Studying can seem very boring compared to all the exciting temptations just outside your door or the games on your computer. Even watching old boring cartoons can seem more interesting than the hand-outs your teacher is expecting you to master!

One reason we often don’t start studying until the last possible minute is that we have misjudged how long it will actually take us to absorb and understand the material. If your mid-term is still six weeks away, this might seem like plenty of time left before you need to get around to studying. You might find however, that the subject matter is a lot harder to understand than you thought it would be, and all of a sudden there’s no time left to ask someone to explain it to you.

If you’re a student attending classes, you have probably experienced many moments when it was hard to make yourself settle down and study, even when an important exam was coming up. If you’re like most students, you put off studying until the very last minute. The night before the exam, you’ll stay up all night cramming, getting little or no sleep. In the morning, you’ll drag yourself out of bed, wake yourself up with lots of coffee or sometimes some cigarettes, and go into the exam feeling exhausted, stressed out and nervous all at the same time. You’ll find it hard to focus or think, and you’ll be cursing yourself for not starting to study sooner. And not surprisingly, unless you’re blessed with natural brilliance, or you happen to know the subject matter extremely well, you’ll probably do terribly on the test.

If this is your typical method of studying, you already know it doesn’t work. Every time you go through this ritual, you tell yourself that you’re going to smarten up the next time you face a big exam. Next time you’ll start to study weeks in advance, you say. But instead, you keep repeating this crazy pattern. Why does this keep