In college, you’re given a lot of free time to do what you want. During this given free time, you can choose to be productive with your time or spend your time doing unproductive activities. Sometimes it can be hard to balance these activities to remain productive and still have time to do the things that you enjoy.
My goal for this semester was to be more productive in my free time. I often procrastinate my work and put it off until the last minute until it can’t be put off any longer. I tried to focus on time management skills by tracking my daily activities and planning out my days each week. Being more productive overall will lead to greater success throughout my life and is as skill that can always be improved.
Recently, I read the book Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi. This books main focus is the amount of time that we have for free time is spent on our phone. Our phone is preventing us from experiencing deep thought. Deep thought can lead to innovative new ideas, it allows you to be more creative because your thoughts aren’t being influenced by what you’re looking at on your phone.
Smart phones cause us to never be bored. With our phones, we always have something to entertain our minds. Zomorodi’s main question is, what actually happens to us when we get bored? Has boredom become an extinct human emotion? When your brain gets bored you enter a state that neuroscientist refer to as default mode. When in this default mode it’s the only time your brain can think past the conscious state.
When our brain is in default mode you have the ability to autographical plan. This is a subconscious planning method that incorporates past thoughts and ideas that set a plan for us to achieve our long-term goals. We figure out what path we need to take in order reach our goals. To allow myself to enter default mode to be more productive I used a program I found in my setting that allows you to schedule downtime on your phone that mutes notifications and only allows you to use selected apps. I scheduled this daily from 12pm – 4pm daily.
Zomorodi also discusses how our brain works with multitasking throughout the day. Our brain is only capable of doing one activity at once. For example, if you’re doing your homework and working on two parts of an assignment at once every time you switch between theses assignments your brain in going through a neurochemical switch that switch your attention from one thing to another. So, when your multitasking by doing multiple things at once, you can actually focus on one of those things at a time and it decreases your productivity level.
I’ve been trying this method of not multitasking to work towards my goal of improving my productivity level and I have seen a great deal of success. I realized that a lot of the time I was multitasking was because I didn’t have a set plan in place of what order I was going to do my work in. This is where I began to schedule out my day using a calendar. This greatly helped me focus on one thing at once. For scheduling my day, I used the app Planner Pro that has more features and I found easier to use than the apple calendar.
I relied on my phone heavily in almost all aspects of my life. I thought it wasn’t possible to live without it. I believed that being bored would make me more productive and that has been my goal for this semester. To achieve this, I needed to substantially decrease the amount of time that I used my phone per day. I did this by tracking my daily use in the screen time that you can monitor in settings every week and decrease the amount of time that I spent on my phone. If I didn’t meet that goal then I would limit the amount time that I scheduled myself for free time throughout the week. This motivated me to stay off my phone to allow myself to have more time for myself and be more productive.
I learned many lessons as I read this book and implemented these strategies throughout my semester. I realized that most of the time I’m on my phone I’m doing things that aren’t self-improving. I would recommend doing all three of my tracking strategies to everyone because I saw an improvement in myself and achieved my goal of increasing my productivity. I will continue these strategies throughout my college career and share these strategies with others to try and help them too.