Perfective Verbs in the Present Tense

Habitual Action with Focus on Completion – here it happens regularly, but the focus is on the completion.

Naši studenti vždycky napíšou esej na konci semestru.

Our students always write an essay at the end of the semester.

Using píšou – ‘the write’ is also possible, but that would focus more on the activity itself (and all the steps of the writing process) instead of the complete action here. The same goes with the following sentence, where the emphasis is on the completion of a a regular task:

Jan většinou uklidí celý byt za hodinu nebo dvě.

Jan usually cleans the whole apartment in an hour or two.

Habitual Action with Focus on Completion in Sequence of Events – this isn’t too different from the habitual actions, but the sequence of events is an added motivation to use perfectives, since you are typically trying to convey that one action is completed before another.

Každý večer se obvykle umyju, vyčistím si zuby a pak jdu^[1] spát.

Every evening I wash (myself) up, brush my teeth and then go to bed.

As a way of summing this up, if we recall our way of viewing the perfective verb as a point (instead of an unbounded line), in which the activity in its entirety from start to ultimate completion is understood, then these meanings above should start to make sense.