Another grad school tip

#6: Set deadlines for yourself.

Chances are, you're not going to have to be turning in a paper every week, or even every other week. In the case of the program I'm in, we don't turn in any work until the end of January. It'd be awfully easy just to sit back and think, "Awesome. I don't have any work for a couple months, so I do the reading I'm interested in now and catch up with the rest when I need to. I have all of winter vacation to write these essays, so everything's fine."

Everything will not, I can assure you, be fine if you take that attitude. Good papers take time, between the research, the analysis, the writing, and all the rest. If you try to shove it all in at the very end, you're going to sacrifice something, whether it's insufficient knowledge of your sources, a complete lack of style, or something else altogether.

The solution is staying on top of your work. This sounds obvious and it is. But you really should go beyond just telling yourself, "I need to stay on top of this." Because you won't have a good way of judging whether you're actually accomplishing what you can and should.

So break up big projects into little tasks and give those little tasks semi-firm deadlines. Don't kill yourself if you finish taking notes on a book a day later than you planned, but remember that those days add up.

Make lists. That way you can cross things off and feel as if you've gotten something done.

Who knows? You might feel inspired one day and get ahead of your schedule. But it's only when you have that schedule that you get that good feeling.

(Yes, in case you're wondering, some of these tips are more reminders to myself than anything else. But they're just as useful for others, so on the blog they go!)