Opinion Sur Joven

There are two basic ways of suffering university and, at worst, they can combine.
- I can’t make progresses in my studies: I can’t pass all subjects.
- I can pass all subjects, but to make it I have to stop living:

I sleep five hours a day and work for eight, and I also try to study: my head’s constantly about to explode. Whether I go out on weekends or pass the exams; I can’t have both. Whenever I’m with my girlfriend or my friends, I’m always thinking about all the things I should be doing and am not, and I just can’t enjoy the moment. I can’t even sit down and [insert your own hobby here] because I feel like I should be studying, so I feel miserable.

If any of these situations sound familiar to you, if you have to deal everyday with any of them, then you have a problem. Luckily, problems have solutions. Let’s see some ideas to solve them: follow me to the terrace.

At the rooftop

Let’s imagine your life is a terrace with plants. Can you picture it? You are in the middle of a terrace holding a watering can, surrounded by lots of plants of different sizes.

The water in your can is a mix of your available energy, concentration and time. The plants are the different aspects of your life: friendship, studies, work, fun, personal growth, and so on.

We’d all surely love to have enough water for all the plants, but this is generally impossible. So we have a few choices: having fewer plants, getting more water or (incredibly somehow!) reduce the amount of water the plants need to be healthy.

The example sounds very simple, right? Let’s see how we can implement each of these options in our lives.

Having a girlfriend, passing an exam, developing a project, having a group of friends: all of our plants are different projects and each of them takes its own time, requirements and dynamics.

But they have something in common: if we give them less of what they need, if we don’t dedicate enough time, energy and concentration to them, problems won’t take long to appear. So what do we do to be productive and enjoy? How can we generate that energy surplus present in the moments we feel alive? Let’s see our choices.

Having fewer plants

As the popular saying goes, don’t bite off more than you can chew. At the beginning (we’ll see later on) we have a certain amount of energy, concentration and time. And one of the most common factors in cases of university suffering consists in systematically committing -to others and ourselves- to watering more plants than those we can actually keep alive.

To have enough energy for each activity, we must learn to eliminate the unnecessary; in other words, we must learn to set priorities.

Hundreds of books have been written on how to prioritize, with solutions ranging from the use of complicated systems to Eastern techniques.

I believe setting priorities consists in only one thing: being honest with ourselves. What of all the things your day consists in are truly vital to you? Answering this question is hard and it’s necessary that you sit down and answer this honestly upon each action: Why am I doing this?

Answering it takes a lot of sincerity and courage to take the following step: ending a relationship that exists out of habit, abandoning a major we don’t like, forgetting the impossible goal of passing all the exams we’re supposed to pass… These aren’t easy-to-take decisions, but they let our lives be the way we want and not the way others want them to be.

Apply this method with honesty for a month and you’ll see how the water in the can starts to be more than enough. We only have one life: let’s use for the things that really matter.

Getting more water

How can we optimize the available energy to get things done? Eating and sleeping well are both essential. Explaining further these items isn’t the aim of this article, and there are no universal formulas either. But we might as well analyze whether the way we’re dealing with those aspects of our lives can be improved. For instance, studying after lunch is quite useless because all the blood in our bodies is working on the digestion process, so it doesn’t pay much attention to our brains. We must investigate the way we sleep and eat by trial and error, in order to increase our productivity.

Another factor college students tend to forget after the first semesters is enthusiasm. Any task is performed more pleasantly, effectively and faster if we do it with enthusiasm. What are the things you like about your major? Why did you choose it? Taking some time to think about these questions is very useful; it brings back the original emotion that made us start studying what we study: enthusiasm may lead you to sky-high productivity.

Less water?

This is what’s usually referred to as “performance”: it consists in getting better results using less energy and time.

There are techniques based on the way our brain, our motivation and our emotional structure work, which allow accomplishing more by using less study time.

These techniques are analyzed by the author of this article at the blog Estudio Vivo (in Spanish only). Here are some of the ideas.

Study for short periods: It has been proved that, if we have three available hours to study, it’s better if we stop every half an hour. We could do it before or after, but the important thing is that you switch off and get back to studying after a while. It works. A lot.Go out, play, have fun, live: Doing things with a different rhythm than when you’re studying allows your brain to process things unconsciously and solve problems faster. Do you remember ever being unable to solve something, burning yourself out to the point of hating the problem and then going out for a walk, a swim or just being in the shower and suddenly finding the answer?

Know thy professor: The faster you find out whether a professor is willing to teach properly or not, the faster you’ll set up your strategy to pass the exams. Asking questions saves time spent on useless searches. Don’t be afraid of getting rid of all your doubts with your professor instead of being clueless at home.

Learn instead of studying: It sounds silly, but this is the most important piece of advice I can give you. The people who think what they do is easy probably do it with a lot of pleasure. Learn to enjoy what you do and you’ll see how your performance will be much better than you think it could. You’ll have very little to study.

These are some of the techniques to help us use less water for the same amount of plants. I invite you to see some more tips on my blog, “10 ideas para mejorar tu rendimiento en el studio” (Ten Ideas to Improve your Study Performance) (in Spanish only).

To sum up, I’d like to point out that the three aspects I’ve mentioned in this article are interrelated: this means that improving one of the aspects makes it easier to improve the others, and viceversa!

If I decide to drop one subject to slow down, I have more time to decide whether the work I’m doing is right for this moment in my life or not. But if I can’t manage to solve a personal problem and I don’t take the necessary time to do it, having a good study performance will probably be much harder.