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What homework should I do first? The easy stuff or hard stuff?

Katie Azevedo December 13, 2016 good habits , homework , productivity , study skills , time management

By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.

What homework should I do first?

This is the first question I often hear when a student feels overwhelmed with assignments. It’s also the first thought that pops into my own head when my to-do list runs onto page 17 of my planner! (Swapping out homework for tasks , of course.)

We all have things to do — whether homework assignments, work projects, personal goals, etc. But not all tasks are created equal. Not all tasks take the same amount of time to complete or have the same impact when they’re completed.

So how do students know what homework to do first — the big, daunting assignments? Or the small, quick ones?

The first answer: First do whatever homework is due soonest. Have trouble with procrastination? Here are some procrastination tips .

The other answer to ‘ What homework should I do first? ‘: It depends. (Least satisfying answer ever. I know.)

A classic Pros and Cons list reveals plenty of reasons to do the quick and easy homework assignments first, and plenty of reasons to do the harder tasks first. 

Despite the above advantages and disadvantages of tackling the easy or the hard homework first, there really is a proper way to approach your homework assignments that will set you up for getting more done . And here it is:

Do what works for you!

How to know what approach works for you

We all work differently and we all respond to pressure differently. If you are easily frustrated and are quick to feel overwhelmed when things get tough, then perhaps you’re the type of person who should tackle the small, quick homework assignments first. In school, start your afternoons by completing the easiest assignments: doing so will motivate you to move onto the harder ones. This is called “grabbing the low-hanging fruit.” At home, same thing: pick up a few items off your bedroom floor before you dig into your deep cleaning routine. At the gym, start your workout with a short walk to warm up before you hit something harder.

On the other hand, if you tire easily or get bored when things are too simple, then bang out the tough stuff first. In school, start with the biggest, most annoying looming homework assignments (even if they’re not due for a while) so you don’t exhaust yourself on the little assignments. At home, get the biggest project out of the way first (clean the garage!), and then pick away at the smaller tasks.  At the gym, go big or go home. (Or go big, go small, and then go home. Ha.)

What I do when I’m trying to figure out what “homework” to do first

Personally, I go back and forth when it comes to choosing which items from my to-do list to tackle first. Sometimes I start with the small stuff, and sometimes I “eat the frog” first. (I don’t really eat reptiles. “Eat that frog” is the title of an awesome book about time management by Brian Tracy. It’s an expression that refers to killing the big, gross assignments first.) It sort of depends on my mood on a particular day, how much free time I have (scattered moments vs large chunks), and what the task or project is.

So my final advice is this: If you’re constantly questioning what homework should I do first,  try both ways.

Try starting with the small tasks and see how you feel. Then another time start with a big task and see how you feel. Compare how productive you were (or weren’t) and how you felt during each approach.

Another idea is that you could start with a small homework assignment, then do a hard one, and then take a short break. Do another small homework assignment, do another hard one, and then take another short break. Keep going until you’re done with all your assignments.  

So this homework strategy looks like this:

Small Assignment + Big Assignment + Short Break (Repeat as many times as you need)

You can use this strategy over the course of a single afternoon, or over the course of a week. Or, like, forever, really. So the next time you’re wondering  what homework should I do first,  try alternating between easy and hard tasks, while paying attention to how much you actually get done. And then you’ll find your answer!

For a full tutorial on the 5 steps of proper homework prioritization, read this.

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Homework vs Study: Everything You Need To Know

Fiach Smyth

Oct 28, 2016

 Homework and study. The two things that all students have in common, no matter where they live, or what school they go to. But what is the real difference between homework and study, and how is a regular routine going to help you do well? Studiosity's Fiach Smyth has the answers.

Why is homework important?

Most nights you are going to have homework set by your teachers.  Although we don’t usually think of homework as being study, it’s actually a key part of the learning process.  Homework has two purposes: to give you a chance to identify gaps in your knowledge so that you can raise them with your teacher; and to help embed class learnings in your head by making a second pass over the key concepts you covered that day.  

What about study?

Now that we know what homework is, what is study?  Study is exactly the same as homework, except that you nominate for yourself what work to do, and you do it at a time that’s removed from the class in which you learned the content.

Let’s take a typical maths class as an example.  In class the teacher shows you a concept, and then asks you to do a few exercises in class so that they can make sure you’ve understood.  They set you some more exercises as homework, so later that night you have to remember what you learned in class, and apply it to those homework exercises.  A month later you’ve moved on to another topic in class, but you decide one night to just spend 40 minutes going over those exercises again, to make sure you still remember how to do them, and to keep the learnings fresh in your mind.  That’s study.

Blonde-girl-studying.jpg

How much study should I do?

This is going to depend on a lot of things: how much time you have, which subjects you find challenging, where you are in your academic career.  For most students from Years 7 to 10, you should be able to manage one block of study at least four nights a week.  One block is about 40 - 60 minutes (we’ll discuss why in a moment).  Maybe you want to do one block each night Monday to Thursday; maybe it’s easier for you to make Friday a study day where you do all your study.  It’s up to you.

It’s important to remember that study is a very personal thing , it’s different for everyone.  This approach of four subjects a week isn’t necessarily the best way for you to study; rather it’s the best way to start studying, to get into the habit and to be able to determine for yourself how to change things up to suit your own needs and your available time.  Maybe you want to, or have time to do more than four blocks a week – if so, that’s great, as every extra block of time spent studying helps!

What exactly is a 'study block'?

A study block is a set amount of time you set aside for the purpose of studying a particular subject. Although there are exceptions, an average study block should be around 45 minutes long.  This is not an arbitrary amount of time.  You’ll notice that most classes at school are between 45-50 minutes in length.  We know a lot about how people learn, and one thing we know is that after about 45 minutes of working on a particular topic our brains are less able to take in new information.  

At school we put a break every 45 minutes or so, allowing students to change classes, change locations and topics, to keep their minds fresh and able to learn, and this is the same with your study.  Even if you still feel like you’re fresh and good to keep going, in most cases pushing much past 45 minutes on a block of study will return much less benefit than the first 45 minutes did. Generally you would be better breaking and doing something else and then coming back to study a second time, rather than studying two blocks back-to-back.

At the same time, very short study blocks aren’t as effective as blocks of around 45 minutes (with a few exceptions we’ll discuss below).  As you study your brain organises and reorganises information, solidifying it for later recall, and building links between the different things you are jamming into it.  It takes a little time for your brain to start building these links, so you need to give your brain time.  If you only spend ten minutes reading through your notes that’s not study, that’s revision.  Revision is certainly something to work into your overall approach to study, but if that’s all you do then you don’t give your brain the time it needs to start building these information connections.  Study blocks should be at least 30 minutes long, but 40-45 is best.

Text-writing.jpg

How do I balance homework and study?

Now that we know that homework and study work together, we can see why balancing both is important.  You can’t skip homework in order to study, but at the same time you can’t let your homework load become so great that you have no time to study.  Teachers are good at knowing how much homework is a reasonable amount to give the maximum chance to bed down class learning without taking all of your available time.  However, if you work or have important extra-curricular responsibilities you may find your time being squeezed and that’s something you need to resolve.

Let’s use another example, from maths again.  You have maths four days a week, and your teacher sets about 20 exercises for the class each night.  These exercises take you two hours to complete, and that’s making it hard to study.  First, ask your friends how long it takes them.  Is it taking you a lot longer than them?  If so, talk to your teacher.  Your teacher may be able to identify why the problems take you longer to complete, or may reduce the number of questions they expect you to complete, focusing on the most important questions.

Or maybe it’s just that you have a lot of other commitments.  Figure out how much time you can afford to spend on your maths homework , and then stop when you reach that time.  

If the reality is that doing all your homework means that you can’t study, it is generally better that you take a few short cuts with your homework rather than just not studying.  As we said above, study refreshes what you bedded down doing your homework, so you need both.

Remember, take a break

An essential component of good study is knowing when to take a break from study.  If you sit yourself down and do four subjects worth of homework and then power through two study blocks, that study is not going to be nearly as effective as it could have been had you taken some breaks.

As a good rule of thumb, if you study for a block of 45 minutes take the next fifteen minutes off.  Get away from wherever you were sitting, go walk around, or talk to people, or grab a yummy study snack .

Slice-studysnack.jpg

Both homework and study are equally as important, and both need to be scheduled into your study time. See how you go with the study blocks, and if you have any feedback, let us know in the comments below! 

We wish you all the best.

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Topics: Students , Homework , Study

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Everyone struggles with homework sometimes, but if getting your homework done has become a chronic issue for you, then you may need a little extra help. That’s why we’ve written this article all about how to do homework. Once you’re finished reading it, you’ll know how to do homework (and have tons of new ways to motivate yourself to do homework)!

We’ve broken this article down into a few major sections. You’ll find:

  • A diagnostic test to help you figure out why you’re struggling with homework
  • A discussion of the four major homework problems students face, along with expert tips for addressing them 
  • A bonus section with tips for how to do homework fast

By the end of this article, you’ll be prepared to tackle whatever homework assignments your teachers throw at you . 

So let’s get started! 

body-stack-of-textbooks-red

How to Do Homework: Figure Out Your Struggles 

Sometimes it feels like everything is standing between you and getting your homework done. But the truth is, most people only have one or two major roadblocks that are keeping them from getting their homework done well and on time. 

The best way to figure out how to get motivated to do homework starts with pinpointing the issues that are affecting your ability to get your assignments done. That’s why we’ve developed a short quiz to help you identify the areas where you’re struggling. 

Take the quiz below and record your answers on your phone or on a scrap piece of paper. Keep in mind there are no wrong answers! 

1. You’ve just been assigned an essay in your English class that’s due at the end of the week. What’s the first thing you do?

A. Keep it in mind, even though you won’t start it until the day before it’s due  B. Open up your planner. You’ve got to figure out when you’ll write your paper since you have band practice, a speech tournament, and your little sister’s dance recital this week, too.  C. Groan out loud. Another essay? You could barely get yourself to write the last one!  D. Start thinking about your essay topic, which makes you think about your art project that’s due the same day, which reminds you that your favorite artist might have just posted to Instagram...so you better check your feed right now. 

2. Your mom asked you to pick up your room before she gets home from work. You’ve just gotten home from school. You decide you’ll tackle your chores: 

A. Five minutes before your mom walks through the front door. As long as it gets done, who cares when you start?  B. As soon as you get home from your shift at the local grocery store.  C. After you give yourself a 15-minute pep talk about how you need to get to work.  D. You won’t get it done. Between texts from your friends, trying to watch your favorite Netflix show, and playing with your dog, you just lost track of time! 

3. You’ve signed up to wash dogs at the Humane Society to help earn money for your senior class trip. You: 

A. Show up ten minutes late. You put off leaving your house until the last minute, then got stuck in unexpected traffic on the way to the shelter.  B. Have to call and cancel at the last minute. You forgot you’d already agreed to babysit your cousin and bake cupcakes for tomorrow’s bake sale.  C. Actually arrive fifteen minutes early with extra brushes and bandanas you picked up at the store. You’re passionate about animals, so you’re excited to help out! D. Show up on time, but only get three dogs washed. You couldn’t help it: you just kept getting distracted by how cute they were!

4. You have an hour of downtime, so you decide you’re going to watch an episode of The Great British Baking Show. You: 

A. Scroll through your social media feeds for twenty minutes before hitting play, which means you’re not able to finish the whole episode. Ugh! You really wanted to see who was sent home!  B. Watch fifteen minutes until you remember you’re supposed to pick up your sister from band practice before heading to your part-time job. No GBBO for you!  C. You finish one episode, then decide to watch another even though you’ve got SAT studying to do. It’s just more fun to watch people make scones.  D. Start the episode, but only catch bits and pieces of it because you’re reading Twitter, cleaning out your backpack, and eating a snack at the same time.

5. Your teacher asks you to stay after class because you’ve missed turning in two homework assignments in a row. When she asks you what’s wrong, you say: 

A. You planned to do your assignments during lunch, but you ran out of time. You decided it would be better to turn in nothing at all than submit unfinished work.  B. You really wanted to get the assignments done, but between your extracurriculars, family commitments, and your part-time job, your homework fell through the cracks.  C. You have a hard time psyching yourself to tackle the assignments. You just can’t seem to find the motivation to work on them once you get home.  D. You tried to do them, but you had a hard time focusing. By the time you realized you hadn’t gotten anything done, it was already time to turn them in. 

Like we said earlier, there are no right or wrong answers to this quiz (though your results will be better if you answered as honestly as possible). Here’s how your answers break down: 

  • If your answers were mostly As, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is procrastination. 
  • If your answers were mostly Bs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is time management. 
  • If your answers were mostly Cs, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is motivation. 
  • If your answers were mostly Ds, then your biggest struggle with doing homework is getting distracted. 

Now that you’ve identified why you’re having a hard time getting your homework done, we can help you figure out how to fix it! Scroll down to find your core problem area to learn more about how you can start to address it. 

And one more thing: you’re really struggling with homework, it’s a good idea to read through every section below. You may find some additional tips that will help make homework less intimidating. 

body-procrastination-meme

How to Do Homework When You’re a Procrastinator  

Merriam Webster defines “procrastinate” as “to put off intentionally and habitually.” In other words, procrastination is when you choose to do something at the last minute on a regular basis. If you’ve ever found yourself pulling an all-nighter, trying to finish an assignment between periods, or sprinting to turn in a paper minutes before a deadline, you’ve experienced the effects of procrastination. 

If you’re a chronic procrastinator, you’re in good company. In fact, one study found that 70% to 95% of undergraduate students procrastinate when it comes to doing their homework. Unfortunately, procrastination can negatively impact your grades. Researchers have found that procrastination can lower your grade on an assignment by as much as five points ...which might not sound serious until you realize that can mean the difference between a B- and a C+. 

Procrastination can also negatively affect your health by increasing your stress levels , which can lead to other health conditions like insomnia, a weakened immune system, and even heart conditions. Getting a handle on procrastination can not only improve your grades, it can make you feel better, too! 

The big thing to understand about procrastination is that it’s not the result of laziness. Laziness is defined as being “disinclined to activity or exertion.” In other words, being lazy is all about doing nothing. But a s this Psychology Today article explains , procrastinators don’t put things off because they don’t want to work. Instead, procrastinators tend to postpone tasks they don’t want to do in favor of tasks that they perceive as either more important or more fun. Put another way, procrastinators want to do things...as long as it’s not their homework! 

3 Tips f or Conquering Procrastination 

Because putting off doing homework is a common problem, there are lots of good tactics for addressing procrastination. Keep reading for our three expert tips that will get your homework habits back on track in no time. 

#1: Create a Reward System

Like we mentioned earlier, procrastination happens when you prioritize other activities over getting your homework done. Many times, this happens because homework...well, just isn’t enjoyable. But you can add some fun back into the process by rewarding yourself for getting your work done. 

Here’s what we mean: let’s say you decide that every time you get your homework done before the day it’s due, you’ll give yourself a point. For every five points you earn, you’ll treat yourself to your favorite dessert: a chocolate cupcake! Now you have an extra (delicious!) incentive to motivate you to leave procrastination in the dust. 

If you’re not into cupcakes, don’t worry. Your reward can be anything that motivates you . Maybe it’s hanging out with your best friend or an extra ten minutes of video game time. As long as you’re choosing something that makes homework worth doing, you’ll be successful. 

#2: Have a Homework Accountability Partner 

If you’re having trouble getting yourself to start your homework ahead of time, it may be a good idea to call in reinforcements . Find a friend or classmate you can trust and explain to them that you’re trying to change your homework habits. Ask them if they’d be willing to text you to make sure you’re doing your homework and check in with you once a week to see if you’re meeting your anti-procrastination goals. 

Sharing your goals can make them feel more real, and an accountability partner can help hold you responsible for your decisions. For example, let’s say you’re tempted to put off your science lab write-up until the morning before it’s due. But you know that your accountability partner is going to text you about it tomorrow...and you don’t want to fess up that you haven’t started your assignment. A homework accountability partner can give you the extra support and incentive you need to keep your homework habits on track. 

#3: Create Your Own Due Dates 

If you’re a life-long procrastinator, you might find that changing the habit is harder than you expected. In that case, you might try using procrastination to your advantage! If you just can’t seem to stop doing your work at the last minute, try setting your own due dates for assignments that range from a day to a week before the assignment is actually due. 

Here’s what we mean. Let’s say you have a math worksheet that’s been assigned on Tuesday and is due on Friday. In your planner, you can write down the due date as Thursday instead. You may still put off your homework assignment until the last minute...but in this case, the “last minute” is a day before the assignment’s real due date . This little hack can trick your procrastination-addicted brain into planning ahead! 

body-busy-meme-2

If you feel like Kevin Hart in this meme, then our tips for doing homework when you're busy are for you. 

How to Do Homework When You’re too Busy

If you’re aiming to go to a top-tier college , you’re going to have a full plate. Because college admissions is getting more competitive, it’s important that you’re maintaining your grades , studying hard for your standardized tests , and participating in extracurriculars so your application stands out. A packed schedule can get even more hectic once you add family obligations or a part-time job to the mix. 

If you feel like you’re being pulled in a million directions at once, you’re not alone. Recent research has found that stress—and more severe stress-related conditions like anxiety and depression— are a major problem for high school students . In fact, one study from the American Psychological Association found that during the school year, students’ stress levels are higher than those of the adults around them. 

For students, homework is a major contributor to their overall stress levels . Many high schoolers have multiple hours of homework every night , and figuring out how to fit it into an already-packed schedule can seem impossible. 

3 Tips for Fitting Homework Into Your Busy Schedule

While it might feel like you have literally no time left in your schedule, there are still ways to make sure you’re able to get your homework done and meet your other commitments. Here are our expert homework tips for even the busiest of students. 

#1: Make a Prioritized To-Do List 

You probably already have a to-do list to keep yourself on track. The next step is to prioritize the items on your to-do list so you can see what items need your attention right away. 

