Miles Chen, Period 2, 9/15/2022

 Atomic Habits and Growth

It is only the beginning of the year so I haven’t set many goals for myself yet, but I think that a reasonable and achievable goal for myself is to stay on top of my class responsibilities. As someone who procrastinates a lot, I want to try to change that little by little before I go to college. To work towards this I will start using daily reminders and planners to make sure I organize my workload and overcome small parts of it everyday. For example, to force myself to be proactive when I was preparing for the SAT, I set a daily goal of at least 30 questions. I wouldn’t play any games until I had finished the 30 questions. Another problem I have is delaying finishing my homework. When I get home after taking the bus I always lounge at my desk scrolling on my phone as a break after a long day of school. I don’t think this is a bad thing to do, but I tend to take it too far and end up wasting a lot more time than I originally planned. This sometimes results in staying up late and night to make up for the time I wasted. To fix this, now I take a shower right away once I get home without even sitting down so that I won’t be tempted to go on my phone. When I finish I get started on my homework straight away, turning off my phone so I won’t get distracted.

I think that I’ve made a lot of progress in some ways, but I have skimped on some of my efforts. College applications are approaching and I definitely shouldn’t procrastinate on them, but I still haven’t finished my common app. It’s mostly because I still don’t really have a complete idea of the end result, but that doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to finish my common app before school started and I haven’t reached that goal. I am also not as on top of my class responsibilities as I hoped I’d be. In fact, I wasn’t aware of the blog I am writing right now until just 2 days prior to its deadline. It was still enough time to get it done, but I think that I should’ve been more aware of it. On the bright side, I know for the future to check the syllabus every day so I won’t be blindsided by another assignment. Some other adjustments I will make to make sure I better manage my time and meet my goal is to have a calendar in my room so that it’ll be easier to recognize what I have to do each day and to add new things to my schedule. I also plan on being more specific on what I will do each day, like setting alarms for when I should plan on finishing my homework or leaving some time everyday to look into colleges and scholarships. It’s a lot to keep in mind, but I think that sticking to this kind of system will definitely help me in college and even after I become a working adult.