Tips for Your Upcoming All-Nighter

Because you didn’t do your summer assignments.

Tips+for+Your+Upcoming+All-Nighter

Kathleen Esfahany, Science Editor

It’s September 5th, and you have your first day of school tomorrow. You’ve texted your schedule to all your friends and made it through fall sports tryouts. The sun is shining, your air conditioner is working, and everything seems fine. Except, everything is not fine: You didn’t do your summer assignments.

As messed up as your summer sleep schedule already is, you’re about to make it worse. You’re about to pull an all-nighter to cram several days worth of work into just a few hours. Here are three tips to pull it off successfully.

1. Make a team. Grab your brother or sister who also neglected to do their assignment, and keep each other awake. If you want to make this even more stressful than it already is, go right ahead and make it a competition. Whoever finishes all of their work first gets to play their music in the car for the entire first semester. Alternatively, FaceTime/Skype your friend(s) and stay up working together. If you do this, you can also help each other get it done faster.

2. Trap yourself. Force yourself to focus. Delete your social media apps for a few hours. Install a Chrome extension to block websites you normally use to procrastinate. Turn off the notifications for your group chats.

3. Eat/drink to stay awake. Don’t overdose on carbs right before you go into this. Instead, you’ll want to eat things that are relatively low on carbs and high in protein. Drink lots of water. If you’re still having trouble staying awake, chew gum while you’re working. Also, energy drinks. They’re unhealthy and can make you crash, but desperate times call for desperate measures. (Just don’t drink Monster Energy – someone found a dead mouse in one of those cans!)

Now, close this tab, go find your textbook, and start working!