Here’s how it works: at the beginning of each day, sit down and make a list of all the items you need to get done before you go to bed. This includes your homework, but it should also take into account any practices, chores, events, or job shifts you may have. Once you get everything listed out, it’s time to prioritize them using the labels A, B, and C. Here’s what those labels mean:

  • A Tasks : tasks that have to get done—like showing up at work or turning in an assignment—get an A. 
  • B Tasks : these are tasks that you would like to get done by the end of the day but aren’t as time sensitive. For example, studying for a test you have next week could be a B-level task. It’s still important, but it doesn’t have to be done right away. 
  • C Tasks: these are tasks that aren’t very important and/or have no real consequences if you don’t get them done immediately. For instance, if you’re hoping to clean out your closet but it’s not an assigned chore from your parents, you could label that to-do item with a C. 

Prioritizing your to-do list helps you visualize which items need your immediate attention, and which items you can leave for later. A prioritized to-do list ensures that you’re spending your time efficiently and effectively, which helps you make room in your schedule for homework. So even though you might really want to start making decorations for Homecoming (a B task), you’ll know that finishing your reading log (an A task) is more important. 

#2: Use a Planner With Time Labels 

Your planner is probably packed with notes, events, and assignments already. (And if you’re not using a planner, it’s time to start!) But planners can do more for you than just remind you when an assignment is due. If you’re using a planner with time labels, it can help you visualize how you need to spend your day.

A planner with time labels breaks your day down into chunks, and you assign tasks to each chunk of time. For example, you can make a note of your class schedule with assignments, block out time to study, and make sure you know when you need to be at practice. Once you know which tasks take priority, you can add them to any empty spaces in your day. 

Planning out how you spend your time not only helps you use it wisely, it can help you feel less overwhelmed, too . We’re big fans of planners that include a task list ( like this one ) or have room for notes ( like this one ). 

#3: Set Reminders on Your Phone 

If you need a little extra nudge to make sure you’re getting your homework done on time, it’s a good idea to set some reminders on your phone. You don’t need a fancy app, either. You can use your alarm app to have it go off at specific times throughout the day to remind you to do your homework. This works especially well if you have a set homework time scheduled. So if you’ve decided you’re doing homework at 6:00 pm, you can set an alarm to remind you to bust out your books and get to work. 

If you use your phone as your planner, you may have the option to add alerts, emails, or notifications to scheduled events . Many calendar apps, including the one that comes with your phone, have built-in reminders that you can customize to meet your needs. So if you block off time to do your homework from 4:30 to 6:00 pm, you can set a reminder that will pop up on your phone when it’s time to get started. 

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This dog isn't judging your lack of motivation...but your teacher might. Keep reading for tips to help you motivate yourself to do your homework.

How to Do Homework When You’re Unmotivated 

At first glance, it may seem like procrastination and being unmotivated are the same thing. After all, both of these issues usually result in you putting off your homework until the very last minute. 

But there’s one key difference: many procrastinators are working, they’re just prioritizing work differently. They know they’re going to start their homework...they’re just going to do it later. 

Conversely, people who are unmotivated to do homework just can’t find the willpower to tackle their assignments. Procrastinators know they’ll at least attempt the homework at the last minute, whereas people who are unmotivated struggle with convincing themselves to do it at a ll. For procrastinators, the stress comes from the inevitable time crunch. For unmotivated people, the stress comes from trying to convince themselves to do something they don’t want to do in the first place. 

Here are some common reasons students are unmotivated in doing homework : 

  • Assignments are too easy, too hard, or seemingly pointless 
  • Students aren’t interested in (or passionate about) the subject matter
  • Students are intimidated by the work and/or feels like they don’t understand the assignment 
  • Homework isn’t fun, and students would rather spend their time on things that they enjoy 

To sum it up: people who lack motivation to do their homework are more likely to not do it at all, or to spend more time worrying about doing their homework than...well, actually doing it.

3 Tips for How to Get Motivated to Do Homework

The key to getting homework done when you’re unmotivated is to figure out what does motivate you, then apply those things to homework. It sounds tricky...but it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it! Here are our three expert tips for motivating yourself to do your homework. 

#1: Use Incremental Incentives

When you’re not motivated, it’s important to give yourself small rewards to stay focused on finishing the task at hand. The trick is to keep the incentives small and to reward yourself often. For example, maybe you’re reading a good book in your free time. For every ten minutes you spend on your homework, you get to read five pages of your book. Like we mentioned earlier, make sure you’re choosing a reward that works for you! 

So why does this technique work? Using small rewards more often allows you to experience small wins for getting your work done. Every time you make it to one of your tiny reward points, you get to celebrate your success, which gives your brain a boost of dopamine . Dopamine helps you stay motivated and also creates a feeling of satisfaction when you complete your homework !  

#2: Form a Homework Group 

If you’re having trouble motivating yourself, it’s okay to turn to others for support. Creating a homework group can help with this. Bring together a group of your friends or classmates, and pick one time a week where you meet and work on homework together. You don’t have to be in the same class, or even taking the same subjects— the goal is to encourage one another to start (and finish!) your assignments. 

Another added benefit of a homework group is that you can help one another if you’re struggling to understand the material covered in your classes. This is especially helpful if your lack of motivation comes from being intimidated by your assignments. Asking your friends for help may feel less scary than talking to your teacher...and once you get a handle on the material, your homework may become less frightening, too. 

#3: Change Up Your Environment 

If you find that you’re totally unmotivated, it may help if you find a new place to do your homework. For example, if you’ve been struggling to get your homework done at home, try spending an extra hour in the library after school instead. The change of scenery can limit your distractions and give you the energy you need to get your work done. 

If you’re stuck doing homework at home, you can still use this tip. For instance, maybe you’ve always done your homework sitting on your bed. Try relocating somewhere else, like your kitchen table, for a few weeks. You may find that setting up a new “homework spot” in your house gives you a motivational lift and helps you get your work done. 

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Social media can be a huge problem when it comes to doing homework. We have advice for helping you unplug and regain focus.

How to Do Homework When You’re Easily Distracted

We live in an always-on world, and there are tons of things clamoring for our attention. From friends and family to pop culture and social media, it seems like there’s always something (or someone!) distracting us from the things we need to do.

The 24/7 world we live in has affected our ability to focus on tasks for prolonged periods of time. Research has shown that over the past decade, an average person’s attention span has gone from 12 seconds to eight seconds . And when we do lose focus, i t takes people a long time to get back on task . One study found that it can take as long as 23 minutes to get back to work once we’ve been distracte d. No wonder it can take hours to get your homework done! 

3 Tips to Improve Your Focus

If you have a hard time focusing when you’re doing your homework, it’s a good idea to try and eliminate as many distractions as possible. Here are three expert tips for blocking out the noise so you can focus on getting your homework done. 

#1: Create a Distraction-Free Environment

Pick a place where you’ll do your homework every day, and make it as distraction-free as possible. Try to find a location where there won’t be tons of noise, and limit your access to screens while you’re doing your homework. Put together a focus-oriented playlist (or choose one on your favorite streaming service), and put your headphones on while you work. 

You may find that other people, like your friends and family, are your biggest distraction. If that’s the case, try setting up some homework boundaries. Let them know when you’ll be working on homework every day, and ask them if they’ll help you keep a quiet environment. They’ll be happy to lend a hand! 

#2: Limit Your Access to Technology 

We know, we know...this tip isn’t fun, but it does work. For homework that doesn’t require a computer, like handouts or worksheets, it’s best to put all your technology away . Turn off your television, put your phone and laptop in your backpack, and silence notifications on any wearable tech you may be sporting. If you listen to music while you work, that’s fine...but make sure you have a playlist set up so you’re not shuffling through songs once you get started on your homework. 

If your homework requires your laptop or tablet, it can be harder to limit your access to distractions. But it’s not impossible! T here are apps you can download that will block certain websites while you’re working so that you’re not tempted to scroll through Twitter or check your Facebook feed. Silence notifications and text messages on your computer, and don’t open your email account unless you absolutely have to. And if you don’t need access to the internet to complete your assignments, turn off your WiFi. Cutting out the online chatter is a great way to make sure you’re getting your homework done. 

#3: Set a Timer (the Pomodoro Technique)

Have you ever heard of the Pomodoro technique ? It’s a productivity hack that uses a timer to help you focus!

Here’s how it works: first, set a timer for 25 minutes. This is going to be your work time. During this 25 minutes, all you can do is work on whatever homework assignment you have in front of you. No email, no text messaging, no phone calls—just homework. When that timer goes off, you get to take a 5 minute break. Every time you go through one of these cycles, it’s called a “pomodoro.” For every four pomodoros you complete, you can take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.

The pomodoro technique works through a combination of boundary setting and rewards. First, it gives you a finite amount of time to focus, so you know that you only have to work really hard for 25 minutes. Once you’ve done that, you’re rewarded with a short break where you can do whatever you want. Additionally, tracking how many pomodoros you complete can help you see how long you’re really working on your homework. (Once you start using our focus tips, you may find it doesn’t take as long as you thought!)

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Two Bonus Tips for How to Do Homework Fast

Even if you’re doing everything right, there will be times when you just need to get your homework done as fast as possible. (Why do teachers always have projects due in the same week? The world may never know.)

The problem with speeding through homework is that it’s easy to make mistakes. While turning in an assignment is always better than not submitting anything at all, you want to make sure that you’re not compromising quality for speed. Simply put, the goal is to get your homework done quickly and still make a good grade on the assignment! 

Here are our two bonus tips for getting a decent grade on your homework assignments , even when you’re in a time crunch. 

#1: Do the Easy Parts First 

This is especially true if you’re working on a handout with multiple questions. Before you start working on the assignment, read through all the questions and problems. As you do, make a mark beside the questions you think are “easy” to answer . 

Once you’ve finished going through the whole assignment, you can answer these questions first. Getting the easy questions out of the way as quickly as possible lets you spend more time on the trickier portions of your homework, which will maximize your assignment grade. 

(Quick note: this is also a good strategy to use on timed assignments and tests, like the SAT and the ACT !) 

#2: Pay Attention in Class 

Homework gets a lot easier when you’re actively learning the material. Teachers aren’t giving you homework because they’re mean or trying to ruin your weekend... it’s because they want you to really understand the course material. Homework is designed to reinforce what you’re already learning in class so you’ll be ready to tackle harder concepts later. 

When you pay attention in class, ask questions, and take good notes, you’re absorbing the information you’ll need to succeed on your homework assignments. (You’re stuck in class anyway, so you might as well make the most of it!) Not only will paying attention in class make your homework less confusing, it will also help it go much faster, too. 

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What’s Next?

If you’re looking to improve your productivity beyond homework, a good place to begin is with time management. After all, we only have so much time in a day...so it’s important to get the most out of it! To get you started, check out this list of the 12 best time management techniques that you can start using today.

You may have read this article because homework struggles have been affecting your GPA. Now that you’re on the path to homework success, it’s time to start being proactive about raising your grades. This article teaches you everything you need to know about raising your GPA so you can

Now you know how to get motivated to do homework...but what about your study habits? Studying is just as critical to getting good grades, and ultimately getting into a good college . We can teach you how to study bette r in high school. (We’ve also got tons of resources to help you study for your ACT and SAT exams , too!) 

Need more help with this topic? Check out Tutorbase!

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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Studying 101: Study Smarter Not Harder

Do you ever feel like your study habits simply aren’t cutting it? Do you wonder what you could be doing to perform better in class and on exams? Many students realize that their high school study habits aren’t very effective in college. This is understandable, as college is quite different from high school. The professors are less personally involved, classes are bigger, exams are worth more, reading is more intense, and classes are much more rigorous. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you; it just means you need to learn some more effective study skills. Fortunately, there are many active, effective study strategies that are shown to be effective in college classes.

This handout offers several tips on effective studying. Implementing these tips into your regular study routine will help you to efficiently and effectively learn course material. Experiment with them and find some that work for you.

Reading is not studying

Simply reading and re-reading texts or notes is not actively engaging in the material. It is simply re-reading your notes. Only ‘doing’ the readings for class is not studying. It is simply doing the reading for class. Re-reading leads to quick forgetting.

Think of reading as an important part of pre-studying, but learning information requires actively engaging in the material (Edwards, 2014). Active engagement is the process of constructing meaning from text that involves making connections to lectures, forming examples, and regulating your own learning (Davis, 2007). Active studying does not mean highlighting or underlining text, re-reading, or rote memorization. Though these activities may help to keep you engaged in the task, they are not considered active studying techniques and are weakly related to improved learning (Mackenzie, 1994).

Ideas for active studying include:

  • Create a study guide by topic. Formulate questions and problems and write complete answers. Create your own quiz.
  • Become a teacher. Say the information aloud in your own words as if you are the instructor and teaching the concepts to a class.
  • Derive examples that relate to your own experiences.
  • Create concept maps or diagrams that explain the material.
  • Develop symbols that represent concepts.
  • For non-technical classes (e.g., English, History, Psychology), figure out the big ideas so you can explain, contrast, and re-evaluate them.
  • For technical classes, work the problems and explain the steps and why they work.
  • Study in terms of question, evidence, and conclusion: What is the question posed by the instructor/author? What is the evidence that they present? What is the conclusion?

Organization and planning will help you to actively study for your courses. When studying for a test, organize your materials first and then begin your active reviewing by topic (Newport, 2007). Often professors provide subtopics on the syllabi. Use them as a guide to help organize your materials. For example, gather all of the materials for one topic (e.g., PowerPoint notes, text book notes, articles, homework, etc.) and put them together in a pile. Label each pile with the topic and study by topics.

For more information on the principle behind active studying, check out our tipsheet on metacognition .

Understand the Study Cycle

The Study Cycle , developed by Frank Christ, breaks down the different parts of studying: previewing, attending class, reviewing, studying, and checking your understanding. Although each step may seem obvious at a glance, all too often students try to take shortcuts and miss opportunities for good learning. For example, you may skip a reading before class because the professor covers the same material in class; doing so misses a key opportunity to learn in different modes (reading and listening) and to benefit from the repetition and distributed practice (see #3 below) that you’ll get from both reading ahead and attending class. Understanding the importance of all stages of this cycle will help make sure you don’t miss opportunities to learn effectively.

Spacing out is good

One of the most impactful learning strategies is “distributed practice”—spacing out your studying over several short periods of time over several days and weeks (Newport, 2007). The most effective practice is to work a short time on each class every day. The total amount of time spent studying will be the same (or less) than one or two marathon library sessions, but you will learn the information more deeply and retain much more for the long term—which will help get you an A on the final. The important thing is how you use your study time, not how long you study. Long study sessions lead to a lack of concentration and thus a lack of learning and retention.

In order to spread out studying over short periods of time across several days and weeks, you need control over your schedule . Keeping a list of tasks to complete on a daily basis will help you to include regular active studying sessions for each class. Try to do something for each class each day. Be specific and realistic regarding how long you plan to spend on each task—you should not have more tasks on your list than you can reasonably complete during the day.

For example, you may do a few problems per day in math rather than all of them the hour before class. In history, you can spend 15-20 minutes each day actively studying your class notes. Thus, your studying time may still be the same length, but rather than only preparing for one class, you will be preparing for all of your classes in short stretches. This will help focus, stay on top of your work, and retain information.

In addition to learning the material more deeply, spacing out your work helps stave off procrastination. Rather than having to face the dreaded project for four hours on Monday, you can face the dreaded project for 30 minutes each day. The shorter, more consistent time to work on a dreaded project is likely to be more acceptable and less likely to be delayed to the last minute. Finally, if you have to memorize material for class (names, dates, formulas), it is best to make flashcards for this material and review periodically throughout the day rather than one long, memorization session (Wissman and Rawson, 2012). See our handout on memorization strategies to learn more.

It’s good to be intense

Not all studying is equal. You will accomplish more if you study intensively. Intensive study sessions are short and will allow you to get work done with minimal wasted effort. Shorter, intensive study times are more effective than drawn out studying.

In fact, one of the most impactful study strategies is distributing studying over multiple sessions (Newport, 2007). Intensive study sessions can last 30 or 45-minute sessions and include active studying strategies. For example, self-testing is an active study strategy that improves the intensity of studying and efficiency of learning. However, planning to spend hours on end self-testing is likely to cause you to become distracted and lose your attention.

On the other hand, if you plan to quiz yourself on the course material for 45 minutes and then take a break, you are much more likely to maintain your attention and retain the information. Furthermore, the shorter, more intense sessions will likely put the pressure on that is needed to prevent procrastination.

Silence isn’t golden

Know where you study best. The silence of a library may not be the best place for you. It’s important to consider what noise environment works best for you. You might find that you concentrate better with some background noise. Some people find that listening to classical music while studying helps them concentrate, while others find this highly distracting. The point is that the silence of the library may be just as distracting (or more) than the noise of a gymnasium. Thus, if silence is distracting, but you prefer to study in the library, try the first or second floors where there is more background ‘buzz.’

Keep in mind that active studying is rarely silent as it often requires saying the material aloud.

Problems are your friend

Working and re-working problems is important for technical courses (e.g., math, economics). Be able to explain the steps of the problems and why they work.

In technical courses, it is usually more important to work problems than read the text (Newport, 2007). In class, write down in detail the practice problems demonstrated by the professor. Annotate each step and ask questions if you are confused. At the very least, record the question and the answer (even if you miss the steps).

When preparing for tests, put together a large list of problems from the course materials and lectures. Work the problems and explain the steps and why they work (Carrier, 2003).

Reconsider multitasking

A significant amount of research indicates that multi-tasking does not improve efficiency and actually negatively affects results (Junco, 2012).

In order to study smarter, not harder, you will need to eliminate distractions during your study sessions. Social media, web browsing, game playing, texting, etc. will severely affect the intensity of your study sessions if you allow them! Research is clear that multi-tasking (e.g., responding to texts, while studying), increases the amount of time needed to learn material and decreases the quality of the learning (Junco, 2012).

Eliminating the distractions will allow you to fully engage during your study sessions. If you don’t need your computer for homework, then don’t use it. Use apps to help you set limits on the amount of time you can spend at certain sites during the day. Turn your phone off. Reward intensive studying with a social-media break (but make sure you time your break!) See our handout on managing technology for more tips and strategies.

Switch up your setting

Find several places to study in and around campus and change up your space if you find that it is no longer a working space for you.

Know when and where you study best. It may be that your focus at 10:00 PM. is not as sharp as at 10:00 AM. Perhaps you are more productive at a coffee shop with background noise, or in the study lounge in your residence hall. Perhaps when you study on your bed, you fall asleep.

Have a variety of places in and around campus that are good study environments for you. That way wherever you are, you can find your perfect study spot. After a while, you might find that your spot is too comfortable and no longer is a good place to study, so it’s time to hop to a new spot!

