Learning Challenge: Time memes

For this week's Learning Challenge, I decided to do "Find a favorite time meme." I found several that I really enjoyed, but these were hands-down my favorite!

Procrastination Flowchart

This one is great because of its simplicity. I love it because this is the thought process that I have sometimes and so it really clicked with me.

Field Guide to Procrastinators

This one is again fantastic because of its relateability. I'm often not just one of these procrastinator types, but several all in one study session. It gets the worst during finals season, so I expect a lot of these roles to come out! 

My favorite type is probably the Cleaner or the Sidetracker because they're my most common excuses for procrastinating. Usually I know what I'm doing is putting off assignments or studying, but if I'm doing something else that is productive (like a future assignment or cleaning up my apartment), then I feel very justified in my procrastination. 

Learning Challenge: I would vote for a political candidate who ran on the platform of "Reading Day"

For this week's Learning Challenge, I've decided to look through a bunch of the reading images on the Learning by HEART site because I want to remind myself to pick up a good book today. 

Especially in times of great stress or weakness, like I sometimes feel towards the end of the semester, reading seems to be such a good way to relieve my woes. 

I like this one in particular because of how amazing I think that would be! Not that it would be enforced, of course, but who knows, maybe we all could use a full day of reading in our lives? I know for sure that if any of the presidential candidates were in favor of a National Reading Day, this year's ballot would have been a lot easier to cast! 

Reading motivational poster from

the Learning by HEART website

Learning Challenge: Audiobook Experience

I've used audiobooks a lot in the past. I started using them pretty regularly when I was in Europe, because I had to pack lightly and couldn't bring physical books around. I really got used to them because of all of the downtime that comes with travel, like long train rides or even just walking to the grocery store. They're super convenient, but I will admit sometimes I would get distracted and forget to pause the tape.

I hadn't tried Librivox before this semester, and I think overall it's a pretty good resource because it has so many audiobooks available. My only gripe is that sometimes the audio quality isn't very good, so it's hard to listen to or understand the story. If you don't have this problem, then Librivox really is great!

Audiobooks by Flickr user Nicola Einarson

Learning Challenge: I Thought I was Paying Attention

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4svQ-CGpII

For this week's challenge, I decided to do it a learning challenge on attention because I feel like I've been having a lot of trouble focusing lately. While this video didn't really help me with that in general,  I did find it to be very interesting! I have seen the gorilla video before, so I thought that I wouldn't be tricked this time around, but because I was focused on the counting and the gorilla walking through, I didn't notice the other seemingly obvious changes. 

I suppose there's then an upside and a downside to attention: if we're tuned in to the wrong things, we can miss out on rather obvious stimuli that could actually be important for us. 

People who definitely need to be 

paying attention

Learning Challenge: Trying the Happiness Jar

This week, I'm going to be doing the happiness jar challenge. 

I don't want to do daily updates, because I don't want to look back on each day until the final day. So next Sunday, I will post the results of this challenge here in an edited section of this blog post. 

Happiness jar challenge, 

via the Learning by HEART blog

The happiness jar challenge was pretty fun! I will admit it was hard to keep up with, but looking back was nice because I remember a lot of good moments throughout the week that I probably wouldn't have thought about otherwise.