Summary – Last resort method for student to get things done

The life of a student has always been like a tug war between being motivated and plain lazy. I know. I’ve been there. Some time, we become so motivated, we even seek for extra work just to enhance our learning. Another time, there are no motivational speech in the world that will make us wake up from that comfy bed.

When that laziness attacks and you have so many things to do, what would you do?

These are a few tricks that I tried as my last resort to get things done. Most of the time they worked. Try them and tell me how it goes.

1) Read standing up
Sometimes I have trouble waking up when I read my notes. So what I did was reading the notes while standing up. If you can walk that would be even more effective to combat those drowsiness. However I found out that my concentration deteriorates even faster walking.

2) One page at a time
This is my last resort to almost anything. If I have to read 20 pages of notes, I will force myself to read 1 page. That’s it. I promise myself that after that 1 page is done and I fully understand or memorize the page, I can stop studying altogether.

Usually by the time I understand the subject, I will be more in the studying mode and thus page 2 🙂

3) Report your failure to other people
This also should be used as the super last resort. Make yourself accountable. Not to anyone but to your parent. I know.. it may sound very childish reporting yourself to your parent but believe me it work.

All you need to do is to write an email (if your parent read email of course) reporting every assignment need to be done, and notes to be studied. And each day, you should HONESTLY write a progress email detailing your progress. If you didn’t touch anything on the subject, confess to your parent and give reason why.

If the shame of not doing anything didn’t move you to finish your work, I don’t know what will.

4) Bet with your lecturer
How about if you prepare one letter signed by you and give that letter to your lecturer when you started the semester.

Put it in writing that everytime you are unable to deliver your assignment in time, you will wash his car FOC. The lecturer will definitely make use of this offer. He will look for your assignment first everytime. And you will feel more driven to do your assignment.

5) Red card of wealth
This is a system I created just to give me an extra push with money. However, being a student I don’t have money. Not much anyway. So what I did is creating about 20 red cards per month. I put value to the card at about $10 per card. So if by the end of the month I still have 20 cards, that is like an extra $200 in my pocket.

Whenever I want to push myself to work, I will just warn myself that 1 card will be burnt down (literally burnt) if I didn’t do the work.

Where will the money come from, my current salary of course. Once I start working, I am entitled to spend the red cards guilt free 🙂

6) When motivated, do extra
There will be times when you just super motivated for no apparent reason. How? Still a mystery to me. What I did when I’m in that state is to do extra work. Maybe study those subject not yet covered by lecturers, do past year questions etc.

Why I do this? Because there will be times when I’m just super lazy and all the above will not change it. By doing extra work when I’m motivated, I will feel less guilty being lazy sometime later. 🙂

– I wonder –
What do you do as your last resort to get things done?

——– Personal Note ———
I still have a few more techniques, but a bit abstract to describe here. Maybe next time 🙂

Now that I work, I actually still practise some of the methods. I honestly give report to my manager on what I have done and what I still don’t do. He may not even care, but I am so ashame to report on task not completed, I usually will finish them all. Well most of them anyway 🙂

Photo Credit – Orangeacid

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Today I wrote two entries, one about Debottlenecking Your Life and another is this. Being a blogger I have only one bottleneck – my internet connection.

I’m currently using a GPRS modem which runs at 5kB/s maximum. Most of the time I only manage a speed of 3kB/s. There’s so much I want to do but I can’t due to this.

I can’t even visit my friends’ blogs without spending 3 to 4 hours loading them. And of course I can’t be randomly surfing to discover new interesting blogs.

Watching videos or listening to podcast has never been into my to-do list. And I must say, I am very interested to venture into this Vlog and podcast.

I read in the newspaper the other day about Wimax. And how it can provide a fast wifi-like connection not only in starbuck but to anywhere in a city radius. Now that would be interesting, don’t you think?

Imagine downloading a 1-hour movie in 1.5 minutes! Can I ask, what will you do with that kind of speed?

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Summary – The only way to be more efficient

Are you familiar with the term “Bottleneck“. Basically, the word comes from the actual bottleneck. Referring to the image above, the bottom part of a bottle is always bigger than the bottleneck. In short, if I flip the bottle upside down, the water flow coming out will be controlled by the bottleneck. The smaller the bottleneck, the slower it will be for the bottle to be emptied.

