October 8, 2014

The Prioritized Problem

She rubbed her eyes to try to wipe away tiredness. After cross country in the morning, school during the day and badminton training in the afternoon she was exhausted. The rate at which she was working told her that she had solved 2 math problems/hour. “I’ll just do this later” She said and she hit the hay after setting her alarm for 5:30 in the morning. “After school activities take up so much of time, some days the homework is okay, but somedays i’m buried underneath homework” Says Lizzie.

Almost every 3 in 5 teens procrastinate while doing their homework. This contributes to stress and in some cases might affect their health. Not having a stable sleep cycle might cause teens to have a short attention span and might cause depression over time.

Imagine a day as a weighing scale. People should try to make their activities, passions and priorities all equally balanced on this scale. “I would usually go on tumblr, check my mail and text a few people before I get down to doing homework” Says UWC student Aditi Rudra. Having a routine or a timetable of things you are aiming to accomplish will help you to find balance. Listening to music, drinking tea, taking breaks by looking outside are all strategies you could use to help reduce stress, test anxiety and will keep you relaxed.

Sleeping and being relaxed actually has quite a large impact on people. According to http://www.coco-mat.com/?i=coco_fr.en.reasons , Sleeping can help with:
  • keeping your heart healthy
  • Reducing stress
  • helps you concentrate & help you evaluate better
  • helps you boost memory
  • helps your body replenish and lose weight. 
“My grade 8 goal was to try sleeping earlier, for the first few weeks i could easily aim and shoot for this goal. I felt more energized by following my goal and I also could get more work done. But, at week four I was finding it hard to keep up and i ended up missing my goal most of the time” says UWCSEA student Akanksha Shukla.

She needed 3 consecutive alarms to wake up the next morning. She rubbed her eyes to try to wipe away tiredness. 6:40. she still needed to finish homework. she still needed to take a shower. she still needed to eat her cereal. she still needed to wear her shoes. Finally she was able to catch up with the bus and get to school in time.

Rethinking over your day to balance your weighing scale will help you lead a healthier lifestyle and relief lots of stress. All simply done by being an effective prioritizing procrastinator.

Written by Manini

1 comment:

  1. I am an 8th grade teacher in Wisconsin, USA. My students are new to Investigative Journalism. They read and have responded to various articles you have written. Although we are not ready to blog individually, I would like to share their response with you:
    We enjoyed reading your article. We, as teens, know and understand what procrastinating does. We agree with your article strongly. In fact, we believe that something needs to be done. People (you, us, others) should take further steps to change our sleeping hours for the better. People have commitments and they shouldn't have to chose between sleep and those comittments.

    ReplyDelete