Become a teacher

Try to explain the material in your own words, as if you are the teacher. You can do this in a study group, with a study partner, or on your own. Saying the material aloud will point out where you are confused and need more information and will help you retain the information. As you are explaining the material, use examples and make connections between concepts (just as a teacher does). It is okay (even encouraged) to do this with your notes in your hands. At first you may need to rely on your notes to explain the material, but eventually you’ll be able to teach it without your notes.

Creating a quiz for yourself will help you to think like your professor. What does your professor want you to know? Quizzing yourself is a highly effective study technique. Make a study guide and carry it with you so you can review the questions and answers periodically throughout the day and across several days. Identify the questions that you don’t know and quiz yourself on only those questions. Say your answers aloud. This will help you to retain the information and make corrections where they are needed. For technical courses, do the sample problems and explain how you got from the question to the answer. Re-do the problems that give you trouble. Learning the material in this way actively engages your brain and will significantly improve your memory (Craik, 1975).

Take control of your calendar

Controlling your schedule and your distractions will help you to accomplish your goals.

If you are in control of your calendar, you will be able to complete your assignments and stay on top of your coursework. The following are steps to getting control of your calendar:

  • On the same day each week, (perhaps Sunday nights or Saturday mornings) plan out your schedule for the week.
  • Go through each class and write down what you’d like to get completed for each class that week.
  • Look at your calendar and determine how many hours you have to complete your work.
  • Determine whether your list can be completed in the amount of time that you have available. (You may want to put the amount of time expected to complete each assignment.) Make adjustments as needed. For example, if you find that it will take more hours to complete your work than you have available, you will likely need to triage your readings. Completing all of the readings is a luxury. You will need to make decisions about your readings based on what is covered in class. You should read and take notes on all of the assignments from the favored class source (the one that is used a lot in the class). This may be the textbook or a reading that directly addresses the topic for the day. You can likely skim supplemental readings.
  • Pencil into your calendar when you plan to get assignments completed.
  • Before going to bed each night, make your plan for the next day. Waking up with a plan will make you more productive.

See our handout on calendars and college for more tips on using calendars as time management.

Use downtime to your advantage

Beware of ‘easy’ weeks. This is the calm before the storm. Lighter work weeks are a great time to get ahead on work or to start long projects. Use the extra hours to get ahead on assignments or start big projects or papers. You should plan to work on every class every week even if you don’t have anything due. In fact, it is preferable to do some work for each of your classes every day. Spending 30 minutes per class each day will add up to three hours per week, but spreading this time out over six days is more effective than cramming it all in during one long three-hour session. If you have completed all of the work for a particular class, then use the 30 minutes to get ahead or start a longer project.

Use all your resources

Remember that you can make an appointment with an academic coach to work on implementing any of the strategies suggested in this handout.

Works consulted

Carrier, L. M. (2003). College students’ choices of study strategies. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 96 (1), 54-56.

Craik, F. I., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104 (3), 268.

Davis, S. G., & Gray, E. S. (2007). Going beyond test-taking strategies: Building self-regulated students and teachers. Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 1 (1), 31-47.

Edwards, A. J., Weinstein, C. E., Goetz, E. T., & Alexander, P. A. (2014). Learning and study strategies: Issues in assessment, instruction, and evaluation. Elsevier.

Junco, R., & Cotten, S. R. (2012). No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and academic performance. Computers & Education, 59 (2), 505-514.

Mackenzie, A. M. (1994). Examination preparation, anxiety and examination performance in a group of adult students. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 13 (5), 373-388.

McGuire, S.Y. & McGuire, S. (2016). Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate in Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Newport, C. (2006). How to become a straight-a student: the unconventional strategies real college students use to score high while studying less. Three Rivers Press.

Paul, K. (1996). Study smarter, not harder. Self Counsel Press.

Robinson, A. (1993). What smart students know: maximum grades, optimum learning, minimum time. Crown trade paperbacks.

Wissman, K. T., Rawson, K. A., & Pyc, M. A. (2012). How and when do students use flashcards? Memory, 20, 568-579.

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

child doing homework

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

Janine Bempechat

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Sara Rimer

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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How to Help Students Develop the Skills They Need to Complete Homework

Middle and high school students can learn to work more efficiently by using strategies that improve their executive function skills.

Middle school-aged girl doing homework

The effects of homework are mixed. While adolescents across middle and high school have an array of life situations that can make doing homework easier or harder, it’s well known that homework magnifies inequity . However, we also know that learning how to manage time and work independently outside of the school day is valuable for lifelong learning. From the homework wars  to students who have little time for homework to students who don’t even know where to begin, everyone can agree that kids who can self-regulate and engage in independent rehearsal are better positioned for whatever the future holds.

How can we empower students to overcome barriers to doing homework well?

Executive Functioning

Homework is partially an assessment of executive functioning. Executive functioning and self-regulation take time to develop. They depend on three types of critical brain function: working memory, mental flexibility, and self-regulation .

Let’s break this down to consider how to improve their efficiency.

Working memory: Don’t hold everything in your head; it is not possible. When doing homework, students should write down their ideas, whether they are notes while reading, numbers when working through a math problem, or non-school-related reminders about chores, such as remembering to take the dog for a walk. Clearing working memory for the immediate task at hand allows the brain to focus as the strain is reduced.

Mental flexibility: As students build their independence and grow their homework routines, seeing an array of strategies, or more than one way to solve a problem, is important. Consider the results when a child gets stuck and doesn’t know what to do to get unstuck or when one keeps trying the same failed approach. Chunking homework helps simplify the process. When stuck, a student looks at a smaller piece, which makes it easier to see other solutions. More practice with mental flexibility happens when others model thinking in different ways, and students practice flexible thinking with partners by asking them: What is another way? Use this bubble map to chart out multiple ways.

Self-regulation: Learning how to prioritize work and stick with it by not giving in to impulses is a skill that students develop over time . One way to teach self-regulation is to have students practice control by concentrating for short periods of time with the goal of building up to longer, more sustained periods of time as the year progresses. For a child who struggles with reading for an extended time, start with five minutes and then build from there.

Another self-regulation tip is creating a plan to overcome distractions. What happens when the child stumbles? Three minutes into reading and a student is reaching for their cell phone. Recommend that they practice moving the cell phone away from the homework area, and summarize before returning to the reading. Stops and starts are frustrating and often result in lost homework time. Have students practice responses to distraction, and make this part of their homework. When a student struggles to stay on task, they should be encouraged to remove any distraction in order to regain focus.

Use classroom assessment as a tool to plan for and support student homework. Record the following information for students:

  • Do they write, read, and/or solve problems in class? For how many minutes independently?
  • What is the quality of their work? Are they actually learning, or are they just going through the motions?
  • Do they know how to strategize on their own or get help from a peer when they’re stuck? Observe them and take notes, and/or have them reflect on this question.

We cannot expect that students will independently practice a skill they don’t engage with during class. If it doesn't happen in the classroom, it's not going to happen at home. The teacher should be able to realistically gauge how much and what students might achieve at home. A suggestion to build independence is to use task analysis . Here is a model . For students who struggle with getting homework done, at first they may not actually do homework; rather, they practice the routines of setting up and getting started.

Direct Instruction

The following are some techniques that help students with homework:

  • Mindful meditation to gain focus
  • Prioritizing and estimating time
  • Filtering out distractions

Peers as Partners

Class partnership routines need practice. With strong partnerships, kids learn how to support and learn from each other. Access to teachers will never match the unlimited access to peers. The hours that students who achieve at high levels put in after class are often spent alone rehearsing the content or with peers who push each other to improve.

Class-to-Home Connection

While some students struggle with executive functioning, others rush through their homework. The most important step in having homework count is to make it seamless, not separate from class. Homework flows from classwork. Especially with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous work, now there is no homework, just work done for our classes. Consistent instructional goals with engaging and meaningful tasks help students see the value in working beyond the last bell.

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How to Do Homework

Last Updated: March 2, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Ronitte Libedinsky, MS . Ronitte Libedinsky is an Academic Tutor and the Founder of Brighter Minds SF, a San Francisco, California based company that provides one-on-one and small group tutoring. Specializing in tutoring mathematics (pre-algebra, algebra I/II, geometry, pre-calculus, calculus) and science (chemistry, biology), Ronitte has over 10 years of experience tutoring to middle school, high school, and college students. She also tutors in SSAT, Terra Nova, HSPT, SAT, and ACT test prep. Ronitte holds a BS in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS in Chemistry from Tel Aviv University. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 954,247 times.

Even though your parents probably complain about how hard it was in their day, students nowadays have more homework than ever before, even when just starting their first year at middle school. That homework doesn't need to be a struggle now. Learning to plan out an efficient schedule for completing your homework, working on it effectively, and knowing when to get help with difficult assignments can help take the stress out of studying. Don't put it off any longer. See Step 1 for more information.

Working on Homework

Step 1 Make sure you have everything you need before you start.

Once you go into your space and start working, try not to leave until you've got a break scheduled. If you want a quick snack or drink, get it now before you start. Hit the bathroom and make sure you'll be able to work for the amount of time before your next break, uninterrupted.

Step 2 Eliminate as many distractions as possible.

  • It's common that students will try to multi-task, watching TV or listening to the radio or continuing to chat on Facebook or Instagram while also trying to do homework. It'll be so much more fun to do those things after you're already done with your homework, though, and your homework will take half as much time if you're focused on doing nothing but your homework.
  • Check your phone or your social networking sites during your study break, but not before. Use these distractions as a carrot, not as a pacifier.

Step 3 Concentrate on one task at a time.

If one assignment proves challenging and time-consuming, it's okay to switch for a while to something else. Just make sure to save enough time to circle back and give it another shot.

Step 4 Take a break every hour.

  • Try to figure out what works best for you. Some students might like to start their homework immediately after school to get it done as quickly as possible, while it may be better to give yourself an hour to relax before starting in on it and decompress from the long school day. Don't wait for the last minute.
  • While it may seem like a better idea to work straight through and finish, it's possible that the quality of the work you're doing will start to suffer if you don't give your mind a rest. It's difficult to think hard for more than 45 minutes at a time on a particular subject. Give yourself a rest and come back refreshed.

Step 5 Dive back in after study breaks.

  • The first fifteen minutes after a break are your most effective minutes, because your mind will be cleared, and ready to work hard. Give yourself a pep talk and dive back in, refreshed and ready.

Step 6 Create incentives to finish.

  • If you have trouble staying focused, get a parent, sibling, or friend to help keep you honest. Give them your phone while you're working to avoid the temptation to check it, or give them the video game controller so you won't be able to plug in for a few minutes of alien-hunting when you're supposed to be doing your homework. Then, when you're finished, show them the finished product and earn back your fun. Make it impossible to cheat.

Step 7 Let the homework take as long as it needs.

  • You can make yourself take enough time by having your gate-keeper (the person with your phone or video game controller) check over your homework for quality when you're done. If you know you're not going to get it anyway unless it's done right, you won't have any reason to rush. Slow down and do it right.

Step 8 Review your work after you finish.

Planning Your Homework

Step 1 Write out your daily homework in a list.

  • It's common to quickly write out the math problems you're supposed to do at the top of your notes, or scribble down the page number of the English reading on a textbook page, but try to recopy this information into a specific homework list so you will be sure to remember to do it.
  • Write down as many details as you can about each assignment. It's good to include the due date, corresponding textbook pages, and additional instructions from your teacher. This will help you plan your night of homework more effectively. Also, it's a good idea to write about your homework in a planner.

Step 2 Make sure you understand each assignment.

  • Homework doesn't have to wait until you get home. Look through an assignment as soon as it's been given, so you'll have the time to ask your teacher any questions you might have before you leave school for the day.

Step 3 Create a comfortable homework spot

  • At home , a desk in your bedroom might be the best place. You can shut the door and tune out any distractions. For some students, though, this is a good way to get distracted. You might have video games, computers, guitars, and all sorts of other distractions in your bedroom. It might be a better idea to sit at the kitchen table, or in the living room, where your parents can call you out for procrastinating. You'll get it done more quickly without the temptation of distraction.
  • In public , the library is a great place to study and do homework. At all libraries, it's a rule that you have to be quiet, and you won't have any of the distractions of home. The school library will often stay open after school ends, making it a good option for finishing up homework before heading home, or your school may even have an after-school study spot specifically for the purpose. [11] X Research source
  • Try to switch it up . Studying in the same place too often can make work more difficult. Some studies have shown that a change in environment can make your mind more active, since it's processing new information. You'll be able to vary your routine and remember what you learned more effectively.

Step 4 Choose the most important assignments to work on.

  • Try starting with the most difficult homework . Do you really hate the idea of getting into the algebra homework? Does reading for English take the longest? Start with the most challenging homework to give yourself the most time to complete it, then move on to the easier tasks you can complete more quickly.
  • Try starting with the most pressing homework . If you've got 20 math problems to do for tomorrow, and 20 pages to read in a novel for Friday, it's probably better to start with the math homework to make sure you'll have enough time to complete it. Make homework due the next day the priority.
  • Try starting with the most important homework . Your math homework might be difficult, but if it's only worth a few completion points, it might be less important to spend a lot of time on it than the big project for Social Studies that's due in two days. Devote the most time to the most valuable assignments.

Step 5 Make a timetable.

  • Set an alarm or a timer to keep yourself honest. The less time you spend procrastinating and checking your text messages, the more quickly you'll be done. If you think you can finish everything in a half hour, set a timer and work efficiently to finish in that amount of time. If you don't quite finish, give yourself a few extra minutes. Treat it like a drill.
  • Keep track of how long you usually spend on particular assignments on average. If your math homework typically takes you 45 minutes to finish, save that much time each night. If you start plugging away for an hour, give yourself a break and work on something else to avoid tiring out.
  • Schedule 10 minutes of break time for every 50 minutes of work time. It's important to take study breaks and give your mind a rest, or you'll work less effectively. You're not a robot!

Finding Extra Time

Step 1 Start working on it now.

  • Do you really need an hour of TV or computer after school to decompress? It might be easier to just dive into your homework and get it done while the skills are still fresh in your mind. Waiting a couple hours means you'll have to review your notes and try to get back to the same place you already were. Do it while it's fresh.
  • If you've got three days to read an assignment, don't wait until the last evening to do it all. Space it out and give yourself more time to finish. Just because you've got a due date that's a long time away doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier to finish now. Stay ahead of the game. Try either waking up earlier or going to bed later. But don't get too tired!

Step 2 Steal some homework time on the bus.

  • If you've got to read a bunch of stuff for homework, read on the bus. Pop in some headphones to white noise that'll drown out the shouting of other students and tune into your book.
  • The bus can be distracting, or it can be a great resource. Since it's full of your classmates, try to get other students to work with you and get things done more quickly. Work together on the math problems and try to figure out things together. It's not cheating if everyone's doing the work and no one's just copying. Also, you might make some new friends while you're at it!

Step 3 Work on your homework in between class periods.

  • Don't rely on this time to finish homework just before it's due. Rushing to finish your last few problems in the five minutes before you need to turn it in looks bad in front of the teacher, plus it doesn't give you any time to review your homework after you finish it. Rushing is a good way to make mistakes. And always check difficult problems you had trouble with.

Step 4 Work on homework during long waits.

  • Work on your homework while you're waiting for a ride, while you're killing time at your brother's soccer game, or while you're waiting for your friend to come over. Take advantage of any extra time you have in the day.

Getting Homework Help

Step 1 Talk to your teacher about difficult assignments.

  • Asking for help with your homework isn't a sign that you're bad at the subject or that you're "stupid." Every teacher on the planet will respect a student that takes their homework seriously enough to ask for help. Especially ask if you weren't there that day!
  • Asking for help isn't the same thing as complaining about the difficulty of homework or making excuses. Spending ten minutes doing half your math problems and leaving most of them blank because they were hard and then telling your teacher you need help isn't going to win you any favors on the due date. If it's hard, see your teacher ahead of time and find the time to get help.

Step 2 Visit the tutoring center or help desk at school.

  • If there's not an organized homework help group at your school, there are many private tutoring organizations that work both for-pay and non-profits. Sylvan Learning Center and other businesses have after-school hours that you can schedule appointments at to get help studying and completing your homework, while community centers like the YMCA, or even public libraries will often have homework help hours in your area.
  • Getting help doesn't mean that you're bad at your homework. All variety of students visit tutoring centers for extra help, just to make sure they have enough time and motivation to get everything done. It's hard being a student! There's no shame in extra help. Imagine being afraid to ask for anything! You wouldn't be able to ask in restaurants, shops, anywhere!

Step 3 Work with other students.

  • Make sure that your group study sessions don't cross the line into cheating. Dividing up an assigned so your friend does half and you copy each other's answers is considered cheating, but discussing a problem and coming up with a solution together isn't. As long as you each do the work separately, you shouldn't have any problems.

Step 4 Talk to your parents.

  • Some parents don't necessarily know how to help with your homework and might end up doing too much. Try to keep yourself honest. Asking for help doesn't mean asking your parent to do your work for you.
  • Likewise, some older relatives have outdated ways of completing specific tasks and might suggest forcefully that something you learned in class is wrong. Always use your teacher's approach as the correct approach, and discuss these alternative ways of completing an assignment with your teacher if necessary.

Supercharge Your Studying with this Expert Series

1 - Study For Exams

Expert Q&A

Ronitte Libedinsky, MS

Reader Videos

Share a quick video tip and help bring articles to life with your friendly advice. Your insights could make a real difference and help millions of people!

