Speaker 1: Hey guys, I hope all of you are safe and healthy wherever you are. I've been trying to get this video up and recorded and start doing it for the last like three weeks and I have really been unable to motivate myself to get it done, but I just wanted to give you guys three tips on succeeding in online classes. I am now about a month in and truly my week looks a little bit different than my college week in my life video I recently put up. It's been harder to maintain a very strict schedule and so I thought I would give you tips of things that have helped me in the last couple of weeks. So the first thing is to try to schedule yourself very, very flexibly. At the beginning of my time being online on Zoom, I really gave myself a work window during the day where I would only do work from 10 or 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. And I would sit at my desk and do my work all throughout that time, taking breaks to FaceTime, taking breaks to grab lunch with someone in my family in the kitchen, or to sort of just honestly waste time, but I would be consistently working during that period. It's harder to do that, especially now, so I've decided to work smarter instead of harder and torturing myself, forcing myself to stay at my desk. I've been allowing myself the forgiveness of not feeling like I wanted to do a lot that day or allowing myself to do easy work in front of the TV on the couch, which I really never do. I don't usually recommend, but right now, if I just have to run some lab analyses or outline a textbook that I'm very familiar with that I can do while splitting my attention a little bit, I'm willing to do that because I'm enjoying myself more. I'm currently binge-watching White Collar, which is very easy for me to sort of toggle my attention between my work and that, especially when it's kind of easy work. So I've been being more flexible and allowing myself gentleness in that way, and I would recommend the same for you, like work when it is good for you to do so, whether that's late night, during the day, in the morning, you know yourself best. The next thing is to break down the big tasks, but also break down the small tasks. So I've been a huge proponent of this over a very long time, honestly probably since high school, where in my planner I'll write down not only just outline chapter 12, but then put down as subtasks all of the headers of that chapter, all the sections, so that even if I only touch one or two sections that day, I still have things to check off. Checking off things in my planner, crossing things off, X-ing out boxes, like gives me great satisfaction and makes me feel like I'm being very, very productive. And so, if I have all of the broken down tasks on my list, if I can check off even some of them, I feel a lot better about myself and the day's work, rather than just having the big items on there. And when I also have all of these things broken down, it's really easy for me to divide them up very flexibly across several days. So when I have a big chapter due by, say, Tuesday at 3.30, that's when my Psych of Gender lecture is, I will allow myself to start working on that on Saturday. Maybe I'll do a section on Saturday, two sections on Sunday, one on Tuesday, something like that. And I can do a little bit of work every day, rather than sitting, forcing myself to do an entire chapter for three hours, which I cannot do right now. There is no way that's going to happen. I also then break down the big tasks. So at this point, I am nearing my final exam period, so I can fit all of my really big to-do list items onto one notepad sheet. This is a knock-knock stationery notebook. And I just have everything sort of brain-dumped onto here, and it's easy for me to see big picture what I have coming up, and all of the things that come with those larger tasks. So I can then break that down into my planner if I need to. And that's been really helpful in deciding how I need to get things done that works best for me. The last thing I would say is if you are super unmotivated or if you're procrastinating on some big assignment or studying for a large exam or test or what have you, I would say use something I call the five-minute rule or the ten-minute rule. So what I do for myself when I especially don't want to do anything productive is that I commit to working on said task for ten minutes. Say it's like 3 p.m., I will say, okay, I'm going to work on this philosophy paper until 3.10, and then I can be done if I want to. Odds are I usually work a little bit past that time limit I give myself because I've hit a writing groove, I want to move on to another point or flesh out a point that I was working on or whatever. And I get a lot more done than if I were to just sit and like stare at the clock and dread having to do it, text friends, whatever. And if you do finish at 3.10 and decide, okay, that's it, I did my ten minutes, you've done the hardest part, which would be to start doing the work for the day. And as simple as that sounds, it helps me a ton. I hope that helps you guys. So just to recap the three things that I think will help in succeeding with online classes right now is to, one, schedule yourself very flexibly and give yourself forgiveness if you don't adhere to a schedule, two, break down the big things and the small things, and three, follow the ten-minute rule if you have something that you're procrastinating on. I didn't really want to give you guys the typical sort of advice of have a study space and eliminate your distractions because I think most people know to do that. Instead, I just wanted to give you guys tips that have been helping me in this very difficult time to navigate academic work. It's been really, really stressful and hard for me to do my work, so I can't imagine that it would be the same for you guys. So I hope this was helpful, and I will talk to you in my next one. Bye, guys.