4 p.m. You arrive home from school and receive a text: Movies? You shoot a quick “yes” back.

7 p.m. You arrive home from the movie. Entering the living room, you see your parents watching your favorite TV show, and they invite you to watch with them.

9 p.m. Time to shower!

10 p.m. Homework?

6 a.m. You wake up with your face squished against on your tablet, still open to the homework you were supposed to do last night.

Procrastination is a crippling issue that affects high school students. It causes sleep deprivation, sickness and bad grades.

Flashback to freshmen year when now senior Olivia Shalhoup was hanging out with her friends rather than doing the math homework she was assigned earlier in the day. What’s the harm? It’s just freshmen year, it doesn’t count anyway.

But her grades said otherwise.

“[As a freshmen] my grades were really bad,” Shalhoup said. “I had like three D’s, a couple C’s and only two A’s. I didn’t really make time to do school work or study.”

Shalhoup decided that things needed to change after a trip to New York. After visiting colleges there, she decided that East Coast was where she wanted to be after high school. But there was no way she could make it there with the grades she had at the time.

“I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to achieve my dreams,” she said. “I really needed to start changing so that I could actually achieve them and be successful. I didn’t want to fall short of what I wanted to do.”

Shalhoup made a radical change in her work habits.

“College became more of a reality,” she said. “I started spending a lot more time on school work and studying. I stayed up later, studied more and skipped some social events in order to study.”

However, many are unwilling to sacrifice a few hours of social interaction, even if those hours could bump a B to an A. Finding a balance between your social life and your academic life is important.

“Now, I don’t have to give up social stuff as much,” Shalhoup said. “I kind of found a balance which is easier. I just study a lot too.”

It’s not always easy to change your grades and sometimes you have to go backward before going forward.

“Math was really hard for me,” Shalhoup said. “I’ve always been bad at it. But then I took a super easy math class and learned tactics about how to be good at math. Now, I can take harder math classes and do pretty well in them.”

Just like Shalhoup changed her outlook on math, anyone can change their outlook on studying. It just takes a little dedication.

“Make the time that you need to and put in the effort now, because it will definitely be worth it later,” Shalhoup said. “Especially when you’re trying to apply to college and scholarships.”

Since her freshmen year, Shalhoup has been able to change her study habits and get her grades from their previous state to almost all A’s with only one B. Shalhoup hopes that next year all her hard work will have paid off as she dreams of attending American University in Washington, D.C.