Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed!
This course can be taken independent of, concurrent with, or subsequent to, its companion course, Learning How to Learn. (Mindshift is more career focused, and Learning How to Learn is more learning focused.)
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Getting Deeper into Happy Learning
Key to your ability to mindshift is being able to learn effectively. This week, we’ll dive deeper into this vital area. Getting yourself motivated to tackle procrastination can sometimes be a challenge in learning, so we’ll give you some important tips here. But we’ll also give insights into mental tricks to help you focus, relax, and reframe if stress intrudes. We’ll also show you how to avoid common learning pitfalls. Welcome and enjoy!
Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University Professor of Engineering, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Oakland University
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies Computational Neurobiology Laboratory
M.S. Orlando Trejo
Assistant Professor Department of Electronics and Circuits, Universidad Simón Bolívar
[MUSIC]
A common challenge to making a mindshift is something so
simple we almost forget to think about it, procrastination.
Of course, in our previous MOOC, Learning How to Learn,
we already learned about how procrastination can arise.
When you even think about something that you don't really want to do,
it activates the brain's pain centers.
The brain, naturally enough, tries to stop that negative stimulation, so
it turns its attention to something else, anything else.
The result?
You feel better almost instantly.
But you've also just procrastinated.
We learned, as well, about,
the Pomodoro Technique to help you tackle procrastination.
Italian Francesco Cirillo devised this fiendishly clever method in the 1980s,
and it's spread around the world since then.
To do a pomodoro, just turn off all distractions, no little ringy dingies
from our cell phones or computers and then set a timer for 25 minutes.
Then you hold your focus on your work as intently as you humanly can for
those 25 minutes.
We're all human, and
distracting thoughts will inevitably arise when we're doing a pomodoro.
For example, sometimes I'll set the pomodoro timer for 25 minutes.
Great, I'm all happy.
And then 5 minutes into the pomodoro, I'll look up and
suddenly realize that I've got 20 whole minutes left to do.
My mind goes, I just can't do 20 more minutes!
But what I do is I let that thought go right on by and
then I return my focus to my learning or my work.
If I catch myself absently checking my email,
I gently stop as soon as I've realized what I'm doing.
In fact, I'll often close my email program, and other programs,
just to make it a little harder to check them.
None of us has perfectly obedient minds, thank goodness,
which means it's inevitable that distracting thoughts are going to arise.
The thing is when you're doing a pomodoro, you don't want to try to push those
thoughts away or tell yourself not to think those thoughts.
Instead, you just want to acknowledge the distracting thought and
let it go by as you return your attention to whatever you were focusing on.
We've mentioned the first three components of the Pomodoro Technique, but
there's actually a fourth.
Once you're done with the pomodoro it's reward time.
[SOUND] You get to switch your attention for a while to whatever you want.
You might listen to a favorite song, go to your favorite social media,
watch a funny dance video, do a funny dance yourself, chat online with a friend.
Or do something where you move around a little bit,
straighten part of your room, walk to the kitchen to get some coffee or tea.
The whole idea is to get your attention off whatever you've just been focusing on.
In fact,
you want to give the part of the brain you've just been using a bit of a break.
This means the reward shouldn't involve similar types of tasks.
For instance, if you've been writing a report then you don't want to go to
Twitter or Facebook and continue writing, even if it's about a different subject.
That would be kind of like taking a break from lifting heavy
barbells instead by lifting boxes of books.
You're still doing heavy lifting either way,
which means you're not getting much of a break.
And at the end of the day you'll find yourself getting much more tired.
A great approach is, if you're doing mental work,
try to instead do some kind of movement during your breaks,
something where your brain can relax and your mind can do some wandering.
All of this is very important because in the past we've always thought that
learning only took place when we were focusing our attention on something.
But we now understand that an important part of learning takes
place when we're not focusing on something.
In fact, to truly understand something we often need periods where we've
switched our attention off the material we're trying to understand, because
that's the time when we consolidate and make sense of the material.
We're not consciously aware of this process, which is why we often don't
realize how important this consolidation process is for
learning, memory, and long-term creativity.
We've heard from tens of thousands of learners in Learning How to Learn
about how much they loved the Pomodoro Technique.
People often ask, well, why 25 minutes?
Remember that pain in the brain that pops up
when we think about something we really didn't want to do?
It seems that when we decide to go ahead and work on that task
despite the pain, that pain often lasts about 20 minutes.
In other words, doing a pomodoro helps you just get past the pain and
into the flow of the work.
I do have to admit, if I really get going and into the flow,
I don't necessarily make myself stop at the end of a pomodoro session.
I just keep going as long as it feels good, which, of course, is fine too.
People often also wonder about how long the break should be between pomodoros.
Well, this depends on you, and what you've got going on.
Maybe it's final examination time, or
you've got a massively important presentation to prepare for.
In this case, you may only want to have maybe 3 to 5 minutes between pomodoros.
But if you're not in such a crunch time, perhaps you can take 10 or 20 minutes.
Some people set a pomodoro timer as a sort of,
worst case I only have to do 25 minutes, sort of motivator.
The pomodoro helps them to get started, but if they get into the flow,
and are liking what they're doing,
they won't necessarily quit at the end of the 25 minutes.
You might also ask,
how do I get myself restarted doing a pomodoro once I've taken a break?
This also depends a lot on you.
Everyone's motivated differently.
One motivator is to download an app onto your phone that gives you badges for
each pomodoro you finish.
People often enjoy collecting these badges each day, and you can set a goal for
yourself, perhaps two pomodoros for
work related to one topic, maybe three related to another, and so forth.
There are also other motivators you can use.
We'll talk about them in the next video.
And you'll be learning a lot more about all of this in our Productivity MOOC.
The Pomodoro Technique is, in reality, a powerful and
actually enjoyable type of meditation through work.
Smart learners make great use of this.
[MUSIC]
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Dr. Barbara OakleyRamón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University
Dr. Terrence SejnowskiFrancis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
M.S. Orlando TrejoAssistant Professor