  • If you missed school that day, then you should call a friend to get the notes and/or homework from that day. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
  • Make sure your little study space is well lit, quiet, and comfortable. This will make it much easier to do your homework properly. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
  • Take a piece of paper or wipe board and create a schedule for your homework. Be generous with the amount of time that you give for each task. If you end up finishing a task earlier than the schedule says, you will feel accomplished and will have extra time to complete the next task. It makes homework get done quicker than usual. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

Tips from our Readers

  • Make sure you have what you need handy when you get stuck on homework. Don't be afraid to ask questions if you're confused — asking helps you understand things better. And get enough sleep since it's easier to get your work done when you're well-rested.
  • Don't put off starting homework just to have more playtime. Jumping in early leaves more free time for later but ensures you don't miss out on sleep. Plus, the class material is still fresh right after school, so you'll understand your homework better.
  • Do your homework as soon as you get home every day except Fridays. On Fridays, give yourself permission to relax for the evening. Also, take short breaks as you work to help you focus. Play a quick game, eat a healthy snack, or use the bathroom.
  • Ask for help when you need it, but don't rely on others to give you all the answers. The point of homework is for you to practice what you've learned, so try to work through problems yourself before asking for hints or explanations.
  • Write down homework assignments in your planner right when your teacher gives them so you don't forget details later. Knowing exactly what work you need to do keeps you from being surprised.
  • Break big assignments down into smaller pieces that feel more manageable. Taking things step-by-step makes big tasks feel less overwhelming, and helps you stay motivated.

study or do homework first

  • Never leave unfinished homework for the next day because you might have other homework to do and you will have to do both. Thanks Helpful 24 Not Helpful 0
  • If you forget your homework, your teacher might not accept late work or may even give you more homework. Thanks Helpful 7 Not Helpful 1

Things You'll Need

  • Writing equipment, such as pencils, rulers, and erasers.
  • Resources that may help you work faster.
  • A comfy place to sit while doing homework.

You Might Also Like

Excuse Yourself from Unfinished Homework

  • ↑ https://www.warnerpacific.edu/5-tips-for-dealing-with-too-much-homework/
  • ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-wealth/201206/10-tips-make-homework-time-less-painful
  • ↑ Ronitte Libedinsky, MS. Academic Tutor. Expert Interview. 26 May 2020.
  • ↑ https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/plan-for-college/college-prep/stay-motivated/take-control-of-homework
  • ↑ https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/homework.html
  • ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/understanding-assignments/
  • ↑ https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/homework.html
  • ↑ http://kidshealth.org/teen/school_jobs/school/homework.html#a_Create_a_Homework_Plan
  • ↑ https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Extras/StudyMath/Homework.aspx
  • ↑ https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/studying-101-study-smarter-not-harder/
  • ↑ https://kidshealth.org/en/kids/homework-help.html

About This Article

Ronitte Libedinsky, MS

If you need to do homework, find a quiet, comfortable spot where you won’t be distracted. Turn off any electronics, like your TV, phone, or radio, and gather all of the supplies you’ll need before you get started. Work on the most important or hardest assignments first to get them out of the way, and if you have a homework assignment that actually seems fun, save it for last to motivate you to finish your other work faster. Keep reading to learn how to find extra time to get your homework done, like working on it on the way home from school! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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6 Tips for a Homework & Studying Schedule That Actually Works

6 Tips for a Homework & Studying Schedule That Actually Works

Waiting until the last minute to cram for a test or to write an essay isn’t just going to make your life more stressful. It’s also less likely to produce the results you want.

Studies have shown that the most effective way to retain new material is with spaced repetition . This means engaging with the concepts consistently over a longer span of time.

If you want to cut down on the all-nighters, try these six easy tips to create a homework and studying schedule that actually works.

1. Review Your Homework in Advance

First, set some time aside at the beginning of your semester or school term to look over your assignments. Make sure you understand:

  • What each one entails
  • How much time each task will take
  • Its due date

Then, check to see if you need any additional resources. For example, you may need a library book to complete an assignment. Nothing will throw off your schedule more than sitting down at your desk only to find out that you don’t have what you need to do the work. Reviewing your assignments before they’re due will help with efficiency once you start working.

2. Make Your Schedule as Specific as Possible

Once you have a list of everything you need to do, turn it into a daily or weekly schedule. Decide which tasks you want to do first and when. Then, you can write it in a planner or use an Excel template to create a printable homework chart.

Avoid generalized terms like “study Spanish for two hours.” Otherwise, you’ll be tempted to fill the time with the easiest task that falls into that category.

Instead, list specific items like, “write book report” or “study flash cards.” This way, you know exactly what you need to do and are less likely to put it off.

3. Find Your Preferred Study Routine

Sometimes you have to do homework when you’re tired or aren’t feeling well, but that doesn’t mean you should totally ignore what your body’s telling you.

According to the latest research , multiple 40-minute study sessions can be more productive than three-hour chunks. Experiment with studying at different times of day and for varying lengths of time.

Take notes about which sessions were productive and which ones weren’t to help you figure out your ideal study routine.

4. Download a Studying App

There’s no denying that phones can be distracting while studying. But if you use them wisely they can be a lot of help.

Use flashcard apps to create your own flashcards and gamify your study experience. These apps help you study in small bits throughout the day plus you won’t have to carry physical flashcards around with you.

There are other apps to help you learn a language, practice math, or take better notes . You can also use a homework scheduling app and color-code your assignments by subject.

5. Create a Productive Workspace

Using the same workspace every day can help you stick to your homework schedule. Avoid distracting places like the living room or kitchen, and try not to work on your bed or in front of the TV. Even small things, like making sure your laptop is charged or putting on your favorite study playlist, can make a big difference in your productivity.

Ideally, you should set aside a desk in a quiet room that’s comfortable enough to sit at for a few hours at a time. The more you use it for studying, the more you’ll associate it with productivity and be in the right headspace to get work done.

For some tips on how to get started, check out our guide on how to create the perfect homework environment .

6. Ask for Help if You Need it

Finally, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. Even if you have a good grasp on the material, sometimes studying alone can be isolating.

From joining an online study group to hiring a professional tutor for your SATs, there are plenty of ways to get outside support. You can ask a friend or parent to check in on your progress or proofread your assignments before you submit them.

Whether you’re in middle school, high school, or college, homework never really goes away. But you can make it more manageable with these six helpful homework and studying schedule tips.

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Does homework really work?

by: Leslie Crawford | Updated: December 12, 2023

Print article

Does homework help

You know the drill. It’s 10:15 p.m., and the cardboard-and-toothpick Golden Gate Bridge is collapsing. The pages of polynomials have been abandoned. The paper on the Battle of Waterloo seems to have frozen in time with Napoleon lingering eternally over his breakfast at Le Caillou. Then come the tears and tantrums — while we parents wonder, Does the gain merit all this pain? Is this just too much homework?

However the drama unfolds night after night, year after year, most parents hold on to the hope that homework (after soccer games, dinner, flute practice, and, oh yes, that childhood pastime of yore known as playing) advances their children academically.

But what does homework really do for kids? Is the forest’s worth of book reports and math and spelling sheets the average American student completes in their 12 years of primary schooling making a difference? Or is it just busywork?

Homework haterz

Whether or not homework helps, or even hurts, depends on who you ask. If you ask my 12-year-old son, Sam, he’ll say, “Homework doesn’t help anything. It makes kids stressed-out and tired and makes them hate school more.”

Nothing more than common kid bellyaching?

Maybe, but in the fractious field of homework studies, it’s worth noting that Sam’s sentiments nicely synopsize one side of the ivory tower debate. Books like The End of Homework , The Homework Myth , and The Case Against Homework the film Race to Nowhere , and the anguished parent essay “ My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me ” make the case that homework, by taking away precious family time and putting kids under unneeded pressure, is an ineffective way to help children become better learners and thinkers.

One Canadian couple took their homework apostasy all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. After arguing that there was no evidence that it improved academic performance, they won a ruling that exempted their two children from all homework.

So what’s the real relationship between homework and academic achievement?

How much is too much?

To answer this question, researchers have been doing their homework on homework, conducting and examining hundreds of studies. Chris Drew Ph.D., founder and editor at The Helpful Professor recently compiled multiple statistics revealing the folly of today’s after-school busy work. Does any of the data he listed below ring true for you?

• 45 percent of parents think homework is too easy for their child, primarily because it is geared to the lowest standard under the Common Core State Standards .

• 74 percent of students say homework is a source of stress , defined as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems.

• Students in high-performing high schools spend an average of 3.1 hours a night on homework , even though 1 to 2 hours is the optimal duration, according to a peer-reviewed study .

Not included in the list above is the fact many kids have to abandon activities they love — like sports and clubs — because homework deprives them of the needed time to enjoy themselves with other pursuits.

Conversely, The Helpful Professor does list a few pros of homework, noting it teaches discipline and time management, and helps parents know what’s being taught in the class.

The oft-bandied rule on homework quantity — 10 minutes a night per grade (starting from between 10 to 20 minutes in first grade) — is listed on the National Education Association’s website and the National Parent Teacher Association’s website , but few schools follow this rule.

Do you think your child is doing excessive homework? Harris Cooper Ph.D., author of a meta-study on homework , recommends talking with the teacher. “Often there is a miscommunication about the goals of homework assignments,” he says. “What appears to be problematic for kids, why they are doing an assignment, can be cleared up with a conversation.” Also, Cooper suggests taking a careful look at how your child is doing the assignments. It may seem like they’re taking two hours, but maybe your child is wandering off frequently to get a snack or getting distracted.

Less is often more

If your child is dutifully doing their work but still burning the midnight oil, it’s worth intervening to make sure your child gets enough sleep. A 2012 study of 535 high school students found that proper sleep may be far more essential to brain and body development.

For elementary school-age children, Cooper’s research at Duke University shows there is no measurable academic advantage to homework. For middle-schoolers, Cooper found there is a direct correlation between homework and achievement if assignments last between one to two hours per night. After two hours, however, achievement doesn’t improve. For high schoolers, Cooper’s research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

Many schools are starting to act on this research. A Florida superintendent abolished homework in her 42,000 student district, replacing it with 20 minutes of nightly reading. She attributed her decision to “ solid research about what works best in improving academic achievement in students .”

More family time

A 2020 survey by Crayola Experience reports 82 percent of children complain they don’t have enough quality time with their parents. Homework deserves much of the blame. “Kids should have a chance to just be kids and do things they enjoy, particularly after spending six hours a day in school,” says Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth . “It’s absurd to insist that children must be engaged in constructive activities right up until their heads hit the pillow.”

By far, the best replacement for homework — for both parents and children — is bonding, relaxing time together.

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Daniel Wong

30 Tips to Stop Procrastinating and Find Motivation to Do Homework

Updated on June 6, 2023 By Daniel Wong 44 Comments

Student

To stop procrastinating on homework, you need to find motivation to do the homework in the first place.

But first, you have to overcome feeling too overwhelmed to even start.

You know what it feels like when everything hits you at once, right?

You have three tests to study for and a math assignment due tomorrow.

And you’ve got a history report due the day after.

You tell yourself to get down to work. But with so much to do, you feel overwhelmed.

So you procrastinate.

You check your social media feed, watch a few videos, and get yourself a drink. But you know that none of this is bringing you closer to getting the work done.

Does this sound familiar?

Don’t worry – you are not alone. Procrastination is a problem that everyone faces, but there are ways around it.

By following the tips in this article, you’ll be able to overcome procrastination and consistently find the motivation to do the homework .

So read on to discover 30 powerful tips to help you stop procrastinating on your homework.

Enter your email below to download a PDF summary of this article. The PDF contains all the tips found here, plus  3 exclusive bonus tips that you’ll only find in the PDF.

How to stop procrastinating and motivate yourself to do your homework.

Procrastination when it comes to homework isn’t just an issue of laziness or a lack of motivation .

The following tips will help you to first address the root cause of your procrastination and then implement strategies to keep your motivation levels high.

1. Take a quiz to see how much you procrastinate.

The first step to changing your behavior is to become more self-aware.

How often do you procrastinate? What kinds of tasks do you tend to put off? Is procrastination a small or big problem for you?

To answer these questions, I suggest that you take this online quiz designed by Psychology Today .

2. Figure out why you’re procrastinating.

Procrastination is a complex issue that involves multiple factors.

Stop thinking of excuses for not doing your homework , and figure out what’s keeping you from getting started.

Are you procrastinating because:

  • You’re not sure you’ll be able to solve all the homework problems?
  • You’re subconsciously rebelling against your teachers or parents?
  • You’re not interested in the subject or topic?
  • You’re physically or mentally tired?
  • You’re waiting for the perfect time to start?
  • You don’t know where to start?

Once you’ve identified exactly why you’re procrastinating, you can pick out the tips in this article that will get to the root of the problem.

3. Write down what you’re procrastinating on.

Students tend to procrastinate when they’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

But you might be surprised to discover that simply by writing down the specific tasks you’re putting off, the situation will feel more manageable.

It’s a quick solution, and it makes a real difference.

Give it a try and you’ll be less likely to procrastinate.

4. Put your homework on your desk.

Homework

Here’s an even simpler idea.

Many times, the hardest part of getting your homework done is getting started.

It doesn’t require a lot of willpower to take out your homework and put it on your desk.

But once it’s sitting there in front of you, you’ll be much closer to actually getting down to work.

5. Break down the task into smaller steps.

This one trick will make any task seem more manageable.

For example, if you have a history report to write, you could break it down into the following steps:

  • Read the history textbook
  • Do online research
  • Organize the information
  • Create an outline
  • Write the introduction
  • Write the body paragraphs
  • Write the conclusion
  • Edit and proofread the report

Focus on just one step at a time. This way, you won’t need to motivate yourself to write the whole report at one go.

This is an important technique to use if you want to study smart and get more done .

6. Create a detailed timeline with specific deadlines.

As a follow-up to Point #5, you can further combat procrastination by creating a timeline with specific deadlines.

Using the same example above, I’ve added deadlines to each of the steps:

  • Jan 30 th : Read the history textbook
  • Feb 2 nd : Do online research
  • Feb 3 rd : Organize the information
  • Feb 5 th : Create an outline
  • Feb 8 th : Write the introduction
  • Feb 12 th : Write the body paragraphs
  • Feb 14 th : Write the conclusion
  • Feb 16 th : Edit and proofread the report

Assigning specific dates creates a sense of urgency, which makes it more likely that you’ll keep to the deadlines.

7. Spend time with people who are focused and hardworking.

Jim Rohn famously said that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

If you hang out with people who are motivated and hardworking, you’ll become more like them.

Likewise, if you hang out with people who continually procrastinate, you’ll become more like them too.

Motivation to do homework naturally increases when you surround yourself with the right people.

So choose your friends wisely. Find homework buddies who will influence you positively to become a straight-A student who leads a balanced life.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun! It just means that you and your friends know when it’s time to get down to work and when it’s time to enjoy yourselves.

8. Tell at least two or three people about the tasks you plan to complete.

Group of students

When you tell others about the tasks you intend to finish, you’ll be more likely to follow through with your plans.

This is called “accountability,” and it kicks in because you want to be seen as someone who keeps your word.

So if you know about this principle, why not use it to your advantage?

You could even ask a friend to be your accountability buddy. At the beginning of each day, you could text each other what you plan to work on that day.

Then at the end of the day, you could check in with each other to see if things went according to plan.

9. Change your environment .

Maybe it’s your environment that’s making you feel sluggish.

When you’re doing your homework, is your super-comfortable bed just two steps away? Or is your distracting computer within easy reach?

If your environment is part of your procrastination problem, then change it.

Sometimes all you need is a simple change of scenery. Bring your work to the dining room table and get it done there. Or head to a nearby café to complete your report.

10. Talk to people who have overcome their procrastination problem.

If you have friends who consistently win the battle with procrastination, learn from their experience.

What was the turning point for them? What tips and strategies do they use? What keeps them motivated?

Find all this out, and then apply the information to your own situation.

11. Decide on a reward to give yourself after you complete your task.

“Planned” rewards are a great way to motivate yourself to do your homework.

The reward doesn’t have to be something huge.

For instance, you might decide that after you finish 10 questions of your math homework, you get to watch your favorite TV show.

Or you might decide that after reading one chapter of your history textbook, you get to spend 10 minutes on Facebook.

By giving yourself a reward, you’ll feel more motivated to get through the task at hand.

12. Decide on a consequence you’ll impose on yourself if you don’t meet the deadline.

Consequences

It’s important that you decide on what the consequence will be before you start working toward your goal.

As an example, you could tell your younger brother that you’ll give him $1 for every deadline you don’t meet (see Point #6).

Or you could decide that you’ll delete one game from your phone for every late homework submission.

Those consequences would probably be painful enough to help you get down to work, right?

13. Visualize success.

Take 30 seconds and imagine how you’ll feel when you finish your work.

What positive emotions will you experience?

Will you feel a sense of satisfaction from getting all your work done?

Will you relish the extra time on your hands when you get your homework done fast and ahead of time?

This simple exercise of visualizing success may be enough to inspire you to start doing your assignment.

14. Visualize the process it will take to achieve that success.

Even more important than visualizing the outcome is visualizing the process it will take to achieve that outcome.

Research shows that focusing on the process is critical to success. If you’re procrastinating on a task, take a few moments to think about what you’ll need to do to complete it.

Visualize the following:

  • What resources you’ll need
  • Who you can turn to for help
  • How long the task will take
  • Where you’ll work on the task
  • The joy you’ll experience as you make progress

This kind of visualization is like practice for your mind.

Once you understand what’s necessary to achieve your goal, you’ll find that it’s much easier to get down to work with real focus. This is key to doing well in school .

15. Write down why you want to complete the task.

Why

You’ll be more motivated when you’re clear about why you want to accomplish something.

To motivate yourself to do your homework, think about all the ways in which it’s a meaningful task.

So take a couple of minutes to write down the reasons. Here are some possible ones:

  • Learn useful information
  • Master the topic
  • Enjoy a sense of accomplishment when you’ve completed the task
  • Become a more focused student
  • Learn to embrace challenges
  • Fulfill your responsibility as a student
  • Get a good grade on the assignment

16. Write down the negative feelings you’ll have if you don’t complete the task.

If you don’t complete the assignment, you might feel disappointed or discouraged. You might even feel as if you’ve let your parents or your teacher – or even yourself – down.

It isn’t wise to dwell on these negative emotions for too long. But by imagining how you’ll feel if you don’t finish the task, you’ll realize how important it is that you get to work.

17. Do the hardest task first.

Most students will choose to do the easiest task first, rather than the hardest one. But this approach isn’t effective because it leaves the worst for last.

It’s more difficult to find motivation to do homework in less enjoyable subjects.

As Brian Tracy says , “Eat that frog!” By this, he means that you should always get your most difficult task out of the way at the beginning of the day.

If math is your least favorite subject, force yourself to complete your math homework first.

After doing so, you’ll feel a surge of motivation from knowing it’s finished. And you won’t procrastinate on your other homework because it will seem easier in comparison.

