Colored Tabs

It’s finals week isn’t it? Crap.

Alright, more than crap. You’ve put off all the things you have to do till the last minute, have altered your sleep schedule and now you are sitting there, feeling like you really just want a beer and sleep. Maybe just the sleep.

We all know that the best laid plans seldom work out. That’s normal. Everyone paves their road to hell with study plans, and binders, PDAs and calendars. Nothing works 100% of the time and we all feel the crunch.

As for the “health tips”? I think enough of us have put ourselves in the hospital or at least in a caffeine induced daze to have seen the following once or twice before.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/brain-food-eat-for-productivity.html

http://esc.calumet.purdue.edu/athletic/wellness_portal/index.asp?pageType=3&pageContent=VIEW_FAQ&FAQID=3

So now that you’re reading this, basically just putting of MORE of your homework/study time, I can try to start touching on what may help you. It’s too late to eat right, too late to plan ahead. So grab an orange, pull the water out, and try these five things.

1) If you don’t know it now, don’t bother.

Cramming is going to do nothing but stress you. Yeah, it is. You’re trying to optimize what you do know, not half ass the whole thing. Seriously, if it’s a comprehensive final, how much is one section going to hurt you? Rule of averages.

2) Walk away from the computer.

Do I need to tell you this? Make some flash cards, yo. Trust me.

3) Space out your subjects, review in spurts

I mean spend less than one hour with each topic. Then every few hours review. Use your note cards.

4) While I am on spacing, space out your energy drinks

DO NOT drink 4 red bulls in a row. Drink one and then wait about 30 minutes. It’s a drug, give it time to work and don’t let it all hit you at once. Drink a lot of water and juice. GATORADE IS YOUR FRIEND.

5) Don’t second guess.

You care enough to want to pass. Trust yourself.

Hey, don’t worry too much, there’s always next semester.

Starting Monday, it’s “Dead Week” for me. There’s been much debate as to why it was called that, either be it because there’s no tests supposed to happen during the week so people can study for finals, or because that rule doesn’t apply to projects, quizzes, or other forms of torture that professors can inflict on hapless students.

I’ve always hated the end of the semester, which was always the time I felt most like a stereotypical student. A victim of the stress and binge.

At first, I wondered if this was because I was unorganized, had gotten too comfortable in the semester. So I started doing things earlier, kept a better eye on long term projects. No avail. I still found myself sleepless and running around like crazy during the last three weeks. So I figured it was the professors, trying to see if they could crack me before I was free of their grip.

Then I learned it was a bit of both.

(more…)

For my online classes, spring semester just recently started. For some reason, I decided that taking a full twelve credits on top of working full time would be a good idea. Luckily, none of them look particularly complicated - I’m taking intros and basic general education requirements right now - and I think some basic time management will get me through.

The challenge with online classes is not just that I’m totally responsible for my attendance and due dates, but that many online classes require more attention than traditional classes. For example, one of my professors suggests that I visit the class discussion board at least four times a week! Very few college courses would require that kind of daily commitment.

These classes also require a lot more teamwork than one would generally expect from, say, a college math course. During the mini-term I spent a lot of time covering for teammates who couldn’t be bothered to do anything. I hope this is better during the full length terms.

All of this means I need to keep my courses in the front of my consciousness every day - without letting them take over either my work or my personal time. My trick is to place a large number of course-related triggers in my to-do list. Homework and quizzes show up on the day before they’re due, but “check discussion board” items appear almost daily. They keep me from forgetting to follow up once I’ve made my initial post, or from forgetting to post at all until the last day.

It may make my to-do list a lot longer, but it also means I can forget about discussion boards and teamwork projects when I’m not actively engaged in them, freeing up valuable time for my brain to worry about other things, like global warming and how bad the G.I. Joe movie is going to be.

Reading this post on Unclutterer and thinking about panel ideas for an upcoming con, it occurred to me that there are certain aspects of uncluttering that just plain need to be approached for a lot of geeks, especially the sci-fi/comic book/fantasy type (rather than those who are purely into tech). There’s lots of talk about organizing fifty different computer peripherals, but very little discussion about what to do with ten years worth of comic book longboxes, two rooms full of books, or a complete collection of vintage GI Joes.

I haven’t decided yet what a discussion like this would need to cover, but I’m thinking about it. Any ideas?

Not too long ago I read a very interesting book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience which basically brought interesting study-based insights into how I operate. Well, how a lot of people do, but I had always wondered why simply sitting and channel-surfing always left me feeling tired and other such passive activities. While reading, something else considered somewhat passive, always left me energized.

Turns out my finicky behavior in regards to my things naturally stems from finicky behavior in regards to my mental state. That is, I really don’t deal well with mental entropy.

Since it’s approaching the end of my semester and thus doom, I have found myself in a state of mental entropy more than I’d like to be in, to great detriment. Especially considering I have one class that relies on memorization heavily, something which I’ve never been good at. I find myself noticing that I’m “spacing out more” and generally having to write things down to remind myself to write things down.

All in all, it’s been an unpleasant week, to say the least.

