How I catch up

I usually don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it hits me hard - so catching up to me usually means doing what the others did in about a week of school during one weekend. As stressful as that might sound, I always try to not be stressed out by all of the work I have to get done, so here’s how I approach catching up.

The number one priority is always to get healthy again if my absence from lessons was due to sickness and not projects. I can’t really focus when I’m ill anyways so I try to always feel at least okay before I start working on all the things I missed in classes.

Since I’m mostly not completely fine when I start catching up, I like to prepare my work area so that I don’t have to get up a lot during my study time. I will have tea and a snack nearby as well as all of my textbooks, my laptop, notepads and all the stationery I like to use.

Before I can start tackling my assignments, I will message my classmates and ask for what we did during my absence. Since our class did have a rather tight community I usually got many responses, however, sometimes no one really knew what they were supposed to do. In such cases, I would email the teacher, telling them about why I was absent and asking for the assignments I would have to get done for the next lesson and if there were any assignments that already were collected but that I should hand in anyways.

After that, I start the planning process. I’m a huge fan of my bullet journal, but any list works for this. I’ll map out everything I have to get done in much detail - so it’s not just “homework”, but all its different components, including vocabulary, reading, writing, project preparation etc. I will then prioritize certain tasks depending on why I have to get them done, and tackle those first. If I missed on an entirely new topic, I’ll try to do my homework together with one of my classmates using voice over IP programs (VOIP) such as Discord so that I can make sure that I understood what I had to learn from the books without the teacher explaining it first.

Whilst catching up, I like to note down questions I have regarding the topics I worked on on sticky notes that I can put into my folders. This way, I remember to ask those questions in class without cluttering my notes and essays with reminders, which does make revising so much easier and quicker later on.

The key to catching up really is to not be stressed out by the amount of tasks you have to get done by a certain date. Even though mapping out everything in great detail, it’s best to stay calm and do one task after the other and crossing them out one by one. Due to prioritizing not everything has to be finished immediately - there’s enough time during the following days as well.

So stay calm and do all your tasks one after another - that did the trick for me and it’ll do it for you as well.