Snap your pen in half and rip up that boring book. Stevie Martin and Richard Benstead present the 50 best ways to avoid work…

If you’re tired of university work then you’re tired of life. This is especially true in your first year. All that is required is that you show your face in tutorials, read the odd text book and make sure you hit the magic 40 mark come June. Next year, and the year after, is when the work becomes important; or at least as important as it ever will be. It’s only then, when you have six summative essays due for completion in just one week and cannot contemplate the thought of another late-night working session that it becomes clear that life isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Even in the ugly, scarred face of such pressure there is always enough time to procrastinate. Procrastination is a form of sleep for when you are awake. It’s about recharging the batteries. After a sustained period of arduous academic investigation (max 10min), both body and mind require time to enjoy an immature act that requires no thinking, no reading of clunky prose and no analysis of the checks and balances in the American political system.

Some 50 time-wasting tactics are listed for your consideration. d21 does not accept responsibility for your subsequent actions.

Happy days

1. Leave anonymous post-it notes on the door of your neighbour. Struggling for what to write? Try ‘I know what you did last night’ or ‘Quit playing Razorlight or I’m going to Chinese burn you’.

2. If up late finishing off a pesky essay, knock on your neighbour’s door at around 4:30am. As soon as they open up shout ‘I love the smell of Napalm in the morning’, remembering to inhale sharply after uttering ‘morning’. Leave immediately so that your sleepy-eyed adversary can contemplate this remark.

3. Stalk yourself on facebook.

4. Start an incredibly offensive facebook group and see how long it takes for someone to report it.

5. Find out who reported you and find out who they are and where they live. Find a horrific photo of them on their facebook profile and print off numerous copies. Take these and insert in random library books. Cover all four floors.

6. Enter your favourite film or book in the appropriate box of the advanced search facebook function. Find people who also like – for example – ‘Liberty Heights’ or Dona Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ – and poke them.

7. Use facebook to develop an unhealthy obsession with a member of the opposite sex. In real life you may have once glanced at this person across the politics section in the library. Soon you will be checking their profile every day. At first it was just to find out the essentials like name, course and current status. Within a week this snowballed into a mild obsession. You’ve now memorised their ‘favourite quotes’ and suffer brief periods in which you forget that you have never actually spoken to them and that they are probably unaware of your existence. Remember: although facebook offers gratification for the timid stalker, curb crawling and/or unauthorised stroking will lead to arrest and imprisonment.

8. Send abusive messages to Purple Radio. About yourself.

9. Wait for a Purple Radio DJ who is into their funky jazz or anonymous indie bands. Then wait until they become really serious and a tad smug about a tambourine solo in some new single being released by a band from Stockholm. At that precise moment send in an email asking when they will be playing ‘Do you know (Ping pong song)’ by Enrique Iglesias.

10. Organise a Coffee shop crawl – everyone must order an Americano with double espresso at every single Coffee shop in Durham. No decafs. Preferably choose friends with summative deadlines for the following day.

11. Find a friend who is doing the same essay as you. Then play a game whereby you see which of you will leave it the longest (i.e. nearest to the deadline) before starting to work. An essay (reading included) can be completed in 2 hours. The question is – will you dare leave it until 10am on the day of the noon deadline? (N.b. Extensions are not allowed and you need to get at least 50% to qualify.) If you want to play this game properly then do it for your dissertation.

12. Raid charity shops for future fancy dress items. Then persuade the old lady behind the counter to knock the price down by at least 25%

13. Play “Corridor Bowls” with vegetables. The winner is the one who can get their tomato as close to the pickled onion as possible.

14. Completely reinvent your entire existence. Cut your hair off, customise all of your clothes, and convince people you have changed your name to Moonunit.

15. Nap

16. Go to an event held by the Christian Union and be as belligerent as possible. Boo, hiss and heckle whenever the speaker mentions Judas and, when they invite questions, stand up and just ask ‘why?’ Repeat until they threaten you with physical or spiritual violence. Then just turn the other cheek and leave.

17. Take a picture of your face, digitally enhance it and become disturbed by how attracted you are to yourself.

18. Sit in front of the mirror and try to shock yourself.

19. Learn by heart a few choice quotes from famous, intelligent people and endeavour to casually drop them into all your conversations.

20. Take a long walk by the river and appreciate nature. Enjoy it until you sense a rank smell from the river and notice that a piece of excrement has become a lifeboat for local squirrels.

21. Go to the top of the Cathedral.

22. Go to the Cathedral bookstore in a long brown overcoat and ask for a hand in finding the Erotic Fiction section.

23. Attempt to show interest in a society that doesn’t interest you. Lament about how uncultured and apathetic you have become.

