In light of recent events, I must stay home for an indefinite period of time.
Usually, staying home would be a dream come true.
For one, it means being more comfortable.
(You can try to make a home out of a dorm room, but is it ever really successful?)
Secondly, being home meant not being on campus. Don’t get me wrong, Wesleyan provided numerous resources—friends, education, and a job, for example— but being on campus sometimes feels like being in a bubble.
One giant New England liberal arts 360-acre-sized bubble.
Home has a bigger mattress, better snacks, and a flat-screen smart TV, but they all paled in comparison to my struggle to stay focused while working at home.
For one, I got distracted by things like television and social media, which proved more entertaining than problem sets and essays. Whenever I researched something for an assignment, clicking on link after link before I resulted in me watching a bunch of funny videos on YouTube.
If I wasn’t distracted by the Internet, I procrastinated. I’d be working on one assignment, then stop because I worried I wasn’t spending enough time on another.
I would just sit there, spending more time overthinking than getting anything done.
Last, but not least, staying focused at home was hard simply because I was at home.
I lived about 45 minutes from Wesleyan, yet being present on campus meant proximity to libraries and office hours. The closer I was to resources, the more likely I was to use them.
Furthermore, being home affected my productivity because I was distanced from campus chaos.
At Wesleyan, it felt like 90% of my life was spent doing work without much room for leisure and rest. If I did want to rest or pursue a hobby, I felt guilty for not working, even if it was past midnight and I had to wake up for an 8:50 AM class.
Not to mention, the ubiquitous existence of competition between students and their peers.
They say the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.
After I noticed my struggle to stay focused, I came up with some solutions that I still use today:
- Cut off any potential distractions from my workspace.
I use an app on my phone called Tide that contains a timer modeled after the Pomodoro technique of productivity. Developed in the 1980s by an Italian consultant named Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro—which is Italian for ‘tomato’, by the way!—technique entails working for periods of 25 minutes and taking breaks in between.
(Here’s some more information about the Pomodoro technique.)
When I use the Pomodoro method, I feel a lot more focused than I do when trying to work for longer periods of time. I achieve a greater sense of balance between work and play.
I also like to use a Google Chrome extension called Block Site that blocks access to certain websites for a period of time—either permanently or on a user-specified schedule—which makes it harder to go on sites that pose a distraction.
I always listen to music while I work, but music with lyrics poses a distraction when I sing along in my head.
How do I combat this? Easy: I listen to only instrumental music.
Some people recommend classical music, but I prefer lo-fi hip hop, a genre that is played on YouTube videos such as the 24/7 live stream below.
Last, but most definitely not least, my final strategy was:
- Be patiently productive.
Instead of procrastinating over assignments, I remind myself that everything will be done in due time.
My work mantra was “one section at a time, one step at a time.”
Rather than worry about what’s not being done, I remember that finishing one assignment at a time is better than finishing none.
Being mandated by the state to stay home may not have been how anyone imagined spending—or, let’s be honest, wanted to spend—their Spring Break semester, but being in my own company made me more cognizant of my unhealthy habits and pushed me to grow and to improve my ways of working.
(featured image credit: @aesullivan2010 via unsplash.)