(On a separate note, check out these tips on how to get better at math if you’re struggling.)

18. Set a timer when doing your homework.

I recommend that you use a stopwatch for every homework session. (If you prefer, you could also use this online stopwatch or the Tomato Timer .)

Start the timer at the beginning of the session, and work in 30- to 45-minute blocks.

Using a timer creates a sense of urgency, which will help you fight off your urge to procrastinate.

When you know you only have to work for a short session, it will be easier to find motivation to complete your homework.

Tell yourself that you need to work hard until the timer goes off, and then you can take a break. (And then be sure to take that break!)

19. Eliminate distractions.

Here are some suggestions on how you can do this:

  • Delete all the games and social media apps on your phone
  • Turn off all notifications on your phone
  • Mute your group chats
  • Archive your inactive chats
  • Turn off your phone, or put it on airplane mode
  • Put your phone at least 10 feet away from you
  • Turn off the Internet access on your computer
  • Use an app like Freedom to restrict your Internet usage
  • Put any other distractions (like food, magazines and books unrelated to your homework) at the other end of the room
  • Unplug the TV
  • Use earplugs if your surroundings are noisy

20. At the start of each day, write down the two to three Most Important Tasks (MITs) you want to accomplish.

Writing a list

This will enable you to prioritize your tasks. As Josh Kaufman explains , a Most Important Task (MIT) is a critical task that will help you to get significant results down the road.

Not all tasks are equally important. That’s why it’s vital that you identify your MITs, so that you can complete those as early in the day as possible.

What do you most need to get done today? That’s an MIT.

Get to work on it, then feel the satisfaction that comes from knowing it’s out of the way.

21. Focus on progress instead of perfection.

Perfectionism can destroy your motivation to do homework and keep you from starting important assignments.

Some students procrastinate because they’re waiting for the perfect time to start.

Others do so because they want to get their homework done perfectly. But they know this isn’t really possible – so they put off even getting started.

What’s the solution?

To focus on progress instead of perfection.

There’s never a perfect time for anything. Nor will you ever be able to complete your homework perfectly. But you can do your best, and that’s enough.

So concentrate on learning and improving, and turn this into a habit that you implement whenever you study .

22. Get organized.

Procrastination is common among students who are disorganized.

When you can’t remember which assignment is due when or which tests you have coming up, you’ll naturally feel confused. You’ll experience school- and test-related stress .

This, in turn, will lead to procrastination.

That’s why it’s crucial that you get organized. Here are some tips for doing this:

  • Don’t rely on your memory ; write everything down
  • Keep a to-do list
  • Use a student planner
  • Use a calendar and take note of important dates like exams, project due dates, school holidays , birthdays, and family events
  • At the end of each day, plan for the following day
  • Use one binder or folder for each subject or course
  • Do weekly filing of your loose papers, notes, and old homework
  • Throw away all the papers and notes you no longer need

23. Stop saying “I have to” and start saying “I choose to.”

When you say things like “I have to write my essay” or “I have to finish my science assignment,” you’ll probably feel annoyed. You might be tempted to complain about your teachers or your school .

What’s the alternative?

To use the phrase “I choose to.”

The truth is, you don’t “have” to do anything.

You can choose not to write your essay; you’ll just run the risk of failing the class.

You can choose not to do your science assignment; you’ll just need to deal with your angry teacher.

When you say “I choose to do my homework,” you’ll feel empowered. This means you’ll be more motivated to study and to do what you ought to.

24. Clear your desk once a week.

Organized desk

Clutter can be demotivating. It also causes stress , which is often at the root of procrastination.

Hard to believe? Give it a try and see for yourself.

By clearing your desk, you’ll reduce stress and make your workspace more organized.

So set a recurring appointment to organize your workspace once a week for just 10 minutes. You’ll receive huge benefits in the long run!

25. If a task takes two minutes or less to complete, do it now.

This is a principle from David Allen’s bestselling book, Getting Things Done .

You may notice that you tend to procrastinate when many tasks pile up. The way to prevent this from happening is to take care of the small but important tasks as soon as you have time.

Here are some examples of small two-minute tasks that you should do once you have a chance:

  • Replying to your project group member’s email
  • Picking up anything on the floor that doesn’t belong there
  • Asking your parents to sign a consent form
  • Filing a graded assignment
  • Making a quick phone call
  • Writing a checklist
  • Sending a text to schedule a meeting
  • Making an online purchase that doesn’t require further research

26. Finish one task before starting on the next.

You aren’t being productive when you switch between working on your literature essay, social studies report, and physics problem set – while also intermittently checking your phone.

Research shows that multitasking is less effective than doing one thing at a time. Multitasking may even damage your brain !

When it comes to overcoming procrastination, it’s better to stick with one task all the way through before starting on the next one.

You’ll get a sense of accomplishment when you finish the first assignment, which will give you a boost of inspiration as you move on to the next one.

27. Build your focus gradually.

You can’t win the battle against procrastination overnight; it takes time. This means that you need to build your focus progressively.

If you can only focus for 10 minutes at once, that’s fine. Start with three sessions of 10 minutes a day. After a week, increase it to three sessions of 15 minutes a day, and so on.

As the weeks go by, you’ll become far more focused than when you first started. And you’ll soon see how great that makes you feel.

28. Before you start work, write down three things you’re thankful for.

Gratitude

Gratitude improves your psychological health and increases your mental strength .

These factors are linked to motivation. The more you practice gratitude, the easier it will be to find motivation to do your homework. As such, it’s less likely that you’ll be a serial procrastinator.

Before you get down to work for the day, write down three things you’re thankful for. These could be simple things like good health, fine weather, or a loving family.

You could even do this in a “gratitude journal,” which you can then look back on whenever you need a shot of fresh appreciation for the good things in your life.

Either way, this short exercise will get you in the right mindset to be productive.

29. Get enough sleep.

For most people, this means getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night. And teenagers need 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night to function optimally.

What does sleep have to do with procrastination?

More than you might realize.

It’s almost impossible to feel motivated when you’re tired. And when you’re low on energy, your willpower is depleted too.

That’s why you give in to the temptation of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube videos more easily when you’re sleep-deprived.

Here are ways to get more sleep , and sleep better too:

  • Create a bedtime routine
  • Go to sleep at around the same time every night
  • Set a daily alarm as a reminder to go to bed
  • Exercise regularly (but not within a few hours of bedtime)
  • Make your bedroom as dark as possible
  • Remove or switch off all electronic devices before bedtime
  • Avoid caffeine at least six hours before bedtime
  • Use an eye mask and earplugs

30. Schedule appointments with yourself to complete your homework.

These appointments are specific blocks of time reserved for working on a report, assignment, or project. Scheduling appointments is effective because it makes the task more “official,” so you’re more likely to keep the appointment.

For example, you could schedule appointments such as:

  • Jan 25 th , 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm: Math assignment
  • Jan 27 th , 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm: Online research for social studies project
  • Jan 28 th , 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm: Write introduction for English essay

Transform homework procrastination into homework motivation

Procrastination is a problem we all face.

But given that you’ve read all the way to here, I know you’re committed to overcoming this problem.

And now that you’re armed with these tips, you have all the tools you need to become more disciplined and focused .

By the way, please don’t feel as if you need to implement all the tips at once, because that would be too overwhelming.

Instead, I recommend that you focus on just a couple of tips a week, and make gradual progress. No rush!

Over time, you’ll realize that your habit of procrastination has been replaced by the habit of getting things done.

Now’s the time to get started on that process of transformation. 🙂

Like this article? Please share it with your friends.

Images: Student and books , Homework , Group of students , Consequences , Why , Writing a list , Organized desk , Gratitude

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January 19, 2016 at 11:53 am

Ur tips are rlly helpful. Thnkyou ! 🙂

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January 19, 2016 at 1:43 pm

You’re welcome 🙂

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August 29, 2018 at 11:21 am

Thanks very much

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February 19, 2019 at 1:38 pm

The funny thing is while I was reading the first few steps of this article I was procrastinating on my homework….

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November 12, 2019 at 12:44 pm

same here! but now I actually want to get my stuff done… huh

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December 4, 2022 at 11:35 pm

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May 30, 2023 at 6:26 am

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October 25, 2023 at 11:35 am

fr tho i totally was but now I’m actually going to get started haha

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June 6, 2020 at 6:04 am

I love your articles

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January 21, 2016 at 7:07 pm

Thanks soo much. It’s almost like you could read my mind- when I felt so overwhelmed with the workload heap I had created for myself by procrastination, I know feel very motivated to tackle it out completely and replace that bad habit with the wonderful tips mentioned here! 🙂

January 21, 2016 at 8:04 pm

I’m glad to help 🙂

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January 25, 2016 at 3:09 pm

You have shared great tips here. I especially like the point “Write down why you want to complete the task” because it is helpful to make us more motivated when we are clear about our goals

January 25, 2016 at 4:51 pm

Glad that you found the tips useful, John!

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January 29, 2016 at 1:22 am

Thank you very much for your wonderful tips!!! ☺☺☺

January 29, 2016 at 10:41 am

It’s my joy to help, Kabir 🙂

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February 3, 2016 at 12:57 pm

Always love your articles. Keep them up 🙂

February 3, 2016 at 1:21 pm

Thanks, Matthew 🙂

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February 4, 2016 at 1:40 pm

There are quite a lot of things that you need to do in order to come out with flying colors while studying in a university away from your homeland. Procrastinating on homework is one of the major mistakes committed by students and these tips will help you to avoid them all and make yourself more efficient during your student life.

February 4, 2016 at 1:58 pm

Completely agreed, Leong Siew.

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October 5, 2018 at 12:52 am

Wow! thank you very much, I love it .

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November 2, 2018 at 10:45 am

You are helping me a lot.. thank you very much….😊

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November 6, 2018 at 5:19 pm

I’m procrastinating by reading this

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November 29, 2018 at 10:21 am

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January 8, 2021 at 3:38 am

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March 3, 2019 at 9:12 am

Daniel, your amazing information and advice, has been very useful! Please keep up your excellent work!

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April 12, 2019 at 11:12 am

We should stop procrastinating.

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September 28, 2019 at 5:19 pm

Thank you so much for the tips:) i’ve been procrastinating since i started high schools and my grades were really bad “F” but the tips have made me a straight A student again.

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January 23, 2020 at 7:43 pm

Thanks for the tips, Daniel! They’re really useful! 😁

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April 10, 2020 at 2:15 pm

I have always stood first in my class. But procrastination has always been a very bad habit of mine which is why I lost marks for late submission .As an excuse for finding motivation for studying I would spend hours on the phone and I would eventually procrastinate. So I tried your tips and tricks today and they really worked.i am so glad and thankful for your help. 🇮🇳Love from India🇮🇳

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April 15, 2020 at 11:16 am

Well I’m gonna give this a shot it looks and sounds very helpful thank you guys I really needed this

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April 16, 2020 at 9:48 pm

Daniel, your amazing information and advice, has been very useful! keep up your excellent work! May you give more useful content to us.

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May 6, 2020 at 5:03 pm

nice article thanks for your sharing.

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May 20, 2020 at 4:49 am

Thank you so much this helped me so much but I was wondering about like what if you just like being lazy and stuff and don’t feel like doing anything and you don’t want to tell anyone because you might annoy them and you just don’t want to add your problems and put another burden on theirs

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July 12, 2020 at 1:55 am

I’ve read many short procrastination tip articles and always thought they were stupid or overlooking the actual problem. ‘do this and this’ or that and that, and I sit there thinking I CAN’T. This article had some nice original tips that I actually followed and really did make me feel a bit better. Cheers, diving into what will probably be a 3 hour case study.

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August 22, 2020 at 10:14 pm

Nicely explain each tips and those are practical thanks for sharing. Dr.Achyut More

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November 11, 2020 at 12:34 pm

Thanks a lot! It was very helpful!

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November 15, 2020 at 9:11 am

I keep catching myself procrastinating today. I started reading this yesterday, but then I realized I was procrastinating, so I stopped to finish it today. Thank you for all the great tips.

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November 30, 2020 at 5:15 pm

Woow this is so great. Thanks so much Daniel

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December 3, 2020 at 3:13 am

These tips were very helpful!

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December 18, 2020 at 11:54 am

Procrastination is a major problem of mine, and this, this is very helpful. It is very motivational, now I think I can complete my work.

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December 28, 2020 at 2:44 pm

Daniel Wong: When you’re doing your homework, is your super-comfortable bed just two steps away? Me: Nope, my super-comfortable bed is one step away. (But I seriously can’t study anywhere else. If I go to the dining table, my mum would be right in front of me talking loudly on the phone with colleagues and other rooms is an absolute no. My mum doesn’t allow me to go outside. Please give me some suggestions. )

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September 19, 2022 at 12:14 pm

I would try and find some noise cancelling headphones to play some classical music or get some earbuds to ignore you mum lol

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March 1, 2021 at 5:46 pm

Thank you very much. I highly appreciate it.

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May 12, 2023 at 3:38 am

This is great advice. My little niece is now six years old and I like to use those nice cheap child friendly workbooks with her. This is done in order to help her to learn things completely on her own. I however prefer to test her on her own knowledge however. After a rather quick demonstration in the lesson I then tend to give her two simple questions to start off with. And it works a treat. Seriously. I love it. She loves it. The exam questions are for her to answer on her own on a notepad. If she can, she will receive a gold medal and a box of sweets. If not she only gets a plastic toy. We do this all the time to help her understand. Once a week we spend up to thirty minutes in a math lesson on this technique for recalling the basic facts. I have had a lot of great success with this new age technique. So I’m going to carry on with it for now.

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study or do homework first

Why is homework important?

study or do homework first

Why Is Homework Important: Beyond Class and Embracing Learning

Homework is important for several reasons, as it plays a crucial role in enhancing students' learning and educational experience. Here are some key reasons why homework is valuable:

  • Reinforces Learning : Homework helps reinforce what was taught in class, allowing students to practice and apply knowledge, ensuring a deeper understanding and retention of the material.
  • Promotes Discipline and Time Management : Regular homework assignments teach students to manage their time effectively, develop self-discipline, and prioritize tasks, which are valuable skills beyond the classroom.
  • Encourages Independence and Responsibility : Completing homework independently fosters self-reliance and personal responsibility for one's learning, preparing students for the self-directed learning required in higher education and the workplace.
  • Provides Feedback : Homework offers teachers a way to assess students' understanding and progress, allowing them to identify areas where students may need extra help and adjust their teaching strategies accordingly.
  • Enhances Critical Thinking and Problem Solving : Homework often involves tasks that require critical thinking and problem-solving, skills that are crucial for academic and life success.
  • Engages Parents in Their Child's Education : Homework gives parents insight into what their children are learning in school and the opportunity to engage in their child's education, supporting learning at home.
  • Prepares for Upcoming Classes : Homework can be used to introduce new material, preparing students for future lessons and enabling more effective use of classroom time.

Overall, homework is a critical tool in the educational process, supporting learning and personal development in numerous ways.

Ever wondered why teachers seem to love piling on homework? The real reasons why assignments have such an amazing impact on your future might surprise you.

In this article, we’re discovering how homework isn’t just busywork — it’s an essential player when it comes to skyrocketing your comprehension of class material, refining your ability to tackle problems, and establishing a sturdy foundation for academic success. 

By the time we’re done, you’re going to be seeing homework in a different light. So, let's find out why homework is important.

Benefits of Homework

Homework facilitates problem-solving skills, provides students with an additional chance to revisit classroom content, enables parents to understand school teachings, and instills a sense of responsibility in students regarding their education.

If you're asking yourself, "Why is homework good for me?" There are numerous reasons why it can be very beneficial in the long run. Challenging work allows us to grow, after all. Let's look at all its benefits.

Completing Homework Encourages Students To Keep Learning

For some students, learning is not just an obligation but can be enjoyed as well. The acceptance of life-long learning can be fostered by homework, and if the teacher manages to engage their students, they’ve set the stage for the students. Let’s take a look at why homework is important:  

  • Improves memory and retention: It increases the potential for students to remember class material since they have to revisit it.
  • Increases the potential for practical use of knowledge: By understanding the lesson’s materials in more depth, students might apply what they know with more ease.

Helps Develop Skills and Good Habits

Doing your homework can help you develop the necessary skills and habits needed to do challenging work and to keep progressing and ultimately growing as a person. This is why the importance of homework can't be overlooked. 

  • Helps you learn time management: Since homework is usually done outside of school, students will learn how to manage their time and studying time, which will seep into their ability to manage their time in general.
  • Helps students become more organized: Organizing what you’ve learned to produce well-thought responses that can also be applied practically will become crucial in your day-to-day life.
  • Helps foster discipline and responsibility: If students want to become successful, not just in the eyes of society but for their personal achievements as well, they must be disciplined and have to take on responsibilities.

Connects School and Home

“Why is homework necessary?” you ask. For starters, it bridges school and home life. Parents are the vital link between schools and students becoming college and career-ready. 

And parent engagement is more powerful than any other form of involvement or support at school. It strengthens the vital educational triangle uniting parents, home, and school. 

Prepares High School Students for The Future

You can become more resilient and adaptable to challenges in your life. You’ll most likely feel more prepared when these challenges come. What’s more, you can become a better problem-solver and can improve your analytical and critical thinking skills in the long run. This is why homework is beneficial.

Helps Develop A Growth Mindset and Time Management Skills

If you're still wondering, "Why is homework important?" Then, you should know that it can help you foster a growth mentality. What does this mean? Instead of feeling victimized by challenges, failures, and other difficulties, you'll develop a mindset where you view these things as opportunities to grow. At the end of the day, these difficulties can be your best teachers.

Struggling with your Homework?

Get your assignments done by real pros. Save your precious time and boost your marks with ease.

Homework: Tips and Tricks

Now that we've taken a look at all the reasons why homework is beneficial to your growth and life let's take a look at some tips you can apply to your homework sessions. If you're still having issues, you can always send a " do my homework " request on Studyfy to get expert help. ‍

To effectively tackle homework, consider these strategies: take regular breaks to refresh, collaborate with friends for support, create a conducive homework area, actively engage in homework discussions, minimize distractions, adhere to a homework timetable, form a study group, organize a dedicated study space, prepare all necessary materials in advance, listen to instrumental music to maintain focus, reward yourself for completing tasks, practice efficient time management, and leverage available resources for assistance.

