One of the hardest things in life is how to manage your time. How is it possible to have a full time job, be a full time student, as well as get enough sleep, family, personal, and social time. People have many different hobbies. Personally, I love to play video games and workout. I’m both a bodybuilder and a gamer. Combine these to hobbies with a management position at Anytime Fitness, and a full schedule of classes at OSU, and you’ve already have full plate. So, I decided to research some time management skills that have helped me or others.

1. Write & Carry

Don’t try to use your memory to keep track of too many details. Writing things down is a great way to take control of your projects and tasks and keep yourself organized. Plus, you never know when you are going to have a great idea. If you wait too long to write them down you could forget.

2. Prioritize & Plan

Prioritizing what you’ve written down helps you focus and spend more of your time on the things that really matter.. Rate your tasks into categories, and do what is most important first. Then spend some time to plan your schedule. This will help increase your productivity and balance your important long-term projects with your more urgent tasks.

3. Think & Be Realistic

Before committing to a new task, stop to think about it first. This will prevent you from taking on too much work. Many people become overloaded because they over commit. Learn to say no to low priority requests and you will free up time to spend on things that are more important. You can always come back to the less important things later.

4. Improvement & Evaluation

It is a good idea to evaluate regularly how you are spending your time. Learn new things, develop talents, and gain abilities. For example, you could take a class, attend a training program, or read a book. Continuously improving your knowledge and skills increases your marketability, can help boost your career, and is the most reliable path to financial independence. Consider what you are giving up in order to maintain your current activities, and what you can accomplish with the time you have.

5. Habits & Goals

Make a list of bad habits that could be sabotaging you from your goals. After you do, work on them one at a time to eliminate them from your life. Slowly try to replace it with a better habit. Write down your progress for each habit or goal. Then, go through your goal journal each week to make sure you are on the right track, but don’t become overly obsessed with perfectionism.

6. Reflection

How did this process make you feel? What did you struggle with the most? What came easy? What were you able to accomplish? What could you have done better? How can you be more efficient at managing your time in the future?

Reference:

http://www.timethoughts.com/time-management.htm

Online reading has always been very difficult for me. Most of us have no problem scrolling through FaceBook for hours on end, but when it comes to actually reading a book or article online, we fail to complete the entire thing. For some reason, I feel that it is more difficult to retain information when it comes from a screen. I’d much rather prefer the hard copy, paper version rather than a backlit one. In general, reading is reading. So, any improvement to reading comprehension should improve both paper and digital versions. Here are some ways to improve your reading comprehension from I website that helped me, and with some of my own opinions.

1. Think about and Build their Background Knowledge

For children who struggle as readers (and even for those who don’t), comprehension is a big deal. And it starts from the very beginning. Before kids even open the book, we need to encourage them to think about what they are going to read. We can ask them to read the title or look at the cover, maybe even the Table of Contents. What is the topic? What do they already know about the topic? What do they think will happen in the story, based off what they know?

Using background knowledge is also vital as the child reads the text. What would I do in that situation? Has that happened to me before? I remember the time that… These thought patterns rely on what the child already knows to help them comprehend and make sense of the text.

–This thought process has always helped me with retaining information. I believe the more often you think of something, the more able you are to remember it. So, if you can tie your information to a memory of yours, then it can increase retention. When I was learning Spanish, I would try to create a sentence out of the Spanish verb, but in English. For instance, the verb Llevar, pronounced Yea-Var, means carry, take, or wear. Yet, every time i think of it I always imagine a little girl angrily screaming, “I would llevar (never) wear that!”. This thought process, although it is not a memory, shows me that just imagining a situation relevant to the information attempting to be processed is enough for me.

2. Introduce Vocabulary

Introducing vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with building background knowledge, as often kids who do not have the background knowledge about a particular subject also do not have the vocabulary that accompanies that knowledge. A child who has never been to a concert or symphony would probably struggle with words such as orchestra pit or balcony in a text. Learn vocabulary terms in visual and hands-on ways, each providing understandable definitions and examples.

— I am usually pretty good with vocabulary, but I still always find myself Googling or asking Siri what a word means. It is also okay to ask people during conversation what a word means. Not knowing something doesn’t mean your dumb, but refusing to learn something does. Improvement means help. The more words you know, the better you can portray your thoughts. Learning vocabulary words is an important skill than can be done in little sessions of time over an extended length.

