What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed with Late Assignments

By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.

Whether you miss class because you’re sick, have an excused absence, or just choose to sleep in, missing school almost always results in missing assignments. And missing assignments lead to late assignments.

Something else that causes late assignments? Not doing them on time. (I know, right?)

An occasional late assignment won’t cause much damage, but it becomes a problem when you ignore your missed assignments and let them accumulate until you’re so overwhelmed that you do nothing. It’s when you do nothing that the situation gets worse, the assignments become more late, the new assignments keep piling on, and before you know it you’re in a bad situation.

In this blog post, I share some strategies for what to do when you’re overwhelmed with late assignments. 

What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed with Late Assignments

I’ve designed the following strategies to not only help you recover late assignments but also to prevent you from falling even more behind with work that continues coming at you.

1. Keep Going to Class

When you’re overwhelmed by late work, it’s tempting to skip class. It’s even more tempting to skip class if your assignments are late because you missed class. (Ahh, the cycle!) 

But the worst thing for your grade and for your stress is to miss more class.

Remember, your whole goal here is to make progress on late assignments while not accumulating more late assignments.

A good way to ensure you’re not going to miss more assignments is by going to class.

Even if you’re tired, even if you’re stressed out, get to class. When you miss information delivered during class, you miss the information that’s essential to doing current and upcoming work. You might be tempted to tell yourself you’re going to use that time to work on late assignments, but that’s not the approach that works, and that never happens.

2. Make “The List”

Now that we’ve established you won’t skip any more classes, it’s time to make The List.

The only way to complete all our tasks is to know what those tasks are. Think about that: If you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, then what the heck are you going to do?

You know it’s not enough to keep your homework assignments in your head or even just in your learning management system (LMS). That does not work, and that especially does not work when you’re overwhelmed.

When my private clients are overwhelmed by late assignments, we go through the following steps together to create “The List.” Some of my students find this process stressful and we often need to take breaks when it gets intense. But then we get back into it. If this happens to you, take a break and come back to the process. If it’s too overwhelming to see a list of all your late work at once, then when you’re done making your master list, you can fold the paper over to expose only a few assignments at a time.

Here’s what you do to make “The List”:

• Get a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle.
• Go into your LMS and click on each class, one at a time. Open every posting between now and the date of your first late assignment. For some students, that might be weeks in the past. Do it anyway. Write every late and current assignment from your LMS on the left side of your piece of paper. In the right column, write the due date.
• Once you’ve written down all late and current assignments from the LMS, it’s time to go into your email. Some teachers send emails with information about classwork to students who miss class; you need to check all emails from teachers to see if they contain important details about assignments. Add them to your list.
• Finally, email your teachers to ensure you didn’t miss anything. Here are my tips for emailing teachers (including a template you can copy). Or feel free to copy and paste the email template below (how to email your teacher about late assignments):

Dear Mr./Ms____,

I understand that I have several late assignments and I’m working hard to create a plan to complete them and turn them in.

I believe the following assignments are missing:

• name of assignment
• name of assignment
• name of assignment

If your records indicate I’m missing anything else, please let me know.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Sincerely, 

(your name)

3. Temporarily Put Other Activities on Hold

It’s time to face the reality that completing late work while also completing current work takes a good amount of time. If you’re a busy student, you might find this truth annoying.

But if you’re overwhelmed and you honestly do intend to complete your late assignments (that’s worth mentioning, as some students choose not to complete late work, taking the low grade that comes as a consequence), then you need to MAKE the time to do the work.

Maybe you need to temporarily cut back on work hours. Say no to babysitting. Get dismissed early from practice or rehearsal. Cut back on social events. This is all temporary, but it’s what we have to do when we’re overwhelmed by late assignments.

Note: You may need to reassess how many activities you’re involved in if you’re falling behind in your schoolwork at least once a month despite your best efforts.

4. Get or Give Deadlines

I know this tip sounds a little odd, but read on for the explanation.

You need to either GET deadlines from your teachers, or you need to GIVE yourself deadlines on your own.

Let’s start with GETTING deadlines. Every teacher has their own late work policy you have to follow. This is especially true in college. And it is your job to know what these policies are.

What does this mean? It means you might have different deadlines depending on whether your work is late due to an excused absence, an unexcused absence, or simply because you chose not to complete your work on time. 

When you’re making “The List” in step two, it’s important to communicate with teachers and get clear about their deadline expectations for submitting late work.

But in some scenarios, your teachers may not give you a specific deadline — so that’s something you have to manage on your own. This is where the GIVE part of the tip comes in.

I’ve seen this happen with students who are so monumentally behind with assignments; sometimes the teacher just says to “turn it in as soon as you can as long as it’s before grades close.”

If that’s the situation you’re in, then you need to make your own deadlines. Your work won’t get done if you don’t have deadlines.

So get out a calendar. Use my free weekly planner. And try to put every assignment from “The List” into a specific spot on your calendar. If this is too overwhelming, you can do it just one week at a time. If you don’t have enough space on your calendar or in your day, see tip 3.

5. Use the 2:1 Ratio

I teach this strategy inside SchoolHabits University. I created this concept after 20 years of teaching. Over this time, I realized that the biggest problem my students had with catching up on late work was dealing with their current assignments at the same time. So I created the 2:1 ratio as a way to gradually tackle the backlog while staying on time with current assignments.

Here’s how it works.

• Complete two current assignments
• Complete one late assignment
• Complete two current assignments
• Complete one late assignment

Essentially, for every two current assignments you work on, you complete and submit something overdue

6. Prioritize Work Connected to Upcoming Tests

If you have one or two missing assignments, you don’t often need to prioritize them — just get them done. However, if you have three or more missing assignments, you might want to prioritize which ones you tackle first.

There are a few ways to look at this, and it depends on your work preferences and your specific situation. But you have some options for how to prioritize your late assignments:

• Time-based: Complete the assignments in the order that they were due; start with the oldest
• Deadline-based: Complete late assignments according to their deadlines
• Difficulty-based A: Complete the smaller, simpler assignments first to get some quick wins and build momentum; then move on to more complex tasks
• Difficulty-based B: Complete the larger assignments worth the most points first; then complete the smaller tasks

Regardless of which approach you take, I always suggest prioritizing the assignments that are related to upcoming tests and quizzes. 

For example, let’s say you have a calculus test in two days. You have a missing French project, a missing chemistry reading with questions, and a missing calculus worksheet. Which late assignment do you do first?

Answer: The calculus worksheet. Why? Because doing the worksheet will help prepare you for the upcoming test. (Homework and class work assignments are designed to prepare you for assessments.) So if you don’t do the calculus worksheet, you’ll be less prepared for your test. Then you’re going to have one more thing on your to-do list: re-take your calculus test.

How to Prevent Late Assignments in the Future

Regularly falling behind in your assignments is a sign of a larger issue. 

If you’re missing classes because of anxiety, depression or other health issue, please seek the advice of a physician. 

If you’re missing assignments because they’re hard and you don’t know how to do them, you’re either in the wrong class placement or you simply need more help understanding the material. You likely need to meet with your teacher, ask a friend for help, or seek outside tutoring. 

If you’re missing assignments because you don’t care about them and are unmotivated to do them, then read these tips for how to do boring things.  

Also, consider the reality that the only way assignments get done is if we do them. This is a fact of life. You can procrastinate and avoid them all you want, but if you don’t want the bad grade that comes with late work, you’ve got to put your feelings aside and take action anyway.