Time
Students routinely plan as though drafting were the whole task. Drafting is perhaps a third of it. Planning and reading take more time than expected, and revision takes far more. Budget in that ratio and the deadline stops being an emergency.
Short regular sessions beat long rare ones for a reason that is not about discipline. Returning to a problem repeatedly gives you the gap between sessions, which is where a surprising amount of the thinking happens.
Starting
The blank page is usually a decision problem rather than a motivation problem: you have not decided what the piece argues, so there is nothing to write down. If you are stuck, stop trying to write sentences and go back to the claim.
When you do draft, draft badly and quickly. A first draft is a thinking device. Editing while drafting is why so many drafts stop after two paragraphs.
Revision in passes
Fix one class of problem at a time. Structure first, then paragraphs, then sentences. Working on all three at once means rewriting sentences in paragraphs you will later delete, which is both slow and demoralising.
Leave a gap before revising if you can. A day is enough to stop reading what you meant and start reading what you wrote.
Feedback
Feedback is not a verdict, it is data about how one reader experienced your writing. The useful question is not whether the comment is fair but what in the text produced it. A marker who says a section is unclear may be wrong about the cause and is almost never wrong that something went wrong there.
Track feedback across assignments. The same three notes usually recur, and those three notes are your actual improvement plan.
Notes
Take notes in your own words, always with the citation attached. Verbatim notes become an integrity risk weeks later when you no longer remember which phrasing was yours. Keep one searchable location rather than several tidy ones you will not remember.
Knowing when to stop
Diminishing returns arrive earlier than perfectionism admits. When your changes are swapping synonyms rather than clarifying arguments, the paper is done. Submitting a good piece on time beats submitting a slightly better one late, and it beats the third one you never finished.