1. Create A Study Space : Moving on from finding out why homework is good, the first tip to make homework sessions easier is to create a dedicated study space. By doing this, you can potentially trick your mind into focusing better in that said space.

2. Establish A Routine : Create a homework schedule and stick to it. By doing this, you're freeing up your time by prioritizing your responsibilities first. It might be hard at first, but it's work sticking by. Moreover, if you're curious, you can take a look at who invented homework and why , and you might get some inspiration from knowing this.

3. Prioritize The Difficult Tasks in Homework Assignments : Continuing why should students have homework and homework tips, another great tip is to tackle difficult homework first. This gives you enough time to complete them, ensuring you meet your deadlines. It also frees up your time and speeds up the process.

4. Make Use of Apps : Apps like Quizlet and Evernote can help streamline your sessions. You can note down reasons on, "How is homework beneficial?" to help you get motivated or simply note down important notes from class and more.

5. Break Tasks Up : For lengthier and more complex tasks, you can simply break them up into smaller and more doable portions. Need more reasons on why is homework good for students so you can learn how to motivate yourself to do homework even more? Keep reading, and you’ll know all there is to know about homework and how to finish it easier.

6. Get Help : How does homework help students when a task is too difficult? Difficulty motivates us to try harder. However, if you feel like you're stuck, don't be afraid to seek out help. You can ask teachers, friends, and your parents for extra guidance.

7. Employ Study Methods : Use study methods like summarizing, memory flashcards, and quizzing yourself. "Why is homework beneficial?" It helps you apply problem-solving skills effectively, just like these 3 methods.

8. Free Yourself From Distractions : One of the reasons why homework is good is it teaches you to focus and to cut off distractions. A habit that applies to anything in life. Free up your study space from all potential distractions, like phones, tablets, and TV.

9. Prioritize Health and Sleep : "Why is homework helpful?" For starters, if you prioritize your work, you are obligated to also take care of your health and get enough sleep. By doing so, you can focus and work better. Good habits produce more good habits.

10. Find Your Purpose : The last tip, but not the least important, is finding out your "Why." Find out why you want to work hard. Instead of summing it up to, "I want to get into a good school" or "I want to make a lot of money as an adult," find a deeper purpose as to why you should be diligent.

Maybe you're doing it for self-improvement, or maybe you want to change the world for the better. You can potentially get to know yourself better, and you realize this is why we should have homework.

Did you like our Homework Post?

For more help, tap into our pool of professional writers and get expert essay editing services!

What are the reasons why students should have homework?

As we've already seen, homework helps foster better cognitive abilities, train discipline, and prepare students for what's coming.

If you're still struggling with your homework, you can get physics homework help and help for other subjects, too, on Studyfy. It's alright to have difficulties, if you try to improve, results will surely show up.     

How can parents help with homework?

Homework is important, therefore you should ask your parents for help and further motivation if needed. They can offer help when necessary and let you solve problems on your own to foster independence. They can create a space where learning is easy and there are no disturbances.

Can too much homework be counterproductive?

While the benefits of homework are plenty, too much homework can be counterproductive. If this is the case, you can directly talk to your teachers and negotiate with them. If you have tests you need to study for, it can help to have less homework.

Too much homework creates unnecessary stress, no matter how good your time management skills are. Yes, homework improve academic achievement, but excessive homework, especially for younger students, doesn't reinforce learning.

Do the study tips this article has mentioned help?

Yes, they do. It's become apparent that to memorize large amounts of information, it is better to break them down into parts. As for the rest of the advice, it will improve most students' learning efficiency. You should still try to find out which methods work best for you.                                                                          

If you need more guidance, you can get math homework help and help for other subjects as well on Studyfy. Gain insights and advice from an expert today.

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School Life Balance , Tips for Online Students

The Pros and Cons of Homework

The-Pros-and-Cons-Should-Students-Have-Homework

Homework is a word that most students dread hearing. After hours upon hours of sitting in class , the last thing we want is more schoolwork over our precious weekends. While it’s known to be a staple of traditional schooling, homework has also become a rather divise topic. Some feel as though homework is a necessary part of school, while others believe that the time could be better invested. Should students have homework? Have a closer look into the arguments on both sides to decide for yourself.

A college student completely swamped with homework.

Photo by  energepic.com  from  Pexels

Why should students have homework, 1. homework encourages practice.

Many people believe that one of the positive effects of homework is that it encourages the discipline of practice. While it may be time consuming and boring compared to other activities, repetition is needed to get better at skills. Homework helps make concepts more clear, and gives students more opportunities when starting their career .

2. Homework Gets Parents Involved

Homework can be something that gets parents involved in their children’s lives if the environment is a healthy one. A parent helping their child with homework makes them take part in their academic success, and allows for the parent to keep up with what the child is doing in school. It can also be a chance to connect together.

3. Homework Teaches Time Management

Homework is much more than just completing the assigned tasks. Homework can develop time management skills , forcing students to plan their time and make sure that all of their homework assignments are done on time. By learning to manage their time, students also practice their problem-solving skills and independent thinking. One of the positive effects of homework is that it forces decision making and compromises to be made.

4. Homework Opens A Bridge Of Communication

Homework creates a connection between the student, the teacher, the school, and the parents. It allows everyone to get to know each other better, and parents can see where their children are struggling. In the same sense, parents can also see where their children are excelling. Homework in turn can allow for a better, more targeted educational plan for the student.

5. Homework Allows For More Learning Time

Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can’t see it in the moment.

6. Homework Reduces Screen Time

Many students in North America spend far too many hours watching TV. If they weren’t in school, these numbers would likely increase even more. Although homework is usually undesired, it encourages better study habits and discourages spending time in front of the TV. Homework can be seen as another extracurricular activity, and many families already invest a lot of time and money in different clubs and lessons to fill up their children’s extra time. Just like extracurricular activities, homework can be fit into one’s schedule.

A female student who doesn’t want to do homework.

The Other Side: Why Homework Is Bad

1. homework encourages a sedentary lifestyle.

Should students have homework? Well, that depends on where you stand. There are arguments both for the advantages and the disadvantages of homework.

While classroom time is important, playground time is just as important. If children are given too much homework, they won’t have enough playtime, which can impact their social development and learning. Studies have found that those who get more play get better grades in school , as it can help them pay closer attention in the classroom.

Children are already sitting long hours in the classroom, and homework assignments only add to these hours. Sedentary lifestyles can be dangerous and can cause health problems such as obesity. Homework takes away from time that could be spent investing in physical activity.

2. Homework Isn’t Healthy In Every Home

While many people that think homes are a beneficial environment for children to learn, not all homes provide a healthy environment, and there may be very little investment from parents. Some parents do not provide any kind of support or homework help, and even if they would like to, due to personal barriers, they sometimes cannot. Homework can create friction between children and their parents, which is one of the reasons why homework is bad .

3. Homework Adds To An Already Full-Time Job

School is already a full-time job for students, as they generally spend over 6 hours each day in class. Students also often have extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or art that are just as important as their traditional courses. Adding on extra hours to all of these demands is a lot for children to manage, and prevents students from having extra time to themselves for a variety of creative endeavors. Homework prevents self discovery and having the time to learn new skills outside of the school system. This is one of the main disadvantages of homework.

4. Homework Has Not Been Proven To Provide Results

Endless surveys have found that homework creates a negative attitude towards school, and homework has not been found to be linked to a higher level of academic success.

The positive effects of homework have not been backed up enough. While homework may help some students improve in specific subjects, if they have outside help there is no real proof that homework makes for improvements.

It can be a challenge to really enforce the completion of homework, and students can still get decent grades without doing their homework. Extra school time does not necessarily mean better grades — quality must always come before quantity.

Accurate practice when it comes to homework simply isn’t reliable. Homework could even cause opposite effects if misunderstood, especially since the reliance is placed on the student and their parents — one of the major reasons as to why homework is bad. Many students would rather cheat in class to avoid doing their homework at home, and children often just copy off of each other or from what they read on the internet.

5. Homework Assignments Are Overdone

The general agreement is that students should not be given more than 10 minutes a day per grade level. What this means is that a first grader should be given a maximum of 10 minutes of homework, while a second grader receives 20 minutes, etc. Many students are given a lot more homework than the recommended amount, however.

On average, college students spend as much as 3 hours per night on homework . By giving too much homework, it can increase stress levels and lead to burn out. This in turn provides an opposite effect when it comes to academic success.

The pros and cons of homework are both valid, and it seems as though the question of ‘‘should students have homework?’ is not a simple, straightforward one. Parents and teachers often are found to be clashing heads, while the student is left in the middle without much say.

It’s important to understand all the advantages and disadvantages of homework, taking both perspectives into conversation to find a common ground. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is the success of the student.

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Privacy overview.

The Productive Engineer

Hardest or Easiest Work First? What the Research Shows

study or do homework first

Hardest or easiest work first? It’s one of the largest questions in productivity management, and one that has been under debate or decades. 

There are two patterns of thought on this topic. Some productivity experts believe that by starting on your quickest, simplest tasks first, you build momentum that carries you through to the harder tasks. However, other experts believe that completing your hardest tasks first is the key to getting things done more efficiently.  Research shows that people who execute their most difficult tasks first are generally more productive and high achieving than those who start easy and work their way up.  

Since productivity is a cornerstone of successful business, there have been many studies performed to analyze what methodologies make people most productive. Read on to find out what their research revealed. 

If you are looking for the best study tools out there, you should read our article on the best study tools to enhance your studying at the link below:

The Ultimate Study Tools You Must Use to Succeed!

Why Is Doing the Easy Thing First Is Less Productive

Completing the easiest items first is less productive. This idea is reinforced by behavioral research that shows that starting with easier tasks first is not helpful overall.

The data shows this is the case even though it can initially feel good to take the path of least resistance in an attempt to get the ball rolling. The human brain is wired to feel positive about short-term rewards, so we are more inclined to take actions that result in gaining those short-term rewards. 

study or do homework first

These are the basic reasons found by behavioral research that doing easier things before hard things in a productivity workflow is counterproductive: 

  • The stress of putting off a difficult task negatively affects productivity towards all other tasks performed. 

study or do homework first

Scientific studies have shown that the dread of having to execute a major task requires a large amount of subconscious focus.

The weight of having a major task on your mind can make you lose focus on the task at hand. This loss of focus makes the task take longer to complete. It can also lead to the task completing less effectively. 

  • People make the choice to complete easier tasks first not on the logical basis of what methodology is more productive, but on what method makes them feel better. 

study or do homework first

The choice to do easier tasks first is rarely made with productivity in mind. 

Rather, people choose this workflow method because it elicits positive emotions that produce a short-term psychological high, not because it works better. 

  • Humans have a psychological tendency to enjoy experiences that improve over time. 

study or do homework first

When you start an easy task and start building up to harder and harder tasks, this can create negative psychological feedback. 

study or do homework first

Rather than building momentum, this process psychologically feels akin to pushing a boulder that gets heavier and heavier the further you push it. The increasing difficulty of subsequent tasks is an exhausting process, not an empowering one and has a poor effect on overall productivity. 

  • Smaller tasks are generally easier to defer, delegate, or avoid entirely than large tasks if time or motivation runs low. 

Difficult tasks tend to be important tasks, and you’re less likely to be able to avoid them without suffering negative consequences.

study or do homework first

However, if a person does their difficult tasks first, it is simpler to postpone or delegate small tasks. 

  • People have a limited amount of energy in any given week to produce or perform. 

After a 50-hour workweek, behavioral scientists have found that the work output of an employee workforce drops off a cliff. Once the number of hours passes 55 hours, work output is almost nil due to exhaustion. 

study or do homework first

The impact of this decline in being effective is that people who work 70 hours a week are achieving next to nothing in the extra fifteen hours they choose to work. Doing hard tasks first ensures there is enough physical and cognitive energy to complete these important tasks.

  • It is more productive to consider whether you need to perform small tasks at all rather than do them first. 

One of the greatest hacks of productivity is not to perform your to-do list more efficiently, but to shorten the overall number of tasks on it. 

study or do homework first

Shorter tasks lend themselves to evaluation easier as they are typically simpler than longer, more-involved tasks. Before doing any task, a two-step evaluation should be performed to determine if:

  • The task is worth doing.
  • If the task is worth doing, am I the best person to do it. 

It is both easier to evaluate the validity of doing a task and whether you are the best person to do it with smaller tasks. This process alone can save you a significant amount of time and energy.

  • The best measure of productivity is the quality of tasks performed, not quantity. 

For example, performing ten different small tasks to organize your office is great. However, if these small tasks stop you from meeting a deadline on a major customer deliverable, they weren’t worth doing.

study or do homework first

Taking the time to access the relative importance of each task as well as its estimated difficulty and duration is essential.

  • People performing small tasks tend to multitask, and multitasking is not productive–it only feels productive. 

Studies show that people who multitask are generally less productive (and less accurate in their work) than those who monotask. 

study or do homework first

The human brain is not good at multi-tasking. Our brains are tremendously powerful and great at many things but multi-tasking is not one of them. If fact, studies have linked heavy multi-tasking to poorer performance on simple memory tasks. Researchers have also seen in brain scans that the human brain struggles significantly with multitasking.

Even though it feels more productive, performing a batch of small tasks is typically not as productive as getting that hardest task out of the way first. 

  • Completing smaller tasks first is constructive procrastination, and destroys productivity.  

If your goal is to complete important work consistently and you are procrastinating, you are not going to produce consistently. 

Cutting through resistance to complete hard tasks first eliminates procrastination and increases your general efficiency. 

Why Do People Choose To Work on Easy Tasks First?

The reason the “path of least resistance” exists as an idiom is because people generally have a tendency to procrastinate on difficult tasks and perform smaller tasks instead. Completing smaller tasks generates a feeling of productivity. 

Behavioral scientists call this tendency  “task completion bias.”  

When you succumb to task completion bias, you feel more productive because they are getting a larger quantity of smaller tasks done. However, as these tasks have less intrinsic value, you end up being ultimately less productive. 

study or do homework first

People who choose the path of least resistance are driven by the satisfaction derived from completing a task. However, this is dangerous to productivity as the satisfaction derived is not coupled appropriately to the level of importance of the task itself.

Why Do the Hard Thing First? 

Productivity gurus like to quote Mark Twain’s famous advice towards productivity, which says to “eat the frog” or perform your hardest task right off the bat. This advice holds water in both behavioral research and anecdotal observation.

In their exploration of behavioral work analysis, scientists have found the following:

study or do homework first

Most successful and productive workers consistently put their most difficult tasks first ahead of smaller tasks. 

In productivity circles, this concept is usually called a Most Important Tasks (MIT) list. 

Prioritization is essential in deciding what tasks to do first. While most people do what they feel like doing at the moment, it is better to complete the most important tasks first.

study or do homework first

Here are some of the reasons why it is more productive to execute your most difficult tasks first: 

  • Doing the hardest task first means you are more likely to complete it. 

The overwhelming majority of people will be less motivated at the end of their day than at the beginning of it due to decision fatigue and erosion of physical and mental energy. 

Hard tasks should be performed first because that is when you have the most energy.

  • Willpower has a ceiling and doesn’t last.

You use willpower throughout the day to force yourself to do everything from picking what you want for lunch to brushing your teeth before you leave for work. By the time you get home, your brain is exhausted from forcing you to act. 

The limits of willpower are the reason why people who are trying to get into exercise should work out first thing in the morning.

The reality is fewer people have the willpower to go out and exercise after a full day of executive function performing other work. 

  • Getting the hardest task out of the way allows you to coast and creates a positive mood, which increases productivity. 

Happy people get more things done, and few things make a person happier than knowing they no longer have to dread a hard task. 

study or do homework first

The relief you feel when you’ve gotten a high-value item checked off your to-do list sets the tone for the rest of your day. You are more likely to finish your other work in a good mood and avoid the emotional demoralization that comes with decision fatigue. 

  • Productivity follows the Pareto principle. 

In the  Pareto principle , the concept is that 80% of your results are the result of 20% of your work. In other words, it’s not the amount of time you spend working. Rather, it is about focusing on the tasks that matter, that move the needle.

study or do homework first

By this principle, which echoes across economic theory and management, if you only achieve the two hardest tasks on your to-do list, you’ve still produced more quality work than you would have if you had completed the other eight tasks combined. 

Applying the Pareto principle to task management, tackling and completing only the most important tasks will have a superior impact on your productivity. In other words, you get more “bang for your buck” in completing larger, more important tasks than lesser, smaller tasks. This principle even applies if you do more smaller tasks. As mentioned earlier, measure your productivity based on the importance of task, not quantity of task. Tim Ferriss covered the benefits of the Pareto principle in his epic book The Four Hour Workweek . If you have not read this book yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.

  • Putting off the hardest task is not just unproductive; it has the potential to create more work. 

Harder work is work that is easier to screw up, and if you are tired at the end of the day, you’re more likely to make mistakes.

study or do homework first

Having to fix mistakes just adds more work on top of the work you already had, so it’s the opposite of productivity. You’re growing your work rather than paring it down. 

Tips and Tricks for Completing Your Hardest Work First

  • Break difficult tasks into a batch of smaller tasks. 

Most hard tasks can be broken down into smaller, simpler tasks. Breaking the complex task down into simpler tasks allows you to use task completion bias to your advantage. You are essentially tricking your brain into believing it is doing easy tasks and allows you to build momentum. A great way of breaking your tasks down into smaller tasks is mind-mapping. Mindmapping allows you to create a relational diagram of your task and its related subtasks. I wrote a blog post on mind-mapping that you can find at the link below:

Link to Mindmapping Blog Post

  • Prioritize your to-do list and pick the top hardest or high-quality tasks. Those are your most important things. 

The heart of true productivity lies in knowing what it is you need to accomplish versus what you just think you need to do. This philosophy is how you determine task value, which determines how productive you are. If you can identify the  top two or three most important tasks  in your list, these tasks will hold the same productivity value as the rest of the list combined. 

study or do homework first

Even if you only do these two or three things and nothing else, you will have been extremely productive in terms of task value. 

  • Set up your difficult tasks ahead of time. 

Because you’ll already be dreading the task, you don’t want to put any psychological barriers up between yourself and initiating the first steps to executing it. 

