By Divine Grace Llamas (Grade 10 – Rizal)
“Three to four hours a day, five days a week of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.” Cal Newport, Deep Work.
With all the time in our hands due to the global pandemic and the need to stay home, it’s easy to just lose track of the days and slump in our beds doing nothing. Aside from online classes, I know each one of us have thought of learning something new and leaving quarantine as a new and ‘glowed up’ person. We’ve done activities like cutting ourselves some bangs, or learning how to bake, but how are we doing now, 7 months later?
It’s quite shocking to think about it, but it’s never too late to start making and achieving your goals.
- Take care of yourself. Being productive doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go and do amazing things and get work done quickly. It’s important to know that you don’t have to overwork yourself and giving yourself time to relax and fulfill your needs like eating three full meals is also something worth doing. Our health during these times is our top priority to build up a stronger immune system. If you’re in for it, you can also do exercises and workouts for your routine.
- Figure out what you want to do and write it down. Take it slow. If there are many things you’ve been wanting to do, like learning how to play a guitar, baking, and painting, make yourself a to-do list and schedule everything in order for you not to get distracted and forget. Divide the work into small blocks and commit to it by following a time management routine that works out the best for you. Some examples are the Pomodoro technique, GTD method, Do it now, and many others. Here’s an article that lists a few more: https://www.brightpod.com/boost/10-popular-time-management-techniques
Small move, big change by Caroline Arnold is also a good book that can help you get work done through breaking it down to smaller steps. - Use your resources.
The internet has many things to offer. There are thousands of youtube videos that teach anything under the sun, and they’re all for free. Even a simple 10 minute video could bring you so much knowledge. Time is gold, every second counts. We all know that, but we always forget. If you want long courses, skillshare is a good site for you to check out. Why not read one or two pages from a book? As long as you keep yourself learning, it will all be put to good use someday. If you’re having a hard time focusing on something, here’s a summary of Cal Newport’s book ‘deep work’ , https://theartofliving.com/deep-work-by-cal-newport/ - Embrace boredom. With this technology-driven world, our attention span gets shorter and shorter
because we easily get distracted by our gadgets. So once we start on a project, we
instantly decide to give up once it gets boring and doesn’t give us the instant gratification
we are used to. Fall in love with the process and work your way towards the result you want. Your hard work pays off. - Just start. We often don’t get anything done because we believe we would need a spark of inspiration to do it. It happens, but most of the time the only thing you can do is just start. Even when we don’t want to, we have to get out of our couch potato state. This also applies to your schoolwork. Don’t let it pile up and give yourself a hard time. Although it always seems scary at first, the experiences and lessons you will learn just by doing it is greater than not having it done at all.
