Here's nine tips and tricks to getting through your latest essay a little bit easier.
Try the Pomodoro technique
Avoid procrastination taking advantage the Pomodoro technique. Use an online Pomodoro timer to break your work up into manageable intervals, keeping yourself productive by not losing your mind.
CUTE PICTURES OF CATS
Not every method of improving your essay motivation is based on complex research or psychology. Written Kitten will show you adorable pictures of cats the more you write.
Or encourage yourself in your own way
Whatever it is that motivates you most...
Use text to speech tools
Put your essay through a text to speech tool (such as Google Translate) and have it read back to you. It's something different to reading it over and over again and you should be able to hear any problems easily
Change the font to help proof reading
Boost the font size and/or change the text to an unusual font to force you to focus on every word rather than just skimming over it and missing errors.
SelfControl/ColdTurkey
SelfControl (for Mac) and ColdTurkey (for Windows) are apps that will stop your procrastination when on your computer in its tracks by blocking certain websites. No longer get distracted again.
Use Wikipedia, but don't tell anyone
You're often told not to use Wikipedia but it is a great place to START your research. Don't cite or copy directly from it of course, but look at the references and bibliography sections at the bottom for papers, journals and books as a cheating way to kick-start your own research into a topic.
RefMe
Once you've found some sources, RefMe is an awesome app for collecting and creating references. You search by book or journal article title, DOI, ISBN, ISSN or URL to automatically create a reference in over 6,500 different styles from Harvard to IEEE. A must when essay writing.
Work on the cloud
Use a cloud service like iCloud, Google Docs Office 365 to protect your work by saving versions of your writing online - you won't worry about losing everything ever again! Plus, you can work from wherever you go with a phone.