Week 3: Fitting it all in: Balancing Learning and Life. And sleep.

Hello again,

Week 3.  It's been a pretty rough week.  I always knew that holding down a full time job AND engaging in studies was going to be difficult.  Reality didn't disappoint me.

I work 5 days a week, 8 or more hours a day.  The novelty of hitting the books after work and at weekends when you're a recovering procrastinator wears off pretty quickly.  Then there's the creeping resentment of missing out on time with the family or hobbies.  The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Learner, you might say (an expression many others have used).

Still I know it's worth it - and after all, I have to do this.  And besides, I have strategies.  My anti-procrastination measures are doing their level best to ensure my study sessions are tight and distraction free. And through a combination of rewards (snacks, down time and a few gaming sessions) and concrete Finish Times, I'm able to keep myself motivated

The MOOC recommended Journal Planners - both Weekly and Daily - as this  something that reminded me of the Study Planners I used to draw up way back when I was at school and University.

Writing up the Daily planner the night before, just before going to sleep, aims to free up working memory and enlists my now helpful subconscious Walking Dead chums to figure out how I'm going to achieve them.  What's really funny is that my lovely wife is always going on at me about making lists.  She's been extolling their virtues for as long as I can remember.  Note to self: Wives are ALWAYS right.

The key thing I've learned about these lists - and it's something we covered in the lectures - was to make the goals realistic and achievable.  'Wiping out World Hunger' on a Wednesday evening was never going to happen, so scaling back what can be realistically achieved takes some productivity tuning.

Pomodoro's are alive and well, along with the ever important Finish Time.  And mixing in time for some diffuse mode breaks (legal web surfing, watching a short TED video on a longer break to focus on something completely different to my subject area, maybe a quick blast on Pinball Arcade or Fruit Ninja) is a welcome break.

As Mark Twain said, "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day."  Mark Twain never experienced Nested Loops.  That said, he was absolutely right in principle; getting the really gnarly study stuff out of the way is very satisfying.

As I may have mentioned, I'm a huge game fan.  If it's got buttons, joysticks or scoreboards, I'm all over it.  I'm also a huge proponent of gamification (still one of the bigger influences in learning design).  I'd read about gamified productivity tools earlier this year on Lifehacker and have tried a couple out.  The one I've currently got installed is a free Android one called Task Hammer (there are similar paid apps for iOS like Doable and EpicWin).  Pick an avatar, load up your tasks to the app - then as you complete them, you get notifications and congratulatory messages. The best thing (for me anyway) about this is the way that you experience permanent 'levelling up', visually representing how you personally are growing in terms of your productivity.

Using this, I'm trying to tap into that little dopamine hit that I get when I achieve each goal (Psychology Today).  Granted, I could get that just by ticking something off a list, but hey, it's 2014 and I'm a total sucker for Achievements :-)

And then, there's sleep.  Lovely, restorative sleep.  As we know, when we drift off to the land of nod, we're not neurologically inactive at all.  As Xie and Nedergaard have proposed (in separate papers), the glymphatic systems in the brain run the 'rinse cycle' (although the same thing happens during anaesthesia, trivia fans), resulting in a 60% increase in interstitial space in the old brain.  That allows the cerebrospinal fluid to exchange with the interstitial fluid in the brain, which removes those nasty toxic beta-amyloids. On waking, the brain has that lovely 'new car' smell (not literally, but you get where I'm coming from).

This fact - along with a really fascinating talk I found on TED - has totally changed my views on sleep, much to my wife's delight.  She's always banged on about how important sleep is - and now she's got science on her side, I'll never hear the end of it.  As I said before, wives are always right.  So I'm aiming for a good 7-8 hours a night (as per Kripke) and as the National Sleep Foundation put it, 'making sleep a priority'.

So far, this is working.  I'm maintaining a flow.  The Pomodoro's are less prone to interruption.  I'm getting stricter about blocking out distractions and as a result, I'm getting into the study habit without the resentment.  And my wife and dog get to see me.  And I still get to play games.  Result.

Until next time...