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Motivation. It is such a huge thing that we all have to try and conjure up from time to time. I am sure you have said this or something along the lines of this once in your life, “I’m not motivated to do my work”. Have you ever wondered why?

Motivation can be easily destroyed when you are in the face of a distraction. Why would you want to go to the gym when you have that new Netflix show to watch? Why study when you can go hang out with your friends and have a great time? Motivation can’t work well with distraction(s). It’s either one or the other.

A fact that I learnt recently that changed my outlook on distraction is “On average, interruptions take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover from – even if the distraction is only a minute!” This means that we aren’t effectively maximizing the potential of our study sessions when we allow distractions to study with us.

When we study with friends, who we love, that are hug distractions for us when we need to focus, it’s hurting how much effectively we get done during those study sessions.

If you want to get the best out of your studying or working life, locate the distractions and take the necessary precautions to make sure those distractions don’t happen while you are trying to be productive.

Watch this to help you start a distraction free studying life

If you have been a student of any kind you must be familiar with these two tools. These tools are imperative to our learning and we actually carry these out all the time without knowing. Sometimes, we mistake one for the other and in this post I am going to address the differences between the two.

Searching is, in short, looking for answers. You search to find a concrete answer about something. For example, how old is Will Smith? This is searching because there is a concrete answer out there (he’s 51 years old in case you were wondering).

Researching involves a little bit more than asking a question for a concrete answer. You usually don’t end up with a solid answer with these but you do end up with in depth knowledge about a certain topic. For example, What is the best laptop for PC gaming? This doesn’t have a solid answer. You will have to research into the various specifications of a laptop that you would best for a good gaming experience. You will have to familiarize yourself with the different capabilities associated with high level gaming. You will have to learn so much about gaming to come to a conclusion for yourself for the answer to that question. At the end of the day you will find that you are more knowledgeable about laptops and their specifications, features, software and hardware capabilities than before you sought after asking the question.

So in a nutshell, searching is not searching but researching involves searching. If you unsure about how to research a topic, the best thing to do is start from the beginning. Look into the foundations of your research question and build your way up. However, no matter what you do, don’t do this

you’re welcome.

 

Note-taking. A thorn in the flesh of most of us I’m sure. We all dread barely waking up at 8 AM, or whenever your class starts, heading to class and take notes for an hour. We would rather use that time to open some emails, order food, text some friends, catch up on sleep or think about catching up on sleep. However, we do this for a few weeks only to out that we have an exam coming up really soon. Yeah, that feeling is terrible. I’ve had it one too many times and so listen when I tell you, you can’t get rid of it without good note-taking strategies.

Note-taking isn’t that hard once you do enough preparation and figure out what kind of note-taking will fit you. There are a few types which all have there pros and cons. We have Outline note-taking which basically jots down notes in an outline form. Pro of this? You can follow up with fast teachers, listen more and get a lot of info down without doing much. Cons? You end up with messy notes that require extra work after lecture to sort out. Another example is Bullet Point note-taking. This type is just as it sounds, you take notes and bullet point things as you hear them. Pro? You definitely get a lot of information down and more organized notes. Cons? Your organization will probably lack sense because a bullet point doesn’t explain why something connects with another thing.

There are many others, which can be found in the video below starting at 14:18, but my point is note-taking is about figuring what works best for you as a student. How do you learn best? Do you require another look at the material? If so then outlining will probably be best. Do you make connections in your head easily? Then bullet point note-taking is a great fit. Finding out what works best for you as a note-taker is the best thing you can do for yourself as a student.

“A fool can know. The point is to understand” – Albert Einstein

For this week we are going to focus on studying and memory. We all have heard of the famous “SQ3R”. It stands for Skim, Questions, Read, Recite and Review. If you have ever taken a class aimed to help you study better it must have talked about SQ3R. Lucky for you, today I won’t go into it because I am sure we’ve had enough of that. What we will go into are some tips on remembering things based on how memory works to our advantage.

For us to recall and understand something, we have to read the information over and over again. However a few things should go on between re-reading. The memory has short term, working and long term divisions. The short term only stores information for about 5 seconds. The working takes whatever is remembered from the short term and recalls it for about 5-20 seconds. Whatever is still remembered is then transferred to the long term memory.

A lot happens when we consume information, we don’t only consume a definition or a list, we consume things like the material of the paper, the sounds around us when reading, the chair we are sitting on etc. Once something is read, before the next read we should workout or do some form of exercise to increase power, we should test ourselves on the material to see what we really know and recall and what we need to focus more on. Then we should try to associate what we know with things that are not abstract or mundane so we can have a better chance at remembering it. So the next time you read the material it would be for review and reinforcement of the neural connection that is made from understanding it.

 

This week, we are going to focus on procrastination. Something that we are all familiar with. We all want to be better with time management and productivity so here’s something to help with that. Sometimes the reason we procrastinate is because of rationalizations. We rationalize that since we don’t know how to get the work done, say a math or physics problem, we procrastinate. That’s very good to know because you can always ask yourself why am I not doing work right now. Once you figure out the rationale you can change the scenario to fix your productivity. The answer to the math or physics problem would be to go to office hours or a friend and ask for some explanation on what isn’t clear so you can move forward.

Something that I found to be really helpful was this TED talk by Tim Urban. He breaks down procrastination in a way that can help better understand how to overcome it. He does so in a very fun and comprehensible way. He talks about procrastination when deadlines are not involved and I think that’s important to get. Deadlines guide us as students but in terms of life and our goals and jobs we may not have deadlines. So we need to learn this happen now while we can so that in the future when we are leading a family or a group of people or an organization we can do so without time wasting.

Welcome to my very first blog post. I’m Anthony and I’m here to give you some tips from what I learned from my course this week. If you are a prospective college student or in college currently I hope this can be of help.

Going through the lessons on communication, it dawned on me that the rules of communication between face-to-face and online communication are not different. Just because its online and you don’t have to deal with repercussions for your words or actions right away, doesn’t give you the right to disregard the respect of the person or people you are communicating with.

In addition, even though the communication forms are similar there is one huge exception and that is online communication is permanent and can be retrieved whenever. So the guide essentially is don’t type or do any action online if it isn’t appropriate to be seen. Regardless of whether it is a formal setting or not, make sure communication is well thought out. Just like what Dr. Fuz says in the video below, communicate thinking about whether this question being asked in the email can’t be answered some other way. In essence, to reiterate, think before you speak(communicate)