Hey, there future media moguls. If you’re anything like me getting the motivation to work on projects doesn’t come easily to you. There have been countless times when I get ready to work on something and decide to put it off or get distracted by other things. This is something I have found to be true for a lot of the students at my school.
Many college students don’t only have school projects to worry about, as a lot of students juggle college coursework with internships, part-time jobs, and extracurriculars. Getting the motivation to work on school projects isn’t easy, especially when friends in an extracurricular want your help on projects, and your boss wants you to pick up an extra shift at work. Students who don’t have a plan in place can find themselves quickly behind in their classes with their GPA suffering the consequences.
Getting a plan in place to balance a busy college schedule is essential for students to handle their workload. Keep a calendar or planner to keep track of what assignments you have to get done and what dates they need to be finished. If you try and remember everything you have to do, you’re setting yourself up to forget something essential and the only person getting affected by your mistake will be you. Things will inevitably come up that change your plans. That’s how life works. It’s still better to have a plan that you can make small changes to when things happen than to have no plan at all.
Once you have a plan in place and your workload feels more manageable, you have to have a strategy in place to make your workflow more efficient. Setting small goals within a project makes you feel like you’re accomplishing more. This feeling of accomplishment will help motivate you to keep working. If work is going slowly, stand up and walk around. Go outside and get fresh air. If you don’t take a break when you are feeling overworked and burnt out, you won’t get more work done by angrily staring at your screen.
If your plan is in place and you have goals but you still can’t find the motivation to start working, a thing I’ve found to be helpful is to give yourself something to look forward to. Make plans with your friends to go out after you finish your homework. This will give you a true motivating factor to get work done efficiently. Telling yourself that after you finish working you will do something you enjoy, makes doing the work feel like it’s worth something. People go to work and do their jobs because there is a reward at the end of the week when they get paid. Media majors can usually see the reward in their media classes of learning new skills and creating productions for their portfolios, but this isn’t the case for some of their general education classes like biology or history. Giving yourself goals that you reward yourself for makes projects for these classes feel like they’re worth doing.
If you stay organized, plan ahead, set goals for yourself, and give yourself a break with things you enjoy, finishing projects will begin to feel more manageable. Getting more work done also allows you to work on side projects creating content for fun that you enjoy making. The content you are passionate about will be easier to create without worrying about other projects you are required to do, so save that as one of your rewards. What will you take away from this post to better manage your workload?
Comment your answers and share the blog with your friends so we can go on our media journey together.