3. Build Fluency

How fluently a child can read the text also affects comprehension. If a text is too hard (especially if the child has little to no background knowledge), fluency is going to be compromised greatly. Most young readers have a hard time focusing on both decoding all the words and thinking about what they are reading at the same time. This pressure is relieved quite a bit if we pick “just right” books for our readers, books that they can both read and comprehend with support from us. Fluency can be built and practiced by asking kids to re-read texts.

–I completely agree that the best way to learn something is to do it over and over and over again. I always find myself dissociating sometimes when I’m in the middle of a paragraph of a rather boring text. I’ll notice that I just read a page or so without really retaining any of it. This forces me to re-read the same page over and over again until I actually pay attention to the content rather than the words on the page.

4. Read Different Kinds of Texts

In the many books and articles I’ve read about struggling readers (and through my own experiences), I’ve noticed one trend. Struggling readers tend to shy away from non-fiction texts. Maybe it’s because non-fiction is typically more difficult because of its features and structure, but studies show that struggling readers do not read near as much non-fiction as they should.

–I have always struggled to find books that I prefer to read. I’m not much of a novel or story book type person because I would rather read to learn something. Recently, however, I have found that I enjoy biographies and autobiographies. History is interesting, but can sometimes get boring. I have found that many of my idols in life have very interesting lives, and therefore I can learns something and be entertained. I also enjoy many different types of articles found online, or even some spiritual books, but I’m always reading for a purpose.

5. Provide Meaningful After Reading Activities

After reading, we want kids to be able to do more than remember and recall what they’ve read. We want them to be able to explain their thinking about the text. Asking them meaningful questions and picking activities that encourage them to be critical thinkers is absolutely key.

One example is using graphic organizers. Graphic organizers help readers organize the information in their head in a thoughtful way that gets them to not only remember, but to THINK about and connect to what they’ve read.

— I’m always constantly asking myself questions when I am reading. Usually, I am trying to figure out how I can relate what is happening in the book to what is happening, or has happened, in my life. Trying to connect something to a memory is one of the easiest ways for me to retain and comprehend new information. Keeping notes, whether mental or physical, will also drastically help me learn and retain the information I am reading.

Reference:

5 Simple Ways to Improve Reading Comprehension

Bettering Time Management

• Some times the best thing to do is to plan ahead. You need to be honest with yourself and prioritize certain things above others. You can do this by creating a schedule, list of short term and long term goals, and try to improve a little bit everyday. I always strike to be better than I was yesterday in at least one facet of my daily life.
• I also really enjoy writing. Whether it’s random epiphanies, essays, or thoughtful messages, I always find writing to be therapeutic. Sometimes, I’ll sit and write down a favorite memory. This not only makes me rejoice, but also strengthens my memory. Plus, I can always look back at anything that I have written for future inspiration.

Online Reading

• I’ve always been pretty bad with online reading. Well, I guess it also depends on the subject matter and purpose. When it comes to articles for classes, I would much rather prefer a physical text that I can carry around, highlight, and note take on. Or, if I was going to read a book, I would hate to read a digital version. But, I did learn some things that helped me.
• You can take notes on paper from online sources as an alternative to my previous conflict. You can also attempt to connect the information you are reading to a past experience. This helps reinforce that memory! You can also always look up vocabulary rather quickly and read multiple different materials off of one device.

Connection Between Exercise and Video Games

• Coming from someone who is extremely physically fit and has been a gamer his entire life, I believe exercise and video games can be correlated. Although many scientific articles provide side effects of prolonged video game use, it is all about balance. I can play games for hours at night without any issue, but I’m also physically active throughout the day. Anything can be bad for your health in exaggerated quantities. I also believe we do not have the technology available to make a larger, positive impact.
• At the moment, wearable technology is becoming more and more popular. We have virtual reality and motion controlled video games. We have augmented reality glasses and apps. We have the Esports coming an Olympic Sport. It is only a matter of time till video games fully integrate. We don’t have too much positive data regrading prolonged video game usage, but with time we can create better games that lead to better results.

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