Never have I ever – pulled an all-nighter

Every university student has been there – it is 7pm the night before your all-important essay has to be in, you have exactly 14 hours to produce 1,500 words on the importance of the Mendicant Order in Medieval England and you have written and researched the sum total of zero.

For some reason you decided to leave it until the last week. And then you decided to leave it to the last two days. And then you really needed to go on that social last night. And, of course, you had to watch that Come Dine With Me marathon for eight hours today. Now you are going to get a third in this essay, fail this module and be chucked out. Baloney! The all-nighter is a surprisingly simple thing to pull off if you follow the following rules.

 

Rule 1 – Do not stress out!

The absolute worst thing you could do 14 hours before the deadline is to make yourself go mad. Hyperventilating, holding your head in your hands, vomiting, whinging at your flatmates like an unattractive spurned lover and crying is not going to get the essay done.

You have made your figurative bed and you have to figuratively sleep in it. Unfortunately, you don’t get to literally sleep in your actual bed for at least another 15 hours. Just man up, grow a pair and get on with it. A little hard work never hurt anyone.

 

Rule 2 – Do a quick recce

Now is time for what those in military circles call a recce. To you and me that is a reconnaissance mission.

You are not going to get through this night alone and unsupported. Run to Costcutter and meet your new best friends for the next half a day of your life – Mr Red Bull, Mrs Energy shot drink, Sir Multiple Packets of Cheap Digestive Biscuits and Mistress Nescafe Coffee. You are going to need energy, quickly and lots of it. You might not come out of this night feeling tip-top, but at least you will come out of it.

Now on to the library. Do a blanket search for anything that might in any way pertain to your chosen subject matter. From there, try and whittle it down. The most likely situation is that every single book of any relevance whatsoever has already been taken out by your more organised (and at this stage, insanely annoying) coursemates. Therefore, take anything you can find. You never know what might be relevant and it always going to be better to have too many books than too few.

Now return to your room and…

 

Rule 3 – Turn off all social networking sites

This one is obvious really. It is an easy equation – Facebook and essay-writing are inversely proportional: if one is increased the other decreases. For some reason, when you are struggling through an essay at four in the morning, it really does seem important to know that the moron you used to go to school with has dropped out of UCL and shoved on three stone, or to read Fern Britton’s ruminations on Twitter, or to Google “Whatever happened to Tina from S Club 7”.

However, turning off Facebook will do more than simply increase your productivity. It also means that you will actually have any friends left at 10am the next day because you haven’t updated your status every half an hour with your every dull thought. “Can’t believe I left it to the night before, FML”, “This book is soooooo dull”, “600 words done, 1400 more to go”, etc, etc, etc. NO ONE GIVES A DAMN ABOUT YOU OR YOUR ALL-NIGHTER. Keep it to yourself if you don’t want to be de-friended by almost every single person you know or care about.

 

Rule 4 – Set yourself deadlines

You are probably thinking that the last thing you need right now is more deadlines. But to be able to actually write 2,000 words on sexual imagery in modern theatrical interpretations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by 9am you are going to have to be cool-headed and organised.

Tell yourself that by 9.30pm you will have read all the relevant books and by 1am you will have trawled through all online resources, such as Jstor. As a general rule writing up needs to be started a good five to six hours before the deadline if you don’t want to academically implode.

You also need to remember to factor in planning time. Very few people can go straight from researching a subject to writing a coherent essay about it. And, let’s be honest, those people are the sort of studious fools that are intelligent enough not to leave it until 12 hours before. Planning will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour if you don’t want to inflict reams of unintelligent drivel on your tutor.

 

Rule 5 – Don’t aim lower, just get faster

Just because you have given yourself 14 hours and not 14 days does not mean you should write absolute crap. It is amazing what a person under pressure can achieve sometimes.

The mixture of no time, stress, Red Bull and digestive biscuits somehow brings out the Einstein in a lot of people. Keep thinking, keep challenging yourself, keep doing whatever it is you normally do…just do it ten times faster.

 

Rule 6 – Keep changing environments

Constantly looking at a magnolia wall has never done anyone any good. This is why prisoners reoffend. Something about being in the same room and staring at the same wall just does something to people’s brains.

Therefore, move around. Go into the kitchen for a few hours. Perch on the stairs to do your planning. Lounge in the hallway to do your writing up. Just whatever you do, don’t stare at the same magnolia wall all night.

 

Keep 7 – Bring on the Wall!

At about 4.30am you will hit something colloquially known as “the wall”. This is the point when extreme tiredness kicks in, caffeine stops working, your brain is constantly trying to shut down and for some reason you can no longer remember how to spell “however”.

“The wall” is your enemy and must be destroyed. Carry on and power through it. Do not be defeated. Do not attempt to power nap. Do not give in. If you do you will fail. By 5am “the wall” will seem like an unpleasant distant memory.

 

Rule 8 – The inevitable happens…

You have actually done it. Somehow you managed to write and research a 1,500 word essay in one night. It is 8.40am, you have 20 minutes until you have to hand it in and you feel like an essay-writing god. Time to print it out.

And then your printer jams. You yank out the paper. It re-jams itself. You yank it out again. This time the paper goes through, but you have run out of black ink. You replace the black ink, but then it says it needs a new cyan cartridge. You wonder at what point in your essay you need something coloured in cyan, but you replace that as well anyway. Then your printer doesn’t recognise the new cyan ink cartridge. Now you have ten minutes to hand it in and you are starting to feel more than a little stressed.

First option – this is the one time in your whole university career where it will be appropriate and allowed to wake up one of your flatmates. You need a printer and they have a printer, it is only fair.

Second option – email your essay to yourself as an attachment and run like the wind to your nearest computer room on campus.

Well done! You did an all-nighter. In a week or two you will get back your essay. You got an alright mark. But now it is time for…

 

Rule 9 – Reread all that crap you wrote

It will seriously amaze you that you ever passed GCSEs when you read some of the rubbish you produced during that all-nighter. Most of it was utter twaddle. And what wasn’t twaddle was probably trash. And if it wasn’t trash there is a fair chance it was tripe.

You know you can do better than this. Maybe, just maybe, start it a week before next time.