24. Send a huge parcel to yourself. Or alternatively, adopt someone else’s parcel.

25. Smile. For an hour. Without stopping.

26. Visit the Palace Green library and sit in the centre of one of the large desks. Begin to read Heat Magazine while eating a big tub of Smarties ice-cream and playing with your hair so that you look more like Sienna Miller. When the ‘guardians of the peace’ demand you leave, shout out the names of past Big Brother contestants: ‘Kate Lawler, Jade Goody, Nick Batman, Brain Be…..ouch, get your hands off me, that’s really hurting my tibia’.

27. Write an article and send it to the four main media outlets (durham21, Palatinate, The Sanctuary and MostlyHarmless). Watch as each of them includes your article in their next publication, oblivious to the fact it has been printed in the other three already.

28. Trophy something of minor importance from another college.

29. Once you have succeeded in number 28, note how quickly your college exec become grumpy bores. On arrival you cannot fail to notice their attempts to nurture college rival through emphasis on the crazy coolness of trophying and by singing about how the Pope tossed off someone from Hatfield (or something along those lines, we forget the exact words). As soon as a prized college item goes missing (normally a fluffy mascot or a pool table) be prepared for a stinging note in the weekly newsletter stressing that this was a grave offence against humanity and how the guilty party will be rusticated unless they come forward immediately.

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30. Drink so much alcohol that you are elevated to a higher form of being. Your ideas will become clearer and the sentences will flow.

31. Drink so much that you miss the epiphany stage and are sick all over your new room. When your roommate asks for an explanation, say ‘I was merely marking out my territory. Would you rather I piss all over the floor?’

32. Read durham21 and consider writing an article.

33. Post a comment on one of d21 theatre reviews criticising the amateurish production and condemning the ‘spineless’ reviewer for ‘talking bollocks’. Then just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

34. Participate in the ‘Charity-worker slalom’. The route goes from Woolworths, down across the bridge all the way to the ‘Fighting Cocks’ pub. The game is simple. Go from A to B in as quick a time as possible whilst slaloming the people in colourful vests who are trying to persuade you to donate to their charity. You lose points for engaging in conversation and if you commit yourself to a monthly donation. Points can be gained by shouting ‘why do you all have dreadlocks?’ and by taking the charity workers out one-by-one with a firm-armed clotheslines. Tip – avoid eye-contact.

35. Walk up through Gilesgate towards the huge Tesco. See how far you get before you begin to feel like you are back in the real world.

36. Search the internet for the next big American TV show and watch the whole first series in a day. Leave your room and brag to friends about your new discovery. Then realise that they have all known about Heroes since Moses was in short-pants. If you want to catch them out, try an oldish comedy like ‘Undeclared’ or ‘Freaks and Geeks’.

37. Go to one of the many Greggs and order the perfect meal of ham and cheese cob, sausage roll and fudge doughnut.

38. During a six-nations rugby match shout ‘Rugby is no more a sport than crochet and if anyone has a problem with this I’ll be standing in front of the big-screen TV all day’.

39. Sit fully clothed at your desk and do your best to wet yourself. It’s more difficult than you would imagine.

40. Get in a heated argument about the Iraq war. Essays suddenly become a more interesting alternative.

41. Try and chat someone up. The problem is that you can only use the lyrics from R Kelly’s ‘Ignition (Remix)’. With a little work on intonation along with wild gesticulation it isn’t that difficult. That is until you get to ‘bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce……..’ and realise that most public-schooled females refuse to do jumping jacks on demand.

42. Go to the library and listen to your iPod at a level you know is audible to other library users. Keep increasing the volume until someone approaches you asking that you turn it down. Warning – deafness is a likely consequence.

43. Check how many emails you have on your uni account about events you are not interesting in or asking you to fill out a survey.

44. Stay in your room and do something that you wouldn’t want other human beings to see you doing. Keep doing it until the cleaners come round.

45. Request some sexual safety gear from your JCR welfare officer and try to figure our how dental dams work.

46. Get into an argument about who is the fittest female in Neighbours – Pepper, Rachel or Janae?

47. Resurrect the days when students gave a shit and arrange a protest march. If you’re struggling for things to rage against then just open up a newspaper.

48. Count how many times you can tap the desk with your pen in one minute. Keep doing this until you can beat you original score. Once mastered, set up a competition with others on your corridor or in your house.

49. Learn to write with your other hand. Being ambidextrous has its benefits.

50. Add another procrastination tip in the comments board below.