How to avoid revision and not feel guilty

Exam in a couple of days? Reached procrastination station? Feeling guilty for not doing work? We feel your pain. However, it doesn’t take much to get you feeling like you’ve done some productive work, even when in reality it’s been about as successful as a one-armed trapeze artist trying to scratch his arse.

Prepare a revision timetable

As all diligent revisers know, it’s impossible to work without a specially constructed timetable to make sure your schedule is in order.

Before you start working, spend hours and hours on a fancy colour-coded timetable so you can sleep easy knowing your schedule won’t suffer during the tense exam time.

Organisation station

Be warned though: becoming an organisational guru can be strenuous and will take all the brain power you can muster for one day. Reward yourself with a day off once the timetable is done, you may as well get a fresh start tomorrow.

Highlight everything

As everybody knows, reading back through your notes is unproductive, useless work. However, add a highlighter to the equation and then you’re in business. Eventually your notes will have more yellow than Scotland’s political map.

Make sure you spend a day in Ryman’s getting the proper equipment first. Once you have a stupid amount of coloured pens and pads of paper, your work will end up being way more efficient.

So much more interesting now

Colour transforms your boring black and white work into boring black and white work with colour. After every single word apart from “the” and “a” has been highlighted, two hours of revision will have flown by and you’ll get the feel-good feeling that only comes from achieving something with minimal effort.

If you’re unconvinced of the benefits of adding colour to your notes, ask a geography undergrad.

Watch YouTube documentaries

Trying to learn from textbooks can take lots of time and effort.

However, you can feel like you’re working by simply typing your subject into YouTube or Google. You’ll no doubt find some relevant educational stuff, and you can sit back and relax while absorbing relevant information.

Relevant stuff

Hell you can even reward yourself with the occasional cat video or ten.

Finish the TV show you are watching

For most of us the exams have come right in the middle of a gripping TV series. Whether it’s Made in Chelsea or Game or Thrones, chances are it will be constantly on your mind, ruining any chance you have of revising. So, isn’t it just better to watch it all now before you start working? After all it shouldn’t take more than a day to get through it all.

One more will not hurt

If you can quickly finish the rest of the season all those pesky distractions will be a thing of the past, and you’ll be able to work completely unhindered.

Put notes on your wall to ‘motivate’ you

Revision and exams aren’t about actually doing work, they’re about making others think you are doing work so they consistently commend you for how many notes you have.

On this wall, a 1st was born

There’s no better way to achieve this social status than by sticking minuscule, somewhat irrelevant facts everywhere. Stick them on the walls, in the fridge, or be really meta and stick them in others textbooks.

By the end of your revision period you’ll have more dead wood on your wall than in Johnny Rockhard’s latest film.

Tidy your workplace

A clean workplace makes for a clean mind. Because of this, you should make sure your room is meticulously tidy before you do any revision.

Jacket on floor = can’t work today

When it is clean, it’s bound to improve the quality of your revision so much that it’s worth taking a day to tidy.

Complain others stopped you from working

Many of us know the feeling: you’ve got up late, rushed to the library, only to find that all the seats are gone. Sometimes it feels busier than a Lib Dem retirement party.

However, if you see someone pointlessly wasting a seat, it’s its your moral obligation to shame said person by spending 30 minutes composing a perfect Spotted in the ASS Library post.

This may seem like simple procrastination, but think of the sweet sweet Facebook likes.