Apart from extracurriculars, after school activities look different for a lot of people. Youth often doomscroll or binge TV after school to cope with the overstimulation of social interactions and mental overload. However, this delay and avoidance can lead to procrastination and increasingly later bedtimes.

Doing homework right after school will likely fix two of the problems I see in myself and in my peers: sleep schedule, social media addiction, and procrastination. By breaking the cycle, we can effectively kill three birds with one stone. That’s the ideal goal of time management.

The Benefits of Doing Homework Right After School

Homework can seem gruelling or daunting, but reading some of these benefits may encourage you to continue reading this post and completing your homework in a punctual manner! Here’s a brief list:

Academic Benefits

1. Work is completed on time
2. Teachers are more likely to give extensions and better letters of recommendation to students who are consistently punctual
3. New knowledge is reviewed the day of, reinforcing and embedding it into long-term memory and beginning the spaced-repetition cycle
4. Active recall will be easier in the future since the first repetition is out of the way
5. You can ask follow-up questions the next day!

Physical Health Benefits

We feel familiarity with the individuals who are chugging energy drinks like they can afford to gamble with their cardiovascular health. Perhaps you are one of these individuals. In any case, doing homework directly after school can help save your physical health in numerous ways:

1. Less procrastination means earlier bedtimes
2. You can finally move your sleep schedule a couple minutes earlier
3. …which in turn also means that you don’t have to chug caffiene every morning or down multiple energy drinks in the span of an hour
4. …which saves your heart health and drastically decreases your chances of cardiac arrest at the ripe age of 20.

Mental Health Benefits

Apart from the academic mental benefits, there are a myriad of mental health benefits you achieve after finishing your homework early, including:

1. Less academic anxiety
2. Increased mood
3. Better relationships – because you will actually interact with people during daylight hours and talk to your family

The Process

Getting to homework directly after school can take quite a bit of habit building, but don’t let that deter you! It doesn’t have to be hard if we take the process one step at a time. Just remember that the benefits far outweigh the avoidance, and that if you value your health and well being this will happen sooner or later.

This guide is made for students who procrastinate their work like they have unlimited time. If you have better time management skills and already do some of these things, you might find that only some of these apply. If you don’t do any of these things, then you probably fall within the former group of procrastinators.

1. Night Before Setup

Prime your workspace for when you arrive home the day you get back. Clear your desk, or if you’re a slob, make sure there’s enough room on your desk to place one sheet of paper down on a flat surface.

Take out a single writing utensil, and place it on the flat surface. Pack your bag so that you won’t forget anything tomorrow morning when you leave for school.

Setting your materials up for success creates an environment where learning is the expectation. At the very least, it reduces distraction. Which brings us to our next step.

2. Put Away Your Phone

Easier said than done? Fine. Turn your phone to grayscale and Do Not Disturb, and place it outside the room you’re going to study in after you get home from school. If you need to use your phone, name what you need it for out loud, do what you need to do, and place it back in its designated area. It should never enter the room you are studying in.

3. Find an easy transition activity

It’s incredibly difficult to transition directly from school to studying at home, especially if you have no commute time. Find something you can do to transition yourself away from school and into homework that you can do if you commute, or if you don’t. Examples include:

• podcasts
• physical activity
• reading
• doodling
• hobbies

Be sure to pick something that is easy and pleasant enough to be a break from the overstimulation of school, but also not engaging enough to be distracting or totally absorbing.

Decrease Transition Time

Begin with doing this activity for an hour. Every day, decrease the time by 7 minutes. In one month, you will be able to transition to homework after 25 minutes!

If this feels slow, remember that you can always start with a smaller interval of transition time but also that even the smallest decreases in transition time are progress from the probable hours you spend scrolling.