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Overcome Lateness to Class with These Helpful Tips

Are you that kind of student that keeps going late to classes? Probably some lecturers have marked you as a late comer and you’ve tried to help the situation but you’ve been unable to really get out of that habit of going late for classes. This habit of lateness can affect many other activities apart from class attendance. More important is the fact that being early for your classes can well impact on how easy and fast it will be for you to grasp lectures. Being late will most often than not make you look like an irresponsible or disorganised student, plus you may be lost during the lecture having missed the background of the day’s work. This article provides helpful tips for you to overcome lateness.

What Kind of Lateness is Yours?

Try to first establish what type of lateness you indulge or fall into, is it habitual, specific or occasional.

Habitual lateness: This means it is part of you already and you almost can’t help it. This kind of lateness is a general one, almost everywhere you want to go to, you go late. And it’s not tied to circumstances beyond your control, it’s just that you’ve grown with it and now it is a difficult bad habit to deal with.

Specific lateness: Try to observe, what kind of lectures do you attend late? Morning lectures? Afternoon classes? Or is it for a particular class? And find out why that happens – maybe you wake up late for morning lectures or you are busy with other things in the afternoon and so go late for afternoon classes or is the lecturer a factor in your going late, maybe he/she doesn’t arrive on time as well. Asking this question can really help you to trace what accounts for your lateness.

Occasional lateness: This may not really be much to worry about as it means you are almost always on time, just for a few times situations may be beyond your control and you get late. Still, if you want to improve on being early, the following tips can be of help.

Be sure to also ascertain specifically what lifestyle, activity or engagement makes you late.

1. Sleep Early

This cannot be overemphasised, especially for morning classes. There are people who seem to be nocturnal in their lifestyle pattern, they seldom sleep early at night, that is when they feel alive and ready to work. But this can impact on your readiness for an 8 o’clock class. Maybe by eight you’ve just slept three hours and you’re struggling to get up. For the sake of days when you have morning classes, you can find a way to sleep early the night before so you can wake up early and get ready for the day. Even if you are not the not the ‘nocturnal’ type, you still have to be deliberate about sleeping at a particular time.

2. Have a Partner

Make a deal with one of your friends, especially if you’re in the same department, to keep yourselves alert for classes. This will help you to watch each other’s backs, going late will be less likely if two people are time conscious than one person. When one person happens to be caught up in something or slack, the other can hasten.

3. Set More Than One Alarm

You could decide to set your alarm in successions of fifteen minutes, a number of times. So that if you snooze the first one, the next alarm can wake you again, and if you stop that too, the next one can wake you.

4. Set Your Wristwatch or Wall Clock Forward (Extra Time)

Another trick you could pull up to help yourself is to set your time forward maybe like ten minutes ahead of the normal time, and work with it as though it was the actual time. This will mean that even if you are ten minutes late by your own time, you can still be on time for your class. Try to avoid the temptation to subtract that ten minutes when looking at your time. Accustom yourself to use it at face value.

5. Be There Before Time

Preparing to get to class at the exact time the class will start may not be the best approach as one or two things may come up which you’ll have to quickly attend to and then the time would be gone. Take for instance your class is to start by 10 am and you have 10 mins to walk to class, if you leave home by 9:30 am, then you have given yourself a space of additional 20mins, perhaps anything comes up in-between or you forget something, then you can quickly attend to such while you’re still able to make it to class before time or on time.

6. Take Care of Your Meal in the Morning

You might be the type of student that likes to make your meals yourself, this should be well factored into your schedule in the morning. As much as possible, try to provide for your meal at least till the time your lectures will be over for the day. Otherwise if you visit cafeteria or restaurants to eat, let the places you visit to eat be near to your lecture halls/rooms if the break in-between the lectures is short.

7. Have a Well-Planned Timetable

Leaving all your activities during the day to chance and however the day comes is not going to be helpful enough. Be more deliberate to have a well laid out time table, so you know what kind of activities to do in the morning and what time to do them so you don’t go late for your classes, also you’ll plan what kind of activities to put in-between your lectures that won’t affect your attending those classes as and when due.

8. Keep Your Alarm a Bit Far from You

If you are prone to the temptation of always switching off your alarm when it rings, then it will be better for you not to keep your phone or whatever you are using to set the alarm near you, let it be somewhere a bit far from the reach of your hand.

9. Make Punctuality to Class A Priority

You must make a conscious commitment to yourself to be early for your classes, make it a priority and a principle you want to imbibe. Tell yourself how bad it is to always arrive late to classes, what kind of person it portrays you as and what it deprives you of, and tell yourself how going earlier will be a more profitable lifestyle. Commit yourself to it and if you can get a person to be accountable to in that regard, make do with the opportunity.

10. Don’t Always Make Excuse for Being Late

There may be times when your excuse for being late might be genuine, but if you’re always going late to classes and always consoling yourself with the excuses for why you are late, then you may not change. Decide to work on those excuses instead of using them to justify your lateness. Convince yourself that it’s possible for you to make it early for your classes.