Resources for Studying

Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial. Choose 1 audiobook and 2 Audible Originals absolutely free. Visit https://audible.com/mariana or text ‘mariana’ to 500-500. There’s this book called free to focus by Michael Hyatt. It starts by giving you food for thought – we only have 168 hours per week but it never feels enough. When you dive into max-productivity mode, it seems like your days can’t be more stretched than they are, and you still feel like there is so much to do and that your work, either being school or career related, is just… average. One of the key concepts to learn from this book is that your concept of productivity is flawed. We usually believe that productivity is based on two factors: quantity and speed. The more work you do, and the faster you do it, the more productive you are. This mindset will result in an overflowing schedule, unrealistic task lists and an endless loop of more work to do, because you are simply anticipating and generating more work than you should. Besides the obvious consequence of burnout, you are actually decreasing the quality of the work you’re doing. Instead of completing fewer high quality projects, you’re completing more average quality projects. The more average quality projects you complete, the more you’ll need to prove to others either in the workplace or college. And the more you need to prove, the more you’ll work. And the more you’ll work, the more average your work will be. As you can see, this mindset is a loop and once you get there, it will be hard to get out of it. “Time is fixed” but your energy and focus levels are not. This means that despite an increase in your working hours, your output will not increase proportionately. This happens because your brain is not able to keep the same level of focus at the end of the day, and will require more energy to tackle a task you would easily complete during the morning – that is, if you’re a morning person, of course. If you are more prone to reaching a productivity peak in the evening, that scheme will probably be inverted in your case. It’s equally important to rejuvenate and recharge – allowing your brain to go back to a maximum level of focus instead of trying to work through your projects with a mind clogged with information and worries. Despite sounding counterproductive, playing and relaxing are key in going back to a focused mode. In fact, *freedom to do nothing* is a central part of how productive you are. Being able to do nothing productive for your career or academic goals during your time off creates breakthrough ideas, allows you to reorganize priorities in your mind and create the needed time and space to relax and restart the process. This is so important that you should schedule this time for yourself – even when your calendar is overflowing with other tasks that *seem* to be more important. And the most important self-care appointment that you should schedule religiously is a fixed time to go to bed and waking up, creating a sleeping routine that allows you to rejuvenate your brain regularly. In his book Dreamland, David K. Randall states that sleep deprivation makes it harder to solve problems, stay focused and make good decisions. Likewise, the neuroscientist Penelope A. Lewis argues in The Secret World of Sleep that sleep-deprived people have far fewer original ideas. The third main idea of the book is that being productive means identifying unnecessary tasks. To save time, you need to eliminate any non essential tasks in your workday. This is how you try to overcome that wrong mindset about productivity – that more done, in less time is being productive. The idea here is not to do more things; but the right things. This is exactly what is discussed in Essentialism as well as Deep Work – identifying key tasks to focus on and trimming away everything else is what will make your work more valuable and increase the overall quality of your projects. You can identify what is a valuable task by assessing your passion and proficiency. Proficiency is what will expected in more regular workplaces – whether you’re skilled at the task at hand and whether that task *significantly* contributes to your work. Passion goes beyond that – it allows you to measure a task taking into account the level of motivation that you bring to the process. Most of these tasks will probably need to be turned down in a workplace environment, especially if getting involved in them is not adding value to the work of your team or company. That doesn’t mean, however, that you aren’t allowed to invest time in that work during your off time. The idea is to evaluate whether that passion can turn into something valuable, that, with the required skill, you’ll be able to transfer to the workplace, or keep it as a personal skill to be developed in the background. I hope you enjoyed today’s video and I will see you next week. Bye guys. FTC: This video is sponsored by Audible.

With so much stress in the world, now’s the perfect time to focus on these self-care routines you can do at home. School and life get overwhelming. Putting 100% into everything you do can get exhausting after a while. Save some of the time and care you put into work and others for yourself. If you’re […]

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Positive COVID-19 stories are happening, like these med students going above and beyond to help out their colleagues. In a good way, it feels like there are too many stories of students doing incredible things to help out during the COVID-19 pandemic to mention them all. With so much doom and gloom out there, we […]

The post How These Western University Med Students Are Making a Difference During COVID-19 (And You Can Too) appeared first on Student Life Network Blog.

University tours in New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are getting cancelled due to COVID-19. Many are now turning to virtual tours to help students choose a school for next year. (This is part of our series on virtual university tours across Canada. You can click to view the articles […]

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University tours in Saskatchewan and Manitoba are getting cancelled due to COVID-19. Many are now turning to virtual tours to help students choose a school for next year. (This is part of our series on virtual university tours across Canada. You can click to view the articles for Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Québec, Atlantic Canada, or the […]

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