What starting early means

They say start early. But what does that even mean? I start early, but that also means to continue the progress you started early. And do the work you do well, where you know it will leave you less than 75% of the work for that portion of the assignment. I deceived myself by saying that I had started early, that I've worked on it and have gathered many quotes with explanations. But when the time came for me to use them, they were barely 50% complete. You have to do your work as complete as you can possibly make them. So that when the final week comes, you aren't struggling as much.

Starting early also means starting each big stage of a project early- like not just the outline, but putting down the words down into paragraphs for an essay. Because that's when you will realize the true scope of things, and you will be glad to have more time. In other words, start doing the work as if its the night before its due. Maybe even gaslight yourself into thinking so, or imagine that you time traveled back a few days and your future deadline-stressed self is ever so grateful for this extra time you got, and is about to make the most of that time.

Learn from my story, of when I didn't properly "start early" for the Frankenstein timeline (english), and also the Big Picture project (hon. bio) in 10th grade:

In my experience, my wrong choices have led to an even bigger fall, due to me getting sick during the weekend. I didn't know that it was an assignment that couldn't be extended due to me falling ill. That has decreased me from 3 days of work time, and left me with half a day and a night. I worked on it 'till 2 am and woke up again to work more on it. I lost too much sleep for the crappiest, most incomplete work ever. And I had plans and dreams about what i would do with the project. I was thinking of a beautiful New York Times article style, with quotes integrated. But even writing the transitions between the quotes and making a story out of them (just to have some type of "theme") took 5 hours - and that was only for half the quotes. I had high expectations of what I could do with little prep work before, so when I started it, I couldn't stop working on it, but I couldn't finish it either.

Having high expectations when I dont know the full range of the work and responsibility is a dangerous task, a time and sleep consuming, risky promise to yourself. I start going to the "do the bare minimum" strategy last, when it is very late at night and I was tired. That is sometimes a mistake. Even if people say "Do your best!" that can't be possible for a stem student with 7 heavy work classes. Sometimes it is okay to "do your best to not fail" instead of "doing your best to be exemplary". I think I have a problem of always trying to look examplary, and trying to look good in a teacher's eyes, so I torture myself to near perfection. Know the value of the assignment. Is it the end of the world if you miss a few points? Perfection is not worth torturing yourself for, especially since it is a near unachievable dream. So know yourself, know your work, know what starting early means, and do it for "only the grade" when absolutely, desperately necessary.

When you got free time and not much homework, that often means you got that time to work on that big project that you shouldn't wait the last minute for.