If you need to write a paper, make sure you have all the research gathered beforehand. If you’re tackling a huge gardening project, make sure all the tools you need are ready to go first thing. If you’re trying to the gym, lay your gym clothes out the night before. 

  • Set a timer. 

Often the anticipation of a difficult task is more difficult than the task itself. Set a timer for twenty minutes and tell yourself you must execute the task until the timer goes off. If the timer goes off, you will be free to take a five-minute break. 

study or do homework first

The Pomodoro Technique uses relatively short work bursts and breaks to help overcome the mental overhead of getting started. For more information on the Pomodoro Technique, check out our blog post (link below): 

Link to Pomodoro Technique Blog Post

  • Set your priority tasks the night before. 

By doing so, this will put them at the forefront of your mind, and part of your brain will be considering them subconsciously while you sleep as well. Humans solve a lot of our problems while we’re sleeping.

Setting your priority tasks ahead of time takes advantage of theta brain waves, which allow you to solve creative problems more easily. 

If you reflect on tasks in a theta state, you may be more likely to come up with creative answers to make the work less difficult. Doing this can increase your overall productivity through outside-the-box shortcuts. 

  • Make sure your difficult task is well-defined. 

A lot of decision fatigue comes from deciding how to do something, rather than what to do. This indecision keeps difficult executive actions that are complicated from being started without great resistance. 

study or do homework first

If you are about to perform a difficult task, write the task down, and list all the things you need to do related to it. An abstract premise like “clean the house” can be daunting to the mind, but if you write fifty small household chores, you will feel less intimidated.

  • Use the power of habit. 

Make a point to consistently keep track of your most important tasks, and consistently do the hardest things you’ve prioritized first. Willpower is a lot like a muscle power–the more you use it, the larger reserve of it you have to draw from.

study or do homework first

One way to do this is to write your most important tasks in a small journal every night, and mark them off the next day. By keeping a record, you can use ritual to reinforce your motivation and make you more productive overall through consistent performance. 

  • Stay away from social media and other distractions. 

Doing the hard thing first thing means doing it first thing. Do not pass GO; do not collect two hundred dollars. Straight to eating the frog for you. 

study or do homework first

It is very easy to get drawn into browsing Facebook or Netflix, reading a blog, or reading the news rather than getting work done. Before you know it, you will have lost hours of productivity. A great way to block out distractions is to use an application like Focus to temporarily block you from accessing certain websites. Focus is a Mac application and is part of the great Setapp service. Setapp is a service that, for a very low monthly price, allows you to download and use over 150 Mac apps. For more information on Focus, click this link .

Do not execute any action before your hardest task for the best results, especially if it could be considered a leisure activity. Save that as a reward for when you complete your task. You’ll be working on completing it that much more quickly.  

Final Thoughts

Productivity is not about how many tasks you get done. Rather, it is about getting  valuable  tasks done as  efficiently  as possible. Everything else is unimportant. Longer tasks are typically more important than smaller tasks. 

Everybody has days where they are running around like a chicken with their head cut off, trying to do a dozen petty or inconsequential things at once. That feeling compounds when you realize you haven’t gotten anything valuable done. The key to true productivity isn’t the quantity of your work, but the quality of it. 

Assessing quality (especially the quality and value of your own work) requires more forethought and preparation. Research shows that working more productively, as opposed to simply working more, leads to higher levels of objective success.  

A decade of data reveals that heavy multitaskers have reduced memory

study or do homework first

Solutions Architect

Jimmy McTiernan is the owner/author of The Productive Engineer, a website dedicated to helping people master productivity applications. Jimmy also is the creator of The Productive Engineer YouTube channel.

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

A s kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the day.

The no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in Texas went viral last week , earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy Young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed early.

But the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:

For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 minutes of homework each night. High school seniors should complete about two hours of homework each night. The National PTA and the National Education Association both support that guideline.

But some schools have begun to give their youngest students a break. A Massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. “We really want kids to go home at 4 o’clock, tired. We want their brain to be tired,” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jackie Glasheen said in an interview with a local TV station . “We want them to enjoy their families. We want them to go to soccer practice or football practice, and we want them to go to bed. And that’s it.”

A New York City public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education leaders.

New solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for kids.

The research

The most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and performance.

Cooper’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, Cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of homework.

Despite the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, Cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no homework.

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment.

Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

“Correlation is not causation,” she said. “Does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?”

Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids.

“I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary school.

The issue has been debated for decades. A TIME cover in 1999 read: “Too much homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push for better math and science education in the U.S. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework.

“The complaints are cyclical, and we’re in the part of the cycle now where the concern is for too much,” Cooper said. “You can go back to the 1970s, when you’ll find there were concerns that there was too little, when we were concerned about our global competitiveness.”

Cooper acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned.

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

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How to Do Homework Fast: 9 Best Tips and Guides

how to do homework fast

Homework can be tough or maybe easier but your primary goal as a student should be to complete your homework on time. Finishing homework on time is one of the signs of a successful college student .

Now it’s up to you, whether you want to finish your homework fast or procrastinate it. You’ll be surprised to know many kids don’t like to study just because of their homework.

But, I think you’re among those students who want to finish their homework fast and save time for other work. If I’m right and you’re already looking for how to do homework fast then you’re in right place.

Because in this article, I am gonna break down the 9 best tips to finish your homework fast while having fun . But before we get going, let me first tell you the benefits of doing homework fast :

  • You get time for other works
  • You can enjoy your whole day without worrying about the homework
  • Doing your homework fast makes you a fast learner
  • It makes a habit to solve questions fast helps you in the exams
  • Finishing homework in time makes you a disciplined student

Now, you would have understood why you should finish your homework faster.

However, doing homework fast is not an easy job. You have to go through with a proper strategy and follow all the tips that I’m going to list here…

How to do homework fast?

1. find a good study environment.

A Study place really matters to studying effectively. A good study place can make your mood to study and also you’ll have a better concentration there.

study or do homework first

So, if you want to stay focused and beat procrastination while doing homework fast then first find a good study environment.

A dedicated study room, library, coffee shop, or park can work great for you. Just find where you’re comfortable most and can give your best.

But make sure, the place you find for study should be distraction-free . Even if your phone is not a part of your homework, keep it aside wherever you study.

Read also: Why do I get bad grades after studying hard?

2. Set your schedule

During the day, besides homework, you may have to do many household works or other things. That’s why some students often forget to do homework or they stop doing their homework in the middle of other work.

study or do homework first

To deal with these situations you have to either make a routine or set your schedule . I agree, that sticking with a routine won’t be easy for you, so why don’t you try to set your schedule?

The better way to set your schedule is to write a note and find the time that you have available for doing homework . Just before sleep or after waking up do it every day, it will keep you on a better schedule and time management.

3. Make a to-do list

A To-do list can be very helpful to finish your homework fast, especially when you have plenty of tasks.

So make a to-do list and write all the homework that you got from your teachers, this way you also won’t forget to complete any subject’s homework.

study or do homework first

A to-do list not only would be interesting to make but, you will also enjoy finishing your homework according to it.

And, whenever you finish any particular homework from the to-do list, make sure you make a cross on it, which will motivate you to move further and finish the remaining homework.

If you have any boring or weak subject then do its homework first then move to an easy subject because when you start your study then your energy level and mood are at peak.

So, put your effort first on that subject that you find hard, and after that, you can easily finish your easy and interesting subject homework.

4. Keep all materials near you

Before doing homework, whatever stationery things or study materials you find useful for your homework, keep them close to you.

These small things really matter when you want to perform an effective study session and do your homework fast.

study or do homework first

For example, if you have homework related to the Geometry subject then first, keep all the geometry tools on your study table, so that you won’t need to break your study in the middle to find any missing tools.

Similarly, whatever the tools, notes, assignments, or anything that you need while doing your homework, keep them near where you study.

Want to read: 17+ Useful things that college students can use

5. Make sure you understand the material

Although there is no need to ask still, I want to ask, do you understand the subject or topic well in which you have homework?

If your answer is No , then you’re making a big mistake.

Because when you don’t understand a subject or topic and your concepts are not clear enough, you can be stuck many times while doing homework on that subject, and this way, you can’t do your homework fast.

study or do homework first

If I’m right and you don’t have enough knowledge in any subject then first understand the subject well. Here are some quick ways to understand the subject well before doing its homework:

  • Review and revisit your notes
  • Watch video lectures
  • Focus on visual learning (like images, graphs, diagrams, etc.)
  • Take help from friends

6. Challenge yourself with the time

study or do homework first

Challenging yourself with time is a great way to do something fast. Isn’t it?

When you start doing homework, make a target like, I will finish this subject’s homework in 45 minutes. Similarly, set a period for each subject’s homework and then follow it.

To follow this tip effectively you can use a TIMMER for it . Chances are you’ll fail and you won’t be accurate with the target you’d set but with practice you can make yourself perfect.

study or do homework first

Remember, don’t do all homework at a time instead you should try Pomodoro Technique and take regular breaks.

Taking breaks regularly while doing your homework fast won’t make feel like your homework like a burden because you have divided them into many sessions and coffee breaks.

Read also: 15 Study Techniques that are worth trying this year!

7. Find a study buddy for homework

Completing your homework with a study buddy, don’t you think it’s a great idea?

study or do homework first

Of course, with a study buddy, you’ll not only enjoy your homework, but you both can finish your homework fast. The biggest benefit of group study is , that you exchange your knowledge and your understanding of the subject with each other.

So, if you have any friend who listens to you, supports your idea, and is good at studying, ask him for studying and doing homework together.

But, be active while studying with your study buddy and if possible then don’t use unnecessarily your phone.

8. Stay focused in classes

Staying focused in cla ss and paying enough attention there , can make your homework much easier to do faster.

Even, in my school days, I used to finish my homework during lunch break, so that I can enjoy my whole day at home without worrying about homework.

study or do homework first

However, you don’t need to finish your homework during lunch breaks instead you can pay attention in class and clear all your doubts.

Whenever you learn something important during your professor’s lecture, make sure you take it in your notes. It will surely help you to do your homework faster.

Read also: What to do if you’ve failed a test?

9. Appreciate your efforts

study or do homework first

Sometimes appreciating yourself can be very important. When there is no one to motivate you and appreciate your work then you should appreciate yourself.

Whenever you complete any of your tasks on time appreciate yourself. But it doesn’t mean, you should celebrate big and splash out money, Instead, you can enjoy an ice cream, a cold drink, or anything that you like.

These small things can bring a smile to your face and motivate you to move forward and keep doing great.

Read also: Best Study Motivational Quotes to Studying Hard

Conclusion:

In this article, I have listed the 9 best tips that must be helpful for you to do your homework fast. And, I hope you have enjoyed this article.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

Which tips from this post, do you like most, and are you going to try these tips from now on?

Let me know in the comment…

How to force yourself to finish homework fast?

It is certainly true that homework can be boring sometimes. Whether you want it or not you can’t avoid it. But what you can do is make it interesting by giving yourself a reward when you finish one task. Now the reward can be anything like listening to your favorite music, playing video games, or munching on your favorite candy bar. Keep giving rewards in breaks while doing your homework. It will keep you motivated and give you a sense of achievement.

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Why do we procrastinate? Researchers finally did their homework to find out

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Procrastination, the art of delaying tasks we’d rather not tackle, is a familiar foe for many. However, an innovative new study sheds light on why some people are more prone to procrastination than others, linking this tendency to a psychological concept known as valence weighting bias . This bias influences whether individuals are more guided by positive or negative attitudes when facing new situations or decisions.

Scientists at The Ohio State University found a fascinating interplay between our attitudes and our actions, particularly when approaching tasks we find unpleasant .

Valence weighting bias, as explained by the team, is a mental process where individuals lean more heavily on either positive or negative attitudes or “signals” when encountering something new or deciding whether to engage in an activity.

“And the question is, which wins that battle — if, indeed, there are elements of both positivity and negativity?” says study senior author Russell Fazio, professor of psychology at Ohio State, in a university release .

Through a series of studies, researchers discovered that individuals with a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of a situation are more likely to procrastinate. Intriguingly, their research also suggests that it’s possible to adjust this bias towards a more neutral stance, potentially reducing the inclination to delay tasks.

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The first study involved 232 participants and focused on a relatable scenario: filing federal tax returns . Researchers found that those who tend to file their returns late in the tax season also exhibited a stronger negative weighting bias. This connection suggests that people’s general attitudes can significantly influence their propensity to procrastinate on specific tasks.

A second study with 147 college students further explored this concept by examining how valence weighting bias and self-control affected students’ participation in a research program for course credit. The findings indicated that students with a negative bias and low motivation or self-control were more likely to delay their participation.

“The first study established the basic effect of negative weighting bias, but study two provides some nuance,” explains study first author Javier Granados Samayoa, a former Ohio state graduate student and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

“For people who don’t think about it too much or can’t think about it too much, their valence weighting tendencies guide their behavior in a straightforward manner. But if somebody is more motivated and able to think more about it, that might bring other considerations that dampen the influence of the valence weighting bias.”

The third study targeted self-identified procrastinators with a high negative weighting bias, attempting to alter their bias to make positive and negative signals more balanced. This intervention led to a significant change in behavior , with students earning credit hours more quickly than those who did not undergo the manipulation.

Researchers also found that a negative weighting bias isn’t always detrimental. It can encourage individuals to be more realistic in their self-assessment , such as when questioning if they’ve studied enough for a test. A positive bias, on the other hand, might lead to overconfidence .

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“It’s better to be more objectively balanced than to be at either extreme,” notes Fazio. “But the situation where a particular valence weighting bias is likely to be problematic is going to vary.”

The implications of their research extend beyond academic curiosity, offering potential strategies for addressing procrastination by understanding and possibly altering our inherent biases. This study not only provides insight into why we procrastinate but also suggests a path towards more effective management of our tendencies to delay, which could have broad applications in educational settings and personal productivity strategies.

The study, supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences .

You might also be interested in:

  • Are you a ‘Precrastinator’? Study finds it may be worse than procrastinating
  • Why We Hate Waiting: Science Solves Puzzle Behind Impatience
  • Why do we still procrastinate despite it causing so much stress? Blame cognitive biases

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What's Hot

Is 'eldest daughter syndrome' a real thing a new study may surprise you..

Senior Lifestyle Reporter, HuffPost

Is "eldest daughter syndrome" a real thing? A new study gives it credence.

Growing up as the oldest sibling, author Y.L. Wolfe often felt the lines between her role and her mother’s role were blurred.

“By the time my youngest brother was born when I was almost 11, I was overwhelmed with feelings of responsibility for his welfare. I used to sit by his crib and watch him sleep just to make sure he was safe,” Wolfe, the oldest of four, told HuffPost.

“It wasn’t that I thought my mother wasn’t competent ― but more that I felt we were both responsible for the family by that point in my life,” she explained. “As if I was literally ‘other mom,’ rather than big sister.”

In other words, Wolfe is deeply familiar with “eldest daughter syndrome.” The internet is rife with thinkpieces about the plight of oldest daughters and tweets about how we ― I might as well reveal my bias here ― need to unionize: “If you are the oldest sibling and also a girl you may be entitled to financial compensation,” one woman joked on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Though “eldest daughter syndrome” is a pop psychology term ― you won’t find it listed as an official diagnosis in the DSM-V ― a new study suggests that there may be more science to the pseudo-syndrome than previously thought.

A University of California, Los Angeles-led research team found that, in certain instances, first-born daughters tend to mature earlier, enabling them to help their mother rear younger siblings.

Specifically, the researchers found a correlation between early signs of adrenal puberty in first-born daughters and their mothers having experienced high levels of prenatal stress.

Why does age of adrenal puberty matter? Changes in skin (acne, for instance) and body hair happen during this phase, but so do changes in brain development. Adrenal puberty processes are believed to foster social and cognitive changes; basically, superficial physical changes correlate with emotional maturity.

When times are tough and mothers are stressed in pregnancy, it’s in the mother’s adaptive best interest for her daughter to socially mature at a quicker pace, said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, one of the co-authors of the study and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Merced.

“It gives mom a ‘helper-at-the-nest’ sooner, aiding the women in keeping the latter offspring alive in difficult environments,” she said.

When times are tough and mothers are stressed in pregnancy, it’s in the mother’s adaptive best interest for her daughter to socially mature at a quicker pace, the researchers said of their findings.

Notably, adrenal puberty does not include breast development or the onset of menstruation for girls (or testicular enlargement, in the case of boys). The study posits that girls become mentally mature enough to care for their younger siblings while not being physically capable of having their own children, which would naturally draw them away from their older daughter responsibilities.

Older brothers are seemingly off the hook when it comes to this kind of parentification : The researchers did not find the same result in boys or daughters who were not first-born.

“One reason that we didn’t find this effect in first-born children who are sons could be that male children help less often with direct childcare than female children do, so mothers have less of an adaptive incentive to speed their social pubertal development,” Hahn-Holbrook explained.

Plus, she said, previous research suggests that female puberty timing is more malleable in response to early life experiences than males.

The results of this study, published in the February issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology (say that five times fast ― or just once), were a long time coming: Researchers tracked the families for 15 years, from the pregnancy stage to the babies’ teen years.

Researchers recruited women from two obstetric clinics in Southern California during routine first trimester prenatal care visits. On average, the women were 30 years of age and pregnant with one child, not twins.

It was their first pregnancy for roughly half of the participants. The women were nonsmoking and not using steroid medications, tobacco, alcohol or other recreational drugs during pregnancy. They were all over 18 years of age.

At five different stages of pregnancy, the women’s stress, depression and anxiety levels were measured, and then measured cumulatively. The depression assessment asked the women to rate the truth of statements such as “I felt lonely,” while the anxiety question asked how often they felt particular symptoms, such as “jittery.”

Of the children born to these mothers, 48% were female and 52% were male.

As the children aged, characteristics of adrenal and gonadal puberty were separately measured ― things like body hair, skin changes, growth in height or growth spurts, breast development and the onset of menstruation in females and voice changes and facial hair growth in males.

The study also measured childhood adversity to account for other factors known to correlate to early maturation or signs of puberty in children, like the death of a parent or divorce before age 5 and the absence of a father and economic uncertainties at ages 7–9.

Taking all that into account, it was the eldest girls who matured the fastest when their moms experienced high levels of prenatal stress.