The biggest problem with entropy is when you notice it, it only gets worse and breeds more entropy. As much as anyone would like to say that they have things under control–they don’t. At best we just have a good response to the chaos around us, little ways to assert a small bit of control over certain areas. Which is likely to turn all philosophical and next thing you know, you’re pulling out some Cartesian Doubt and you sound like a looney.

So far the only thing I’ve found that can soothe states of mental entropy is that, when I have the time, I sit and focus on one very menial task. Like dusting. Or sewing a button onto something. It’s only a temporary fix, but it sure helps me to remember that I am not simply a toy of wicked evil Fates or something.

Funny how a lot of the things stated in the Flow book are related to a lot of Eastern philosophy, only with different goals. Flow is based on achieving a form of control, while a lot of Eastern thought is about losing it.

Maybe it’s time to switch tactics and give into the universe a little? Naw.

We’re coming up on a big deadline at work, and I’ve noticed that the closer we are to panic time, the more of a mess my desk seems to be. And yes, as a consequence, I tend to spend more time hunting for files than I should.

Of course, there seems to come a point on every project where putting things away and taking them out again is more annoying than leaving them on the desk is, but this isn’t just about access. This is mostly about me being too tired to want to put them away at the end of my work day.

Yes, I know, lazy.

The problem is that I am a visual cues kind of person. When I need to do something unusual with a file, I leave it somewhere I’ll see it, which will remind me to do it when I have some free time (unless, of course, I’m working on a blog post). The problem is that files tend to pile up, and then my brain starts blocking them out and I don’t take care of any of them.

Oops.

The obvious solution is to stop being lazy and also to use a to-do list instead of visual cues. I’ve switched to a Remember the Milk-based system in my personal and school life, but to-dos seem to come so fast during the day that I can’t make myself use the website. I’m going to try both paper and Outlook-based lists (don’t laugh; Outlook is required by the office) and see which works better. If anything works, I’ll keep you updated.

I’ve always been a Spring Cleaner.

Partly due to the fact that winter is so much more pronounced where I live, but mostly due to the fact that I’ve never been good at cleaning regularly. This year I managed not to have the cluttered nesting problem so much, but then, I didn’t bring as much stuff to my dorm room as I had some years.

Doesn’t mean I don’t still have a lot of work to do.

My problem areas are my storage places. I come from a long line of severe hoarders, so it takes a lot of focus for me to throw things away. I’ve narrowed down specifically “nostalgia” items to a shoebox. Whoo!

I usually start with my clothes, because they have the biggest tendency to pile up. Relatives have a tendency of getting me things that are too huge (my mom especially) which I just shove in the back of my closet so as not to offend them. Then I get to the items I had hid away from Christmas that were, well, awful.

Honestly, who hasn’t gotten some horrible knick-knack given to them “out of love”?

I always leave papers and drawers for last, because a lot of that contains “useful” items. And I have the hardest time deciding whether or not to let something go. I’m big on recycling and reusing, so I rarely actually throw anything in the trash. In the recycle or donation bins? All the time. But I know I won’t reuse everything and have to at least get it out of my room.

But there’s another purpose to the Spring Cleaning other than controlling the amount of crap that builds up despite best intentions. And it’s for introspection. I read somewhere that you can tell more about a person by looking at their rooms than by asking their friends about them–and who better to know the significance of something than yourself? Likely you’re going to be the only one that will see why you kept that certain ticket stub or that cigar case.

Habits and hoarding and possessions are all a part of a person’s psychological makeup. But every now and then we could use a little dusting in our minds.

For instance, the first thing I did after a particularly traumatic year was purge. Got things associated with those memories out of my sight. Cleaned the smells out of the clothes, threw out the more potent reminders. Then I opened up a bunch of boxes I had put in storage from way before, got a glimpse at myself before I got all mixed up.

I guess what I’m advocating is keeping a box, at least. Something out of sight until you go and clean everything. You may find yourself throwing some things away, but at least they’re there for a little while. And others can get tucked back in until the next big purge.

It’s just a matter of keeping it from getting out of hand, is all. And actually throwing something away.

I don’t ask for much. Some brightly-colored post-its. Some index cards. Maybe a few highlighters. My closet shelf is neatly stacked with magazine holders and storage boxes.

But sometimes I dream of more. I imagine that there’s a complete organization system out there that will finally allow me to find anything I need in my room without any effort on my part. Most of the time, I know it doesn’t exist, but sometimes I dream.

And sometimes reality encourages me: The Container Store is opening a branch in my metro area this year.

Part of me is tempted to look at that and say “oh, there’s no point in worrying about it until the Container Store opens and I can buy the perfect art or paper storage box, but that’s a cop-out. My collage paper fits perfectly fine in an oversized shoebox, I just need to remember to put it away when I’m done working.

The art of getting and staying organized has very little to do with my choice of boxes - though I like the ones I’ve chosen. It’s about actually sorting things. Going to the effort of putting things away. Throwing out things I don’t need. Making the effort is more important than buying the boxes.

Though come the grand opening, you’ll probably find me out there buying the boxes anyway.

I am a bad bad student.

