Handling Midterms Stress: "One Tab at a Time"
Midterms… Oh what a wonderful time for midterms. Midterms crop up between the 3rd and 9th weeks of the quarter, but the majority of people have them in the middle. Those middle weeks consist of a workload that no one sees as accomplishable. We all work our butts off and stress builds to enormous levels. Our stress feeds off of other’s stress, and no one has time to do anything but fall in to anxiety and study.
SO, what do you do? How do you go about handling midterm Stress. How do you deal with all of the things that you need to finish, and more importantly how do you do well throughout it all?
I like to clear away all distractions and concentrate on one project at a time. First prioritize your giant to do list, and then focus on each item one at a time. I personally enjoy the concept of “One Tab at a Time”. I found this idea from the Youtuber Elio. His video “One Tab at a Time”, talks about keeping only one tab open on your internet browser. He found himself more concentrated on a single project, and his work on that project improved greatly.
I tried this for a while, and I felt refreshed and more productive, although it is difficult to actually concentrate on that one project. As you can see from the photo at the top of this article, which is a screen cap from my computer as I write this, I have stopped doing “One Tab at a Time”. I have multiple Youtube videos open, Facebook, Tumblr, articles to read for my Politics class, and my email. And I will be completely honest… since sitting down and trying to write this article, I got distracted and watched videos and tumbled for a while, and I truly believe that we all do this. I bet that if I went back to only keeping open one tab, I would be finished with this article faster.
Concentrating on one thing for an extensive period of time is crucial to creating worthy work. This worthy work comes from focusing on only one project, and the tabs idea becomes a metaphor for every task we set out to accomplish in life. Wipe away all of the other distractions and focus on one assignment. Give everything you do 100% of your time and effort. Your concentration and effort will help you finish the project sooner and then allow you to work on the next project.