Other studies suggest that there is some later-in-life payoff for highly responsible eldest girls: A 2014 study found that eldest daughters are the most likely to succeed out of any sibling type, while a 2012 study found that those who are eldest-born are more likely to hold leadership roles .

“This is a first-of-its-kind finding and is fascinating to look at through an evolutionary lens,” said Molly Fox, a UCLA anthropologist and one of the co-authors of the study.

The findings ring true for Wolfe, the aforementioned author who said she felt like a second mom to her siblings growing up.

“I’m not at all surprised by what the study found,” Wolfe said. “My story is slightly different — I went through true puberty, not just adrenal puberty, at 12, though I suspect I experienced an early cognitive maturation.”

The study is interesting for another reason as well: The findings add to social scientists’ growing understanding of fetal programming , a fascinating area of study that explores how stress and other emotional and environmental factors women experience during pregnancy affect their children long after birth.

“This is a first-of-its-kind finding and is fascinating to look at through an evolutionary lens,” Molly Fox, a UCLA anthropologist and one of the co-authors of the study, said in a press release.

In an interview with HuffPost, Fox delved deeper into how fetal programming works.

“One fascinating theory is that when you’re still a fetus in your mothers’ womb, you get cues about what the world is going to be like, and your body can flexibly adjust the shape of your life-cycle to be optimally suited to those conditions you expect to encounter,” she said.

Fox and her co-authors are excited their work is out there for the public to read, especially after following the families along for so long. The fact that the findings were published just as a cultural conversation about eldest daughters broke out was just a cherry on top, especially for Fox, a co-oldest daughter. (She’s a twin.)

“As co-oldest, I think it’s a special role in any family because of the potential for closeness with my mother and capacity to help care for my younger siblings,” she said.

Spoken like a true eldest daughter.

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MethaneSat

Satellite to ‘name and shame’ worst oil and gas methane polluters

Leaks are driving 30% of the climate crisis and MethaneSat will provide the first near-comprehensive global view

A washing-machine-sized satellite is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry.

MethaneSat is scheduled to launch from California onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday at 2pm local time (22:00 GMT). It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites.

Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.

MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere.

More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.

The EDF’s senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability . I’m sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”

A sample of MethaneSat’s data

The oil and gas industry knows how to stop leaks and the cost of doing so is usually very modest, said Steven Hamburg, the EDF’s chief scientist and MethaneSat project leader: “Some call it low hanging fruit. I like to call it fruit lying on the ground.”

Kelly Levin, the chief of science at the Bezos Earth Fund, which helped to fund the project, said: “From the sky, MethaneSat can see what others can’t, helping good actors and holding bad actors accountable.”

The Guardian revealed more than 1,000 methane “super-emitter” sites in March last year. The worst single leak was spewing the gas out at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars. It also revealed “mind-boggling” methane leaks from Turkmenistan, prompting the government to pledge action. These revelations were based on lower-resolution data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 5P satellite.

MethaneSat’s instrument has a resolution of about 140 metres, compared with Sentinel 5P’s of about six kilometres (3.7 miles), enabling it to monitor the smaller leaks that combine to make a large part of the total. MethaneSat will circle the Earth 15 times a day at an altitude of 590km and collect data in a 200km swathe. “For the first time, we will have empirical data for effectively the entire oil and gas production system globally,” said Hamburg.

The first results after the commissioning process are expected at the start of the summer with the full flow of data being available from early 2025. Nasa’s Emit mission also collects high-resolution data, but with lower precision methane measurements than MethaneSat, which can detect changes as small as three parts per billion. Methane data from the commercial GHGSat is not freely available.

Experts said they expected MethaneSat to be the gold standard for methane measurements. It is expected to contribute to the UN’s international methane emissions observatory , which will collate and publish data on leaks.

Hamburg said MethaneSat could also be used in the future to track methane from coalmines, landfills and farming, which are the other main sources of human-caused emissions. The Guardian revealed in February that there had been more than 1,000 huge methane leaks from waste dumps since 2019.

  • Greenhouse gas emissions
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Review: Chris Stapleton’s sold-out San Diego concert with Elle King and Turnpike Troubadours was a sound study in contrasts

Chris Stapleton at the 57th Annual CMA Awards on Nov, 8, 2023, in Nashville.

His performance kicked off Stapleton’s 2024 All-American Road Show tour with a winning combination of musical fire and finesse. The opening acts did not fare as well in the stadium setting, but he made the sprawling ballpark feel intimate.

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“It’s my show and I can do whatever the hell I want!” a smiling Chris Stapleton said midway through his Saturday night concert at Petco Park. The capacity audience in the sprawling stadium — the 20-year-old home of the San Diego Padres — cheered in response.

On paper, this might read like a standard moment from almost any live-music event, whether in a stadium or arena, theater or bar. But there was almost nothing standard about what Stapleton did following the sound-marred opening sets by Elle King and the rootsy Oklahoma country band Turnpike Troubadours.

The concert, which kicked off Stapleton’s 2024 All-American Road Show tour, was happily free of pomp and circumstance. But his two-hour set was a celebratory musical event that at times almost qualified as subversive, at least by the usual stadium concert standards.

Stapleton’s “I can do whatever the hell I want!” declaration came prior to his soul-baring ballad “Whiskey and You,” the 12th of the 26 songs he performed. It was also his third consecutive solo acoustic number, following “What Are You Listening To?” and “Mountains of My Mind,” the tender, whisper-soft closing number from his superb 2023 album, “Higher.”

With his band temporarily offstage — “Don’t worry, I’ll hire them back” he quipped — Stapleton accomplished a daunting feat. He transformed his stadium concert at the enormous ballpark into a campfire singalong for the sold-out crowd of more than 40,000.

It was, of course, minus the campfire — and, thankfully, also minus Saturday’s rains, which subsided over Petco Park barely half an hour before King’s 48-minute opening set kicked off at 6:31 p.m. But Stapleton’s ability to make a giant concrete edifice seem like an intimate hootenanny with just an acoustic guitar and his deeply expressive voice was a rare accomplishment.

So, too, was the no-nonsense manner in which he and his ace band — featuring longtime Willie Nelson harmonica great Mickey Raphael — delivered their impeccably paced performance. Stapleton’s blues-rocking country songs are expertly constructed to achieve maximum emotional impact without a single extraneous lyric or gesture.

Or, as Stapleton put it a 2018 San Diego Union-Tribune interview: “I don’t like to waste words in songs is the best way I can put it. If you can say something with three words that puts the point across — and leaves room for the listener to put themselves into the song — there’s no need to use 10 words.”

Chris Stapleton talks songwriting, leaving college and his best and worst day jobs

Before he won enough Grammy, Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association awards to almost fill the wing of a museum, Chris Stapleton went to Nashville as an 18-year-old eager to conquer the world.

Aug. 4, 2018

That same sense of purpose and concision applied to the fuss-free performance Stapleton delivered Saturday. His unwavering, music-first focus was clear from the surging opening salvo of “White Horse,” “Parachute” and “Second One To Know” to the two tender reveries that closed the show, the intensely melancholic “Where Rainbows Never Die” and the quietly defiant “Outlaw State of Mind.”

Stapleton’s vocals were tender one moment, gritty and blues-drenched the next, rising from a deep growl to a falsetto swoop without a hint of affectation.

His singing is expertly calibrated to achieve maximum impact, without a hint of the overwrought delivery that can make too many stadium concerts exercises in empty histrionics. While his vocal influences are easy to discern — from Otis Redding, Bob Seger and the Marshal Tucker Band’s Toy Caldwell to Marvin Gaye, John Fogerty and (if my ears don’t deceive me) Terry Reid — when Stapleton sings, he sounds wonderfully distinctive and completely natural.

“We’re going to play as much music as we can in the time we have. So, I’m not going to do much talking,” he said, shortly after taking the stage.

But Stapleton didn’t hesitate to stop his band four minutes into the rollicking “Might As Well Get Stoned” when he spotted an audience member near the front of the stage in apparent need of immediate medical attention.

“Somebody needs some help down there,” Stapleton said. “We want to make sure everybody’s taken care of. Make room for him, make a path everybody. Let him out. The sooner you do, the sooner we can get back to the show.”

Once the person was attended to, “Might As Well Stoned” resumed with note-perfect precision — at the exact point in which pedal-steel guitar master Paul Franklin was completing a brief but exemplary solo.

Throughout, Stapleton and his band consistently played to serve the songs at hand, not to show off. He, Raphael, Franklin and second guitarist Mike Eli LoPinto could easily hold an audience’s attention with extended instrumental forays, but their solos were unfailing crisp and to the point.

The stadium setting proved daunting to opening acts King and Turnpike Troubadours, whose music seemed ill-suited to such a large location. But Stapleton seemed right at home, even if he himself marveled at the size of Petco Park.

“Amazing!” he said after romping through the Guy Clark-penned 12-bar blues, “Worry Be Gone.”

“I do that (song) every night, but not in a baseball stadium in San Diego!”

Stapleton’s set list Saturday included such gems as “Nobody to Blame,” “Broken Halos,” “Think I’m in Love With You” and his 2015 breakthrough hit, “Traveler,” the title song from his album of the same name.

With that album, Stapleton unexpectedly created a tectonic shift in contemporary country music, before going on to win 10 Grammys and enough other awards to fill a room. He did so by offering wonderfully soulful new songs that sounded like weathered classics, not the slick, instantly forgettable assembly-line knockoffs the Nashville music machine too often spews out like an aural form of cotton candy.

Stapleton’s San Diego concert was a winning testament to the craft and durability of his work — and his work ethic — and he clearly savored and appreciated the moment for all it was worth.

Alas, the audio quality for the opening sets by King and Turnpike Troubadours was somehow both muddled and not nearly loud enough, in contrast with the much higher volume but perfectly balanced sound mix Stapleton and his band received.

Elle King

Elle King, a multi-Grammy nominee and first-time mom, talks music, sobriety and confronting COVID-19

Music has been her salvation. But going on tour with her infant child in the midst of a pandemic, after both contracted COVID-19 in December, poses major challenges

Feb. 13, 2022

Coming on the heels of King’s drunken, profanity-fueled performance at a Dolly Parton tribute in Nashville in January — after which King canceled her January and February concerts — she conspicuously took sips from a plastic water bottle during her by-the-numbers Petco Park performance. She was not helped by the atrocious audio quality for her set, which suggested King was not able to conduct a pre-concert sound-check.

But the large illuminated letters “F” and “K” that bedecked the stage behind her suggested King may not be ready to make nice just yet.

Or did they? What clearly appeared to be an “F” from the vantage point of this reviewer — who was seated in the 12th row of Section 118 overlooking left field at Petco Park— was later identified by several other concertgoers (including one seated on the upper deck) as an “E,” the initial for Elle King’s first name.

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    A classic Pros and Cons list reveals plenty of reasons to do the quick and easy homework assignments first, and plenty of reasons to do the harder tasks first. Despite the above advantages and disadvantages of tackling the easy or the hard homework first, there really is a proper way to approach your homework assignments that will set you up ...

  2. Homework vs Study: Everything You Need To Know

    Study is exactly the same as homework, except that you nominate for yourself what work to do, and you do it at a time that's removed from the class in which you learned the content. Let's take a typical maths class as an example. In class the teacher shows you a concept, and then asks you to do a few exercises in class so that they can make ...

  3. How to Do Homework: 15 Expert Tips and Tricks

    You finish one episode, then decide to watch another even though you've got SAT studying to do. It's just more fun to watch people make scones. D. Start the episode, but only catch bits and pieces of it because you're reading Twitter, cleaning out your backpack, and eating a snack at the same time. 5.

  4. Should I first study or do homework? : r/studytips

    Personally, I prefer study first if I want to really learn the subject, but I think you should try and see what's best for you. I study first because the truth is that once you start working the only thing that matters is that you understand what you're doing. Job interviews aren't usually shaped like homework but rather a live "how do ...

  5. Studying 101: Study Smarter Not Harder

    Active engagement is the process of constructing meaning from text that involves making connections to lectures, forming examples, and regulating your own learning (Davis, 2007). Active studying does not mean highlighting or underlining text, re-reading, or rote memorization. Though these activities may help to keep you engaged in the task ...

  6. Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

    Bempechat: I can't imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.. Ardizzone: Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you're being listened to—that's such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County.It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she ...

  7. How to Help Students Develop the Skills They Need to Complete Homework

    The effects of homework are mixed. While adolescents across middle and high school have an array of life situations that can make doing homework easier or harder, it's well known that homework magnifies inequity. However, we also know that learning how to manage time and work independently outside of the school day is valuable for lifelong ...

  8. How to Do Homework (with Pictures)

    2. Eliminate as many distractions as possible. Put your phone away, get away from your computer, and make your environment as quiet as possible. Giving homework your undivided attention will actually make it easier, because your mind won't be balancing different tasks at the same time.

  9. 6 Tips for a Homework & Studying Schedule That Actually Works

    This means engaging with the concepts consistently over a longer span of time. If you want to cut down on the all-nighters, try these six easy tips to create a homework and studying schedule that actually works. 1. Review Your Homework in Advance. First, set some time aside at the beginning of your semester or school term to look over your ...

  10. Does homework really work?

    For high schoolers, Cooper's research suggests that two hours per night is optimal. If teens have more than two hours of homework a night, their academic success flatlines. But less is not better. The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69 percent of the students in a class with no homework.

  11. 30 Tips to Stop Procrastinating and Find Motivation to Do Homework

    Do weekly filing of your loose papers, notes, and old homework. Throw away all the papers and notes you no longer need. 23. Stop saying "I have to" and start saying "I choose to.". When you say things like "I have to write my essay" or "I have to finish my science assignment," you'll probably feel annoyed.

  12. Why Is Homework Important

    Here are some key reasons why homework is valuable: Reinforces Learning: Homework helps reinforce what was taught in class, allowing students to practice and apply knowledge, ensuring a deeper understanding and retention of the material. Promotes Discipline and Time Management: Regular homework assignments teach students to manage their time ...

  13. The Pros and Cons: Should Students Have Homework?

    Homework allows for more time to complete the learning process. School hours are not always enough time for students to really understand core concepts, and homework can counter the effects of time shortages, benefiting students in the long run, even if they can't see it in the moment. 6. Homework Reduces Screen Time.

  14. Hardest or Easiest Work First? What the Research Shows

    Some productivity experts believe that by starting on your quickest, simplest tasks first, you build momentum that carries you through to the harder tasks. However, other experts believe that completing your hardest tasks first is the key to getting things done more efficiently. Research shows that people who execute their most difficult tasks ...

  15. How To Motivate Your Child To Doing Their Homework

    Low self-confidence. 2. Make Homework Time Easier. Make study time as easy as possible for your child by providing him or her with everything needed to get work done: Quiet space: Find a quiet, distraction-free space for your child to study. Food and drink: If your child is hungry, it can be hard to focus on work.

  16. Is Homework Good for Kids? Here's What the Research Says

    For decades, the homework standard has been a "10-minute rule," which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 ...

  17. Do you do homework, then study later. Or do you study WHILE ...

    When I finish the homework, I finish the rest of the session studying. I do homework first, then study. Studying while doing hw doesnt seem like a good idea. Multitasking overall isnt the best choice. Besides, since youd be partially doing both of those things at once, itll take a longer time to finish one of them. CustomWritings_CW.

  18. How to Do Homework Fast: 9 Best Tips & Guides

    1. Find a good study environment. A Study place really matters to studying effectively. A good study place can make your mood to study and also you'll have a better concentration there. So, if you want to stay focused and beat procrastination while doing homework fast then first find a good study environment.

  19. Students, do you prefer to workout before or after studying?

    It helped me keep a routine. Wake up early, gym by 7am, back by 8:30, day of studying and classes, bed by 10pm, repeat. It was before I really needed to do anything so I couldn't make an excuse later in the day like "oh no I can't go to the gym I'm right in the middle of a homework assignment!" Nope. Doing work first thing in the morning sucks.

  20. Get Homework Help with Chegg Study

    Ask questions related to your courses and get step-by-step solutions. 1. ^ Chegg survey fielded between Sept. 24 - Oct. 12, 2023 among U.S. customers who used Chegg Study or Chegg Study Pack in Q2 2023 and Q3 2023. Respondent base (n=611) among approximately 837,000 invites. Individual results may vary.

  21. Should I start doing homework and studying in the library ...

    heckillwingit. • 3 yr. ago. Yes, but also remember to protect your spaces. By this I mean when you go there to study/do homework, then only study or do homework. Either go to a different part of the library to browse Youtube/Reddit or just leave. This way when you are in the library you will not get that almost unyeilding desire to ...

  22. When is the best time to do homework?

    Option #3: Homework after dinner. Homework after dinner may work best for your family too if there are two parents working outside the house. Helping with difficult assignments or test prep (if you can handle the pressure!) can be a time for bonding between parent and child. Lessons learned from mom or dad (who are the first teachers, after all ...

  23. Why do we procrastinate? Researchers finally did their homework to find

    Researchers finally did their homework to find out. 20 seconds ago Add a comment. by StudyFinds Staff. ... "The first study established the basic effect of negative weighting bias, but study two provides some nuance," explains study first author Javier Granados Samayoa, a former Ohio state graduate student and now a postdoctoral fellow at ...

  24. Is 'Eldest Daughter Syndrome' A Real Thing? A New Study May ...

    "This is a first-of-its-kind finding and is fascinating to look at through an evolutionary lens," said Molly Fox, a UCLA anthropologist and one of the co-authors of the study. The findings ring true for Wolfe, the aforementioned author who said she felt like a second mom to her siblings growing up.

  25. Satellite to 'name and shame' worst oil and gas methane polluters

    The first results after the commissioning process are expected at the start of the summer with the full flow of data being available from early 2025. ... study says. 5 Feb 2024. How do you stop a ...

  26. Should you do your homework right after school? : r/GetStudying

    Take a shower, eat, watch an episode of friends and play on my phone. If I try to start right after school my brain is 'tired'. The "rest time" is when you make your way home. Anything that is due the next day, is done the moment I get home. I also re-write/condense all my notes from class that day so that come midterms/exam time I can study ...

  27. Chris Stapleton's tour-opening concert with Elle King and Turnpike

    Stapleton's "I can do whatever the hell I want!" declaration came prior to his soul-baring ballad "Whiskey and You," the 12th of the 26 songs he performed.