Everyone has those days, weeks, even months when it feels like nothing’s working for them. They lack motivation, inspiration, and just feel stuck. As college students, we have so many things on our mind and it’s easy to get completely overwhelmed by all of it. However, there are a few habits that I’ve picked up in order to help myself get out of these funks.

1. Listen to music and DANCE! 
I love listening to new albums and artists when I feel stuck because it allows me to think of things in a different way and have a new creative anchor. Dancing releases endorphins, which will immediately make you happier and more motivated, especially if you’ve been spending your whole day sitting at a desk doing work.

2. Spend time with close friends.
Just being around positive, uplifting people who genuinely care about you will immediately make you more excited and happy to work! Most of the time it just takes a nice conversation with a good friend to you into a better frame of mind and allow you to get back into the groove of things.

3. Rethink your sleep schedule.
When we have many tasks to manage, we often completely mess up our sleep schedule. However, this affects our performance during the day and makes us forgetful, unmotivated, and tired. If you’re feeling stuck, fixing your sleep schedule will immediately make you more positive, attentive, and refreshed during the day!

4. Move around 27 items.
This is one of my favorite tips—it is a Feng Shui teaching and it actually works! Moving physical items around you allows you to connect with your surroundings and symbolically press the reset button. Changing your external environment is a really effective way to start looking at things from a fresh perspective.

When I started college at NYU, I knew I was going to have an interesting experience. I mean, I was going to live in the city for the first time after having grown up in the suburbs all my life! Along with the fact that I’d be living with three strangers and experiencing college classes, I had a handful of new experiences waiting in the palm of my hand. Little did I know that I was about to have a fourth stranger come into my life.

See, when I was young, I never had any pets. Well, the fish I overfed when I was eight doesn’t really count. The reason that I never had any pets as a child was because my mom dislikes animals. I remember asking my mom if we could get a dog when I was eight and all she said was, “You’re going to have to pick up the poop.” Eight-year-old me was horrified and never asked her again.

Since I never really grew up around animals, I’ve always felt awkward around them. So, you can imagine my hesitation when my roommate said she wanted to ask NYU for permission to let her dog, Bella, stay with us. I wasn’t against the idea, but I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, I was going to be living with an animal for the first time in my life! If I’m being honest, my first thought was, Mom is going to flip.

When the day of Bella’s arrival finally came, my roommate had already left for class by the time I got back to our room. I was meeting Bella for the first time alone. When I walked into my room, I froze for a few seconds as I soon as realized she was huge. Slowly, she came closer to sniff me. Then, she turned around and promptly went back to lying on her dog bed. That was the moment I knew that Bella was an angel.

While it may seem like I’m simply talking about my experience with a dog, there’s more to this story than that. This was a way that I put myself outside of my comfort zone, which is something I wanted to push myself to do more once I started college. It’s also about adjustment. Throughout life, we will have to work and get along with different people. This means adjusting to their habits and making compromises, especially if you’re living with that person. Although I’m sure my journey with animals was amusing, there is still something important I forgot to mention: my mom still doesn’t know.

Photo Credits: Sonia Butt

Summer brings beaches, winter brings slushy New York snow, fall brings pumpkin spice lattes, but exam season ... brings procrastination. The many options in the city are often a roadblock to getting through those thick textbooks and draining essays. But no fear! There are many tools made to help students battle through those tough couple of weeks:

1. BaTo.Life
We’ve all had those moments of promising to only check YouTube for five minutes and somehow that ended up being two hours. BaTo.Life is an online application which allows you to set up breaks—and properly enforce them. After setting the amount of time for your break, the website will count down. After the timer runs out, the tabs you have opened will be closed, and an alarm will tell you to get back to work. Sort of like an aggressive parent but ... hey, it gets the job done. Literally.

2. Forest
Planting trees may seem like an odd reward, but it sure is a new, innovative take on combating procrastination! The app forces you to keep it open for a pre-selected amount of time, which lets you grow a virtual tree if you don’t go out of the app. Should you exit, your “tree” dies, but if you keep it open for the entire time, your tree is planted in the game. What is interesting is that Forest partners with tree planters: coins that you earn from being focused are partially donated to their tree-planting partners in real life.

3. FocusWriter
FocusWriter offers a very minimalistic, distraction-free writing document that you can use when typing up essays or papers. Leaving only a solid color background or simple wallpaper, the program can remove those tempting tabs open next to your still very-much blank Google doc. It also offers timers, alarms, and daily goals that further ensure that you can finish your 20-page assignment on time.
 
4. If All Else Fails ... The Excel Sheet Method
Personal tip: While strict, this method has worked quite well for me when I am under a tight time frame to get work done. Simply open up an Excel sheet and label three columns for “Event,” “Start Time," and “End Time." Spend a couple minutes “assigning” all the time that you would have in a day, including blocking out time for short breaks, specific assignments, and other activities you have planned for the day. Follow the schedule as strictly as you can, and even if you can’t finish a task, move on, and revisit it later if possible. Though pressurizing, this method of fighting procrastination has been highly effective for many people—especially when it’s 12AM at Bobst and your paper is due at 9:30AM.

Happy un-procrastinating!