How To Study (Super) Effectively.

Set your alarm for 7:30 am. Wake up at 7:30 am to the shrieking sound of an alarm and flail your hand frantically around beside your bed in the hope of hitting the snooze button on your phone. Wake up at 7:35 am and repeat previous exercise. Wake up at 7:40 am, grab your phone and place it under your pillow so that you can press the snooze button more efficiently the next time it goes off. Wake up at 7:44 am anticipating the alarm that is about to go off. Hold your finger over the spot on the phone where the snooze button will be in twenty seconds and wait. Press the snooze button and place the phone back under your pillow. Wake up at 7:50 am and finally feel ready to commit to turning off your alarm. Think that you'll just lay in bed for another minute and then you'll get up. Wake up at 9:42 am.

Get up and go to the bathroom. Make a half-hearted effort to close the door, but don't worry if it doesn't shut completely. Stand infront of the toilet and relieve yourself. Continue standing there for another two minutes while you attempt to ascertain where you are and what you're doing. Flush the toilet and wash your hands. Head into the kitchen. Search the fridge, cupboard, draws or anything else that could possibly have contents in the hope of finding something edible (and possibly somewhat nutritious) for breakfast. Settle on some stale bread. Put it in the toaster and turn the kettle on. Realise that there's no water in the kettle, and take the kettle off the kettle holder thing and fill it with water. Put the kettle back and press the button again. Get the indeterminate yellow spread out of the fridge and place it on the table, anticipating your toast. Choose the green tea bag over an English breakfast because you like the way that the dry leaves smell. Huff on your tea leaves until the water is boiled. Your toast should be done too. Rush to get your tea done so that you can get to the toast within that ten second window before it goes cold, and forget that green tea needs a bit of cold water with it. Pour a bit out of the mug and fill it with cold water from the tap. Tea in one hand, grab the toast out of the toaster and take it over to the table. Spread whatever it is that's in the container on your toast, and you're ready to go. Unfold the paper. Eat your toast. As you turn the pages of the paper, notice that your toast crumbs are going all over the table. Sweep them onto the floor. By the time you've skimmed over all of the interesting articles, telling yourself that you'll read the world section when you have a but more time, you've finished your toast and realised that you haven't drunk your tea, which is now cold. Pour that cup out and make a new one, which you take to your room.

Get your laptop out of your bed and take it to your desk. Think about restarting it (it's been in a running/sleeping cycle for a few days now), but don't bother about it - that slight hum it makes when it's overworked is somewhat calming. Check Facebook. Check your rss feeds. Check your local newspaper site (even though you just read the paper). Check all of your music news blogs. Check your blog. Check to see if there's anything new worth downloading. Check Facebook again. Close your internet browser. Open up your books. Open up your internet browser and go to your uni page. Open up a tab for Facebook as well. Download the lecture slide that you should have printed out weeks ago when you actually had the lecture, and start reading through them, trying to work out what bits you should write down. Get stumped at a huge mass of words and check Facebook. Drink your tea. Check your whole repertoire of sites again, in the hope that something new might have come up. Finish you tea. Go back to your lecture slides and decide to write nothing about that page. Continue. Go to the kitchen and look in the fridge. You're not hungry, and there isn't anything in there anyway. Boil the kettle again. Go back to your room and get your mug to make yourself another cup of tea. Go back to summarising. Check Facebook again. By now the diuretic effect of your multiple cups of tea should be kicking in, so you head off to the toilet. This time your shut and lock the door. Notice that your urine is more clear than yellow. Finish up and go back to the kitchen. Search the the fridge and cupboard again. Head back to your room, empty handed. Check Facebook. You've spent three hours writing a page or two of summary notes. It's lunch time now (even though you're not hungry).

There's a can of chicken noodle soup in the cupboard. "100% real breast fillets" it claims. Open up the can and pour it into a bowl. It's akin, in both look and smell, to pouring out a can of your dogs vomit. The "100% real breast fillet" chicken turns out to be tiny little chunks of pinkish mush that add so perfectly to that whole vomit-y persona of the soup. Heat it up anyway. After three minutes in the microwave (the recommended time on the can), you taste the soup. It is still cold. After another minute it's still not right. You decide to go for an extra two minutes. About a minute and a half in you hear a popping noise and discover that half of your soup is now lining the walls of the microwave. At least it's hot now. Go back to your room and put on an episode of The Simpsons to eat to. After five minutes you've finished eating, but continue to watch the remaining sixteen minutes of the episode, which you have seen at least twenty times before. When that's over, check Facebook. Now it's time to get back to some serious work.

After checking Facebook again, try and start reading/writing again. However, find yourself wondering what new things might have happened in the wonderful world of Facebook, so go back and see the same news feed as you did thirty seconds ago (which incidentally happens to be the same as it was the last ten thousand times you checked, somehow). Look at the time in the top right corner of your Macbook and see that it's already three in the afternoon. Look at the amount of work that you've done since you tried to get up eight hours ago, and wonder how you're ever going to manage a nine to five. At this stage you start to get quite anxious about your lack of studying. Get angry at yourself and write something depressing/witty/interesting about studying as a status update. But don't post it, because you don't want to seem like an attention whore. Go back to staring at your lecture notes in the hope that they'll magically summarise themselves in your book. Check Facebook.

When you look up at the time again, it's nearly five. Now it's seven. Now it's ten o'clock. Somehow you managed to go sit down in the kitchen and eat dinner during this time. Look down at your book and see a handfull of pages filled top to bottom with rushed cursive writing. Try and read over it, but don't recall learning, or even writing, any of it. Try and think about what is is that you're actually meant to be studying, but you can't remember. Look out your window and see darkness. Think about how you're going to get up early tomorrow. Think about how you're actually going to focus on studying, and not just muck around doing pointless shit on the internet. Think about how you're actually going to take in whatever it is you're trying to learn. Think about how it will all be so much easier tomorrow. Put on an episode of whatever new show came out today. Put on an episode of a show you've already watched a few times before. Try and get back to studying. Give up after two minutes of reading. Read a bunch of random stuff on the internet. Explore reddit for two hours. It's now time for bed.

Get into bed and set your alarm for seven. You'll get up properly tomorrow morning, you tell yourself. For sure. It's always easier tomorrow.

*As an added bonus, write a 1500 word blog post about your how awesome you are at studying, while you should be studying, the day before you have two exams.