productivity

How to pay attention in lectures

Lectures can get the better of you, no matter how much you want to pay attention. Actually, wait…No matter how much you need to pay attention.

Yes, at times it can feel like so much hangs on the lecture, but you still can’t manage to keep focus on the words.

photo by Tadeeej

Okay, so lectures aren’t quite that important (I’ll come back to that in my last point). Still, it’s useful to pay attention to them, whether or not you think they’re the best way to learn about a topic.

Here are my tips to stay switched on and in tune with your lecturer for an hour or two:

Get rid of disruptions

It’s easy to be distracted when something more enjoyable is there to entertain you. Commit to a move away from temptations. Switch off those moreish phone apps, ignore your social networks, and even move away from your mates if they take up too much of your attention in lectures. Whenever temptation is still within your grasp, you’re more likely to reach out and grab it.

Prepare beforehand

Ten minutes is all it takes to have a quick look online for a basic rundown of what you’ll probably encounter in the lecture. The lecture may end up being different, but your preparation will get you thinking about the subject in advance and help you focus on the content when you get in there.

Hopefully you’ll have a list of prior reading, handouts, and other information for you to prepare from. Once you start working with the subject matter, you’ll be less likely to switch off in the lecture.

Eat and drink wisely

If you attend a lecture too full or too hungry, you’ll suffer for it. No matter how busy you feel, find time to get the nutrients you need. Listen to your body and you’ll have a better job listening to your lecture.

Engage in your head

When you don’t get it, your brain can start to switch off. Don’t let it! Note what confuses you, write down questions you have, think whether this part of the lecture is crucial to understanding everything else.

If you’re just bored at a certain point, make sure you note the basic idea/concept down for later so you don’t miss out completely.

Get comfy!

Dress so you’re not too hot or cold in the lecture theatre. If you need to wear more/less outside, prepare for that instead of suffering in the lecture!

What if the seating arrangements are uncomfortable? Bring something to sit on, or find a different seat, or take less stuff with you, and so on. Your surroundings may not be the first thing you consider when it comes to lectures, but it can make a big difference to your attention.

Record the audio on your phone/music player/dictaphone

This should be done for your own personal use only and, even then, you should probably ask the lecturer in advance if they are happy for you to record their lectures (if they aren’t already recorded for you!). I don’t recommend this method as a regular thing, because you can get caught up in listening to the lectures more than doing your own work. Use as a failsafe only.

If you do, you can listen again at higher speeds on an iPhone or software like Windows Media Player and VLC Media Player. I used to listen at 1.4-1.7 times the speed and now frequently listen to podcasts and lecture recordings at 2 times the speed. An hour long lecture in half the time? Yes please!

Focus on your own thoughts rather than the monotonous voice

No matter how interesting the topic, a monotone can send you to sleep. I found the best way to stay awake was to think about my own reactions to what was being said in the lecture. I reframed each sentence or idea in my head so it felt like I was doing a lot of the talking.

That way, I felt more in control of my own focus. If the subject was boring that was one thing, but some topics suffered more from the voice than the content. At these times, focus as if you’re in control, like when you’re reading a book or doing private research.

This took a bit of practice and it did mean I might miss a bit as I went along, but it’s better than missing the whole lecture!

photo by arctanx.tk

Relax or take a nap before the lecture

We all need time to relax, to wind down, and to find calm. I love powernaps and it’s worth finding out how much time works for you. We’re all different, meaning I like about 18 minutes and you may prefer 15 or 20. It’s worth finding your personal sweet spot. Many of the people I’ve spoken to who didn’t think powernaps worked for them found that they worked a lot better when they found the right length of nap for them.

If you don’t want to nap, it’s still worth taking time out to relax. As a recent Mind/Shift article on mindfulness states:

“Recent brain imaging studies reveal that sections of our brains are highly active during down time. This has led scientists to imply that moments of not-doing are critical for connecting and synthesizing new information, ideas and experiences. Dr. Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School put it this way in a 2010 New York Times article: ‘Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body.'”

The lecture isn’t *that* important

If you’re worried that you need to hang on every last word of a lecture, your stress levels are bound to shoot up and your concentration levels drop to the floor. Lectures help to frame a topic, make you aware of debates, and give you some of the academic nuts and bolts on your learning journey. Lectures are not for rote learning, even if there is a necessary element of it in some sessions. You are unlikely to fail miserably for missing a single, crucial point in a lecture. If it’s so important, the information will be elsewhere and will likely be repeated again.

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Some lectures are a slog, no matter what you try. Don’t beat yourself up about that. If it’s all too much, try to understand why. If it’s down to something you can change, try to make that change for next time. If it’s out of your control, either let it go or speak to someone who can help deal with the issue.

