I interrupt your regularly scheduled blog posts to participate in Hack Library School’s Library Student Day in the Life. For the week of October 28 – November 1, 2013, I will be posting each evening to share with prospective library students what a day in my life as a library student at Florida State University’s iSchool is like. Regular posts will resume November 2, 2013.
Today I will give you a brief overview of my day, discuss a study skill I have been using to combat procrastination, and chat about the music I’ve been listening to while studying.
#HLSDITL – Day 2
Arts and crafts day at the library as I create the display for Radiologic Technology Week
- Random song entering my head when cutting out four of the letter “I” (Eighteen Wheels on a Big Rig by Heywood Banks)
- Helped a student printing a PowerPoint – she needed to save to a PDF in order for it to spool properly to the printer… we’ve been having issues with that recently and the tech guy is constantly working on it
- Cancelled a PowerPoint print job for a different student – she wanted it to be 6 slides to a page, front and back, but it ended up just printing one slide per page front and back
- Contemplated our public access computers – starting today they appear to be reserved for a student library survey only… but then what about the public users who come in? Aren’t we doing them a disservice by eliminating the only computers available for them to use? Is there another way we could encourage students to complete the library survey on computers available for student use?
- Checked a lot of headphones in and out to Respiratory Care students
- Wore the shawl I knit at ALA Annual because I got cold and I had actually remembered to bring a shawl! Even got complimented.
- Assisted a student with sending a media file via email – had to save it as a different format before it sent properly
- Just got finished with Social Media Management class (which is the reason this blog exists, and that I actually tweet on occasion)
When Procrastination Hits Hard
Source: cheerfulmonk on Flickr
I know I am not alone in the world of procrastinating. And last week I was bit by a particularly nasty bug of it. I had no desire to work on any homework, despite having plenty of time to do it.
My assignments this semester are (mostly) due on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Last week Thursday came and I had barely read the assigned chapters for the week, let alone started on the assignments. That’s when I had to implement a very structured Study-Break schedule.
Scheduling study/break time
I grabbed the timer from my kitchen, which has three separate timers on it. I set the first timer to 25 minutes, the second timer to 5 minutes, and the last timer to 20 minutes. Seems a little strange, right? I had read somewhere recently that people are most productive or study best when they alternate working for 25 minutes, breaking for 5 minutes, and every third break is 20 minutes instead of 5.
Now, do I believe that it was that regimen that made more productive? Not really. It was the fact that I made myself sit down and do my homework that made me more productive.
As I said yesterday, I am trying to get on top of my end-of-term projects. Last night I implemented this same study/break schedule with pretty decent success. Since it wasn’t as imperative that I finish what I was working on, I allowed myself a little more leeway than I did last week.
Music choices
I like listening to music in just about every situation. When there is no music playing, there is music in my head (see Eighteen Wheels on a Big Rig, above). I use several music applications, all with different purposes. For a while I had been listening to my Apocalyptica station on Pandora when I study. But recently I’ve been craving something different.
Last week I used TuneIn to find good soundtrack and video game music stations, which worked pretty well. I’m not even sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I recognized the Final Fantasy 7 tune that came on, even though I’ve never played Final Fantasy…
Last night I used Songza to find some studying music. I happened upon a station called “808s and Brass“. It’s description is
“Commonly referred to as jazz hop or jazz rap, this subgenre combines jazz samples with hip hop beats.”
I really enjoyed it! Even though some of the songs had lyrics, it wasn’t overly distracting. More distracting was just the fact that I thought the songs were really cool and I would be dancing in my chair to them.
Llama Llama Librarian 