When you have a large amount of homework to tackle, you may feel so overwhelmed that you don’t even know where to begin. As a result, you may not begin at all, perhaps making excuses that there are other things that require your attention. The problem is your homework won’t just go away on its own — in fact, it will keep building up until it’s unmanageable. You need to come up with strategies that will help you cope with your homework to ensure you succeed with your classes.

1. Understand the Content

When your homework is to read a chapter from a textbook, put in the effort to assimilate the content. Skimming quickly to check this item off your to-do list will hurt you later, as you won’t remember anything you’ve read and you’ll be unable to use the material for assignments or tests. Of course, you’ll need to spend more time on homework now if you take detailed notes, highlight key points, or read difficult passages several times. However, you’ll save a large amount of time later, as you won’t need to go back and do what you should have done the first time.

2. Relate Concepts to Each Other

At university, you’re expected to tie different concepts you’ve learned together. Your professors don’t want to know if you can memorize information — they want to see if you can apply your knowledge to new situations. Take the time to think about how ideas relate to each other as you’re reading, as this will make writing papers later much easier.

3. Stay Focused

Everything will take much longer if you’re constantly stopping to check your phone or do something else unrelated to your studies. When you’re doing homework, commit to studying and nothing else.

4. Avoid Striving for Perfection Every Time

It’s great that you want to do as well as possible on your assignments, but this can be unrealistic when you have too much on your plate. Besides, a minor error often won’t even make a difference to your final grade. If you feel that you’ve already dedicated too much time to a particular task, you may need to move on to something else — even if the paper could still be slightly better.

5. Start Homework Immediately

You may have a large amount of homework because you keep putting things off until later whenever your workload is light. Avoid this by at least starting your homework on the day the professor assigns it. An advantage of this is that you’ll have a buffer to ask for support if you run into a problem — whereas if you leave homework until the day before it’s due, you’ll need to make your best guess, and your grade could end up suffering.

It’s more difficult to tackle homework when you’re constantly being distracted by roommates or friends dropping by. To regain control over your life, you need a private space where you can focus. Regent Student Living offers Niagara College off-campus housing with this in mind. You’ll have an individual bedroom, furnished with a desk and chair. When you’ve finished your homework and want to socialize, you can invite friends to hang out in the living room or head to the community room to meet new people. Set up your tour today to check out our student housing for yourself.