How do you cope with difficult lectures? What is the worst you’ve had to endure as you tried desperately to stay focused?

Expansive Learning Is Your Friend

You live and learn. Or so the saying goes.

When you finish a course module, do you put it behind you, or do you keep hold of the ideas, knowledge and possibilities that you built up over that time?

Unlike at school, your degree gives you more opportunity to take a holistic approach to learning. A discovery in one area of work can change your perceptions in other areas.

Make use of multiple connections as you learn (photo by identity chris is)

At university, you must take knowledge as a whole. The bigger picture matters. What you learn in one class may be relevant to another class. What you discovered in the first year is still often relevant in the second year and beyond.

Joelle Fanghanel quoted an academic in her book, Being An Academic, suggesting that compartments of learning are worryingly favoured over the expansion of knowledge as a whole:

“If you ask [students] a question which perhaps involves some knowledge that they have learnt in some other part of the course, they get indignant with us saying ‘well we haven’t done that with you, we have done that with somebody else in a different course’…There is very much this feeling that you do the work, you are tested, and that’s the end of it, you close the door on that piece of work.” [p.56]

Rather than close doors, make your bigger picture even bigger:

Use links to your advantage – The academic above stated that students can get annoyed when they find or discuss a link between one course and another. Instead, see it as a gift. Links like this help you not only strengthen the bonds between different strands of knowledge, but also build upon what you already knew in one easy step.
Keep your notes and quotes – Over the years, you’re expected to search deeper in your field of study. By ignoring your past work, you risk having to remind yourself further down the line. Worse, you may even be starting from scratch for no reason. I used to resent the need to study Milton’s Paradise Lost on about four occasions at school and uni, because I didn’t enjoy it much. But by the final time I was working on it, I realised how much reading and research I had already done on it. As a consequence, I made much better use of my time and past work than before. It saved me a lot of time and bother.
Take your own initiative – So what if you weren’t told about something in class itself? If you’ve stumbled across it in a different tutor’s lecture, let it add to your overall learning. Use your initiative and make the reference where you see fit. It’s no different to doing your own research in books. Treat all your discoveries as equally relevant, however you found them.

There will be times when you spot links that make you shout “Of course!” (not always literally…) and realise that your life has been made so much easier because of it.

Keep your mind open to expansive learning and you should get many more of these “Of course!” moments coming your way.

original photo by farleyj

Manage the Noise – 6 Easy Ways to Plug In Better.

Where we’ve improved in communication and information, we’ve suffered in lost time and overload.

If the coming years are set to be a boom for curators of information, how can you strike a balance between drinking from a firehose and switching off the flow completely?

photo by bartmaguire

The Atlantic provides some ideas on how to plug in better, and there’s plenty more you can do to use your time productively and access huge amounts of noise at the same time. Here are some of the things I’ve learned to do over the years.

Six Ways to Plug In Better

Prioritise accurately – Recognise social networks as a true time sink. If it’s on in the background, or constantly causing you to check your phone, it’s taking up more time and attention than you think. In many cases, that’s fine. In some cases, you need to shut down or find a way to tune in to a more limited feed of information.
Know when to shut down – I used to repeat the phrase “know when to stop” a while back. It was to remind myself that time is precious. You may be wonderful at time-management, but that doesn’t mean you know when to stop. The constant flow of information coming your way is easily switched off, but it’s not so easy to make that conscious choice to shut it down.
You rarely need to hear something at the first possible moment. You may want to, but that’s a whole different matter. Also, when a big event takes over, you’re unlikely to miss it completely. I regularly take days at a time away from online activity, but the world still goes on without problem. And I return without problem too. Nothing is damaged, no harm is done.
To some online gurus, leaving the scene is a cardinal sin. Why not schedule something in advance? Why not make a big deal about your downtime? Why not find a way to not have any downtime at all?
I prefer not to follow advice that doesn’t gel with the bigger picture. When my circumstances change, the bigger picture may change and I may follow different advice. So I’m listening to what makes sense in my own personal circumstances. With a bit of listening, it becomes clear when it’s wise to shut down and when it’s best to log back on.
Don’t read everything – Some people complain when they’re following more than a hundred RSS news feeds. Some people complain when they’re keeping up with more than a couple hundred users on Twitter. Some people complain when they’re catching up with several hundred friends on Facebook.
But how much of it is important? Chances are, most of what you read won’t make a difference to you. You need to be brutal and bypass a lot of the content out there. Either flick through your updates and develop a focused mind (no more cute kitten vids and hilarious TV ads will disturb you now, uh-huh!) or select the items you want to spend more time on and save them for later consumption.
Don’t fall for ‘in the moment’ – When you save stuff to look at later, you may not be the first person to comment on every last detail. You may have to miss out on making a really clever remark within five seconds of someone writing a status update. I always feel sad when I miss saying something amusing in the moment, but I remind myself that I find loads of other times to do it. You can’t be everywhere all the time. Not everything will work out how you want it, and you have to get used to that (which takes a bit of practice, but isn’t difficult in itself). Once you get over this, you’ll find it much easier to turn off the feeds when you need. And you’ll find it much easier to catch up too.
Scan for what’s important now, what you’ll save for later, and what might entertain you – Everything else can go out the window. If you’re unsure about something, save it for later or take a quick peek to decide one way or another. That’s a quick peek, not reading half an article! The important stuff comes first, the stuff for later comes whenever you get spare time (including never), and the stuff that might entertain you can be for your breaks and downtime when you want something else to do. Because breaks are important!
Use the time you’ve got rather than finding more and more time to sort – When I’m away for a few days, or something urgent crashes in to my schedule, I may come back to A LOT of catching up. After all, I subscribe to hundreds of blogs, I follow thousands of people on Twitter, and I’m using loads of other services more too (like Google+, LinkedIn, Scoop It, and so on).
A lot of the catching up isn’t necessary, so I work on what I should be aware of. For instance, I have a Twitter list of essential accounts to check back on for the last day or so, I have selected a few RSS feeds that need reading and a few busy RSS feeds that I can ignore without even checking, and I keep a scratchpad to make brief notes rather than trying to put something major together (that can wait, but I don’t want to lose any ideas).

