How To Be Productive... At Home... During A Pandemic. #COVID
- College Lessons
- Mar 4, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 20, 2021
Stores are closed, schools went digital, and there is no toilet paper on the shelves, since my buddy Erik decided he's going to become a toilet paper re-distributor... Looks like it's working out for him though (see below).
Life changed pretty quick and so did the days of going to libraries, coffee shops or really any where outside your house to study/work.
Now I can go into this quite a bit, but I'll keep my points brief, so you can be... well productive.
If you've read my previous post you know that i'm a pre-med student and that I'm an absolute nerd! So I'm going to dive into a little bit of the detail of why you should do some things so you have a strong grasp of why I'm telling you what to do rather than you BuzzFeed Article with 5 tips on pandemics.
To sum it up briefly, I'll be talking about:
Classical Conditioning + Habits.
Health
My One Secret That Helped Me Study For Hours On End in College, While Maintaining An "A" Average.
1. Classical Conditioning & Habits:
So what is Classical Conditioning? Well it's a way to make being productive/studying easier! I won't bore you with the history of it, but there was a man name Pavlov with a sweet beard, who noticed that their dog would begin salivating when he rang the bell, after a period of time where he paired both the ringing of the bell and giving of food together. So the dog essentially gave the response he would give to seeing food to the bell. As you can imagine, by leveraging this paradigm to our own lives, we can make powerful habits, that happen without conscious input, making ourselves productive and our work effortless.
How to use this:
Keep a separate space away from everything else you do and only use that for studying. Over time, being in that space will prime you to study.
Use a Pomo-doro timer (and app that essentially times you for a 25 minute period, giving you a sound when to start and when to finish). The sound of these signals prime your brain to study and to rest. I personally use the Be Focused timer on the apple app store.
Reward yourself at the end of your long work day. Want to watch a movie? Go for it. Eat ice-cream? Sure. you need to take a break or else you won't be able to continue your behaviour in the long run.
Have a morning routine that you consistently follow to get you into the flow of the day. I personally wake up, meditate for 10 minutes, go on the elliptical for 10 minutes, shower, make a smoothie + coffee and tackle my day. Before you know it you will be waking up easier, getting to work easier and productivity will be, well productive and efficient!
2. Health:
We've heard it over and over: "Health is wealth." You might be thinking: "oh jeez, here we go again..." but I'm not here to shame or blame you for putting your health priorities aside. I mean, If i were to, i'd have to shame myself, since I did it for the majority of my undergrad degree,
Well CollegeLessons, what can I do and why? Great question, thanks for asking :-). It's important for a couple of reasons, I'll list out the most important relative to this blog post:
It has been shown to increase life-span: You can get more things done without worrying about your body not working.
Decrease your stress level to improve productivity and retention of information
Fills you up with good feeling hormones and endorphins, that give you the energy you need to tackle your day.
Increases the size of your brain. Yes exercise has literally been shown to make you smarter... Don't believe me? Check out the book Spark by Dr. John Ratey.
Makes you happy. You can then associate this with your work/study if you reward yourself with a workout/stretch, thus effectively causing your brain to make working make you feel happy. Now if that isn't a life-hack I don't know what is!
How to use this:
Meditate: Meditation has been shown to decrease stress levels, increase brain size and make you less anxious. All of these critical to being able to focus, and manage the situations that we're dealing with right now.
Go for a run. It's free, gets you out of the house and helps you feeling good!
Try some calisthenic workouts such as squats, push-ups or burpees to get that heart rate elevated
Go for a walk & get some fresh air mid day. This little bit of exercise and distraction from the work you're doing actually makes you much more efficient once you're back and makes you want to work.
Eat Healthy: I know uber eats isn't shut down, but if you trade that Chick-fil-a for a nice salad, I guarantee you will feel better, have more energy and be more productive.
Sleep. You've heard it many times. You need 8-9 hours of sleep. Don't skip out. have a sleeping routine and a consistent wake-up time. We have something called a circadian rhythm that once used properly helps us
3: My One Secret Trick:
You made it! To be honest, I never thought I would share this with people, because it has had such a profound effect on me and at least in College I didn't want others benefiting to scale the curve! Without it, I probably would've been that student that just "wants to get by." Since you've made it this far and have shown initiative to get your life back into your grasp: Let's go.
There are going to be times when you don't want to study. When you can't study. When you're bored. The second you're feeling like this: you NEED to do the following. I guarantee you it will give you the
Go to the rest-room and splash yourself with some water to wake you up.
Do 5-10 pushups, then 5-10 squats.
Use Study/Focus Music.
The first two are pretty self- explanatory, so I won't go into them. But I'm going to touch a bit further on Study/Focus Music.
In brief: it's music that helps you groove to studying to make your day go faster, and to improve your cognition. I personally use Focus@Will, as it's pretty much the gold standard for this. I'm going to keep it brief but I talk about it further in my Previous Blog post: "Things I Wish I Knew Earlier In College. Grades. Social-life. Life-advice." The reason why I used this in the first place is because I saw the Ted Talk by the founder: Will Henshall. The talk intrigued me so much and as someone who always looked at ways to improve productivity (I know I must be fun @ dinner parties), I was thrilled to hear his talk on why Focus music was important and specifically his own. I was interested as I recently got some tips from my friends to use "pink noise," but that was just a brutal experience that I've never used since I opted to Focus@will. I've improved the amount of time, level of deepness and efficiency of what I'm capable of studying/working on by using Focus@will. I was in my first semester of College, I was unable to focus and my grades were plummeting. After watched Will's TedTalk, I checked out the Focus@will website, and noticed they had a trial. Needless to say, I've been hooked ever-since, I'm actually currently using it right now to actually write this article, ahha!
I just noticed that Focus@will has a 50% off promotion for COVID, so if you're looking to take the productivity back in your life, give it a read.
Anyways, I'm going to head back to get some work done. Hope you enjoyed reading! All the best and feel free to let me know what more you would like :)
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I have partnered with Focus@Will and will receive compensation when you utilize the link in the article. I have utilized the service for more that 4 years and continue to do so because it just works... If you would like to support my blog and think that focus@will can help you, I encourage you to at least check out their free trial... If you then would like to purchase a subscription you'd be helping your productivity and our medium... Cheers.
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