Maybe it was all those years of being able to get by on the fact I am a world class guesser, but it made me very lazy about studying and otherwise being able to discipline myself in regards to schooling. While some people can still get away with this, I hit a sort of brick wall the instant I got to college and classes that required a little more than my diverse, but limited, general knowledge.

I have finally found a fantastic method for myself that allows me to actually retain information. And all I needed was to start using the highlighters and colored tabs I had collecting dust in a drawer.

This worked best for my history class, which is the type of class that really can’t be taught by anything other than lectures and reading. The main problem with this type of class is a lot of information goes in, but a lot of it needs to be filtered. In a way, I had to learn how to declutter the information I was receiving. Since I am not super disciplined, I had to do this twofold. So here was the first set of filters.

1. Write notes in outline format (I type my notes, simply because I type faster than write)
2. Keep notes in separate text files by date
3. Only do the readings in segments related to their assignment
4. Add a colored tag of the same color at the beginning of each segment

The third point was especially important, since I’m a fast reader and everything tends to jumble together if I don’t watch it. The fourth point is really only beneficial in that I used one color of a tag for every segment pertaining to a single test. That way when I needed to know which material was going to be on the next test, I could easily flip to it.

After sorting things as they came in, I was left with the processing part, otherwise known as studying. Most people will tell you that you need to study as you go, sometimes going to the extreme that you need to be reading something from a class every day. Personally, I find this tiring, and as some things have different deadlines, I fall behind that kind of schedule quickly.

So, I start about a week before an exam processing through all the information. I count listening in class and keeping up with the reading assignments as an initial pass through, and the actual studying as something far more in depth. But even this had a sort of process to it.

1. Put all note files into one file and print it off (since I put the date at the top of all of them, this wasn’t disorganized)
2. Go through notes and highlight all important names in one color
3. Repeat this with locations, concepts, dates, each in their own separate color
4. Then actually read through the notes
5. Do this with reading materials, only more liberally

The first point is a necessity for me, because computers distract me easily when I need to focus. Can’t check email if there’s no email on a paper. For the most part, studying should be as low tech as possible. Points two and three were especially useful in that it helped distinguish certain important things; names didn’t get mixed up with locations, dates stood out, etc. For instance, I used a purple highlighter to indicate locations. When I got to point four, actually reading through it, the idea of locations being associated with purple stuck in my brain. Turning to the reading, I skimmed more, because it was less of an emphasis in the class. Not only that, the readings are always more dense than notes. So, only the first time a name appeared, unless it was connected with say, an invention in that paragraph was highlighted.

Using different colors also helped it from turning into the wall of yellow that is a mistake a lot of younger students I see make. Like the girl next to me in class, who used the same orange highlighter for everything.  The point about a good study method is to filter out the noise and try to filter to the types of facts you’ll be tested on. Because no matter how much they will tell you that you need to know everything in a class, they can’t possibly test you on all that. If you pay enough attention during class or when people ask questions before the exam, you will notice which things the professor finds important.

So go ahead and splurge for multiple colored highlighters and those neat flag thingies. Just make sure you use them appropriately.

Leo at Zen Habits has a post on dropping RSS feeds. He discusses how he cut his 100 or so RSS feeds (which he spent an hour a day reading) down to a more manageable sixteen. Quite a leap. In his article, he outlines a ruthless system for minimizing the time spent on feeds every day.

For him, that may have been a necessary leap. But the article suggested readers take a look at their own feeds, so I did just that. According to Google Reader, I followed 175 feeds when I finished reading this article. Of those, maybe fifty update daily or more than daily. Maybe another twenty update on a regular schedule, two or three times a week. The rest are weekly or even less frequent.

One of his suggestions is to cut infrequent blogs. This was a bit of advice that I personally am going to put aside. To me, infrequent blogs are content that I enjoy that don’t take much of my time precisely because they rarely make demands on it – and yet, unlike an infrequently updated website, I don’t have to remember to come back to them and look for new content.

In the comments of the post, Leo mentions that part of the value for him in reducing his feeds is the sheer joy he feels from looking at a list that he’s whittled down that much. I suppose I can see how someone might feel that kind of joy, but I think that’s the difference between me and someone who’s a genuine productivity porn enthusiast – I find the techniques interesting, but I derive no inherent joy from having less of something. Less work, less worry, those are benefits of organization for me. Just plain less, or fewer enjoyable things, doesn’t have the same appeal.

I think that sort of near-fetishization in organization or productivity is a distant cousin of the “attachment to non-attachment” that sometimes crops up in enthusiastic Buddhists (and the related truism that new converts to almost any religion are often among the loudest and most obnoxious adherents). There’s a Buddhist tale about a monk who came to a river and needed to cross it, but there was no crossing for many miles. He built a raft out of the materials around him, and made his way across the river. When he got to the other side he left the raft there. He didn’t forget that the raft was a tool to get him over a specific hurdle.

So I’m keeping my infrequent feeds, and my comic strips, and my friends, and basically all the feeds I enjoy reading. I did remove a handful that I realized I was mostly skipping over… ironically, mostly productivity blogs or blogs about blogging. If you find you have more feeds than you have time to read them, you might also find his article helpful.