I’m still learning and I doubt I’ll ever stop. So let me know what works for you when you plug in to the great firehose of noise in your life.

Last-minute Essays: Should you REALLY be pulling an all-nighter?

In the early days of TheUniversityBlog, I wrote a popular piece about pulling all-nighters and writing essays at the last possible minute. And I wasn’t very complimentary about the process.

To see my friends in a fiddle and my peers in a panic was frustrating, because some of them clearly didn’t respond well to this regular ritual.

The one time I didn’t focus enough until it was too late…was my dissertation. Yes, I know, it annoyed me at the time too. Even worse, I’d been enjoying the research and writing at first and then simply stopped doing enough to make the project as scholarly (and awesome) as I could have done. Sucked to be me. 😉

So I knew that the last-minute wasn’t for me. By all means get close, but never get TOO close.

But can the all-nighter essay work for some students? Is it really the best way to get the right words flowing?

Rachel Toor, an assistant professor of creative writing, says this:

“What I’ve learned about writing and intellectual work is that there’s no right way to get things done, no ritual or routine that is effective unless it’s effective for you…If the products are coming out in ways that you’re not happy with, by all means, try to make a change in your work style. But…if you need the guillotine hanging over you to get that paper done, let it dangle. There’s no “right” way.”

My personal preference is to use the time given and aim to finish with time to spare if necessary. More often than not, it’s not necessary. I’ll set my own deadline in advance of the actual requirement, so I’m not tempted to run over for some reason.

I do it this way because I prefer to work when it suits me, often in small doses. It depends what I’m working on, but I generally feel comfortable, so see no reason to change.

And that’s the big deal. I see no reason to change.

Just as Rachel Toor explains, pulling an all-nighter is fine if that’s what makes you tick.

Unfortunately, I get the impression that it’s not what makes many last-minuters tick. It’s just what they’ve got used to.

I recommend you to do a little experiment to find out whether or not there’s another way for you. A better way. Take the time to work on a few assignments earlier than usual. Mix things up and see what happens when you spend more time on an essay.

If the slow approach doesn’t work for you, I have another thought. Pull an all-nighter and finish your assignment the way you normally would. But do it a week or two before the real deadline. Treat it seriously and do it as if there will be no more time left after this night. That may be hard to believe, but give it a go.

Because once you’ve got your last-minute attempt, you’ll still have time to revisit it in a couple of days and see if you truly think it’s the best darn paper you could possibly hand in.

Make an effort to explore new ways, rather than doing it once and not bothering again. Toor suggests three months of working differently, but you may be comfortable with something else. Just so long as you take it seriously, otherwise it’s not worth trying in the first place.

After that, if you’re still not convinced, maybe the all-nighter approach is the best way for you after all. The stress, the adrenalin, the pressure…I doubt it works for all the people that experience it, but a few will still find it’s the only way to greatness. In Toor’s words:

“See if it makes your life better. If it doesn’t, then I would say there isn’t a problem. Accept that you are a last-minute person and realize this: Writing is hard, no matter when you do it. Thinking that there’s a better, easier way is just silly.”

The difference will be that you tried and you understood. For others, the difference will be that they tried and they realised the wonders of a somewhat calmer approach. What works for you?

No matter which direction you take, at least you can now be certain!