accomplished. Focus on one section of a project at a time, one small task at a time, until you finish the section. If you know what should come next, go ahead and map it out. Repeat as needed.
Timing is key to the success of this process. The Forest app is a valuable tool for staying focused and managing the clock. It can help you assess if particular kinds of tasks tend to take more or less time than anticipated.
2. Set Specific Goals
Although you might be tempted to write your whole memo at once, your brain will likely have a different idea. Mental fatigue is a real thing in law school. Instead, try completing big chunks of uninterrupted deep work and then taking a well-earned break.
You want to set a big enough goal, but one that’s not so big that you end up with paralysis an hour in on your project. The more you do this, the more you’ll be able to predict fairly accurately what a deep work session should look like.
3. Get Feedback Often
If you’re a perfectionist who has trouble bringing unfinished products to professors for feedback, please take note. If you write an entire memo section incorrectly or have the criteria for unforeseeable consequences wrong, you will expend much more energy and time going back and correcting that later. A better process is to ask for feedback early and often to avoid lots of do-overs.
4. Set Arbitrary Deadlines
Fear of failure is rather a reality of law school. Self-doubt has a way of creeping in when you are overloaded and overwhelmed. How you overcome that fear has a lot to do with tricking your brain into thinking all is well.
Take a deadline, for instance. By using an app such as Countdown, you can mark an assignment as due a full week ahead of its actual due date. You’ll work on the project ahead of its actual deadline and feel the calm come over you when you realize you’ve got time to spare. Or time to put toward another task. No derailed progress here!
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