Debottlenecking is one of the basic process of engineering. For example, imagine a road with three lanes. Somehow it is noticed that there is always a traffic jam when the three lanes merge into two lanes. The merging point now will be the bottleneck. And if the engineers ever want to solve the traffic jam problem, this is where they should tackle first.

Now apply debottlenecking process in our life.

Example 1 : You are having problems with debt. You are paying monthly, but with your credit card at hand, the debt is still increasing. In this specific case, credit card is the bottleneck. Not only it is slowing your debt reduction program, it is actually making the debt grow. So once you have identified the bottleneck, you can eliminate it by maybe cutting the card into two and stop using it altogether.

Example 2 : Try debottlenecking in studying. Figure out what is slowing the process. Maybe studying in front of a computer with the internet on is taking most of your time. Then you should know what to do to make the studying process more efficient. You must disconnect.

Conclusion – One very important rule about debottlenecking a process is that you must only handle one bottleneck at a time. Studying for example has a lot of problems. You may be distracted by the internet, or maybe you have a family problem stuck in your mind. Even if there is hundred of problems, just choose one that is affecting you the most. Tackle that first and you will see the improvement. I guarantee that.

I’m not sure about you, but I find that by imagining the problem I’m having as a bottleneck motivates me to settle it. When I know that something I did is affecting the efficiency of the whole process, I just imagine it as the bottleneck. Immediately I just want to eliminate it because I know there’s no other way to empty a bottle faster.

– I wonder –
What is the bottleneck in your life?

Photo credit – Etwood

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Summary – Associate with emotion and some practice
One of the biggest mystery of life is this – Let say tomorrow we are going for a trip oversea and we have to wake up at least 6 am just to get that flight. And somehow, we manage to wake up precisely at 6 am, not a minute sooner or later.

Have you had such experience?

This will happen almost everytime we are excited about waking up the next day. For example, first day at a job, or marriage. A theory suggested to explain this is that we have an internal clock built in to our subconcious mind. That will explain the accuracy of waking up time for some people, or the sudden nervousness when you forget an important thing to be done.

I have no proof on the theory, but I really believe that internal clock does exist. And wouldn’t it be a waste if we do not make use of this amazing gift.

Here’s some exercise that you can do immediately to harness the power of your internal clock.

1) Be insanely excited about waking up
The secret to waking up exactly at the specific time you wanted is actually making use of your emotion.

How many time do you able to wake up early when you know there’s something fun for you to do. Or maybe you are nervous about that first date, or when you know you will be called up by your boss for some big mistake you’ve done. Every one of these has one thing in common. You go to bed with an emotion associated to your future waking up.

If you go to bed, with an intense feeling about waking up tomorrow at 6am, you will definitely wake up at 6 am. Try it.

2) Guess the time without using any clue
This is a training I come up with to use the internal clock. At any time of the day, I will try to guess the time. It must not be a wild guess, you must try to search for the answer in you.

Another rule you must abide is that you must not make a calculated guess. An example of calculated guess is as such “Peter always leave the office at 1pm, so I know now is about 1.30pm”. Try to avoid this kind of analysis just to guess the time. In the end we want to train ourselves to be able to rely on the accuracy of our internal clock.

3) Play with your timer.
There’s one in your cellphone right? When you have nothing to do, play with it. Set it at 1 minute, and without counting the seconds in your mind, try to guess when will your 1 minute will be up. Maybe do a 10 seconds countdown.

With practice, you will be able to tell without looking at your watch, how long is 1 minute.

Advantages of a trained internal clock:

• You will be able to wake up anytime you want.
• You will be able to take power nap (5 minutes nap that will energize you back).
• No more waking up at random hours.
• You will appreciate the time you have better.
• A giant leap in your time management skill.
• A more discipline you.
• You can now sell your watch.

Conclusion – I truly believe there’s so much more mystery of our body that we still haven’t figure out. By doing this exercise, hopefully we will be one step closer to better understanding them.

– I wonder –
Do you believe in internal clock? When is your last time waking up exactly at the time you wanted?

———– Personal Note ———-
When I was a child, I was told that ghost will appear every night at 2 am. Thanks to my internal clock, I woke up every night exactly at 2 am. And man, I was so frightened at the time. I thought it was the ghost that woke me up since it is exactly 2 am. 🙂

Of course there are no ghost.

Photo credit – Yves Lorson

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