You should - if you are the ideal, perfect uni student - go through the planning process, - make a thousand of those - talk to your seminar leader to ask them if your plan is even worth executing, probably make another plan, then draft and draft again and again until you're happier with it.
Next proof read it again and again to find the six thousand mistakes, typos and bits that honestly just don't make sense. Then hand it in, ideally early enough that you're not actively concerned you'll get a late penalty because you're not quite sure if you got it in at 11:59 or 12:00.
Unfortunately, I have been an academic victim on more than one occasion.
I've done overnighters (once and never again), panicked rewrites and once completely forgot to hand in an essay I had written in advance until the day after the assignment closed!
There have been less of these complete failures in second year and, I think I've written enough essays to give some advice on when to start writing them when you are a bit of a procrastinator.
The main thing I like to do when preparing to write my essays is have an out-of-this-world plan. I know this isn't for everyone but I love a plan with links to academic articles, more words than any plan needs and basically a fully constructed bibliography.
This plan is mostly my own ideas, I then start my reading which sometimes does not agree with what I'm trying to say (which makes my job harder but the essay altogether more interesting) and get good background knowledge of my topic.
My main piece of advice: do your reading in advance. Writing stuff while you're reading it is stressful and in my experience not conducive to a good essay. Personally, I don't think you need that many academic articles to do well you just need to know a few very well.
Make sure to use the library, use what your lectures have given you and actually just use your own common sense as to what you do and don't need to know for your assignment.
Now if all this is wrapped up a week before your essay is due in you're golden. You've basically got your essay written already just link all the information you have together, make it sound intelligent (which you can absolutely do) and make sure to reference everything. The last thing you need is to be pulled up for plagiarism after all of this.
Good luck with your assignments, try not to do them a day before their due and please remember to hand them in on time!
