Hey there! What a lovely day to enjoy new Nerdify reviews post. Ready to unleash your bad habits and fight them?

It’s already December and soon enough you gonna think of new resolutions to make. College is a challenging time, which always comes with risks of really bad academic troubles that we all seem to go through from time to time. There are new challenges, unknown environment, too much studying, and the joy of youth kicking in, so it is only natural that you try to cut the corners and find an easy way out! Nevertheless, it is important to take care of your college life and do your best to ditch the bad academic habits.

1. The Art of Procrastination

Procrastination problem is what most students face on a daily basis as soon as the battle of deadlines versus the fun times starts! There is a movie that you definitely want to see or a party that you want to join early to meet your best friend or even a blog post that you want to read. This is when procrastination gets in the way. Trust us, we all have been there and it is only natural to put off some difficult tasks and think that you can do it later. The best way to ditch this bad habit is writing down a list of the “urgent” and “not so urgent” tasks in two columns. This way you can get more focused at tasks at hand and organize your time in a more efficient way!

2. Junk Food Problem

While it is tasty, quick, and you do not have to spend way too much time cooking, junk food can become a bad academic habit that comes up as soon as you start the college and try to get through the myriad of tasks. You run around, you catch a bite here and there, you talk to your friends as you eat, run around in the park, still chewing something. Sounds familiar? Add the late night pizza and Chinese takeouts to the list and you risk making all the healthcare specialists sad and angry! If there is a kitchen in your college room, start cooking your own simple food and check with your college friends to share the tips and get the best recipes. Moreover, stick to more accurate dining times and make sure that a time when you eat something is not in the middle of another task!

3. Using “you know”, “like” and “totally” When You Speak.

Now that you are about to become a skilled professional, your task is to work at the social skills and strive for academic success. You have to learn how to speak in a professional way and get rid of all the rubbish words and slang. We all get this “you know” and “like” bugs in our sentences, yet getting rid of these words can be really helpful. Just give it a bit more thought and learn to breathe! They call them “the filler words” because they are used to fill the space when you do not know what to say or when your lack of confidence comes through. Instead of using all these words, try to think and learn to talk at a slower pace, allowing yourself to focus on a subject and remember all the important information. This way the people will listen to you and know that you are experienced and have sufficient knowledge.

4. Ignoring College Group Projects

While far not everyone is guilty of this bad academic habit, it still exists and can be damaging to your college success, future resume, and a list of strong social skills that you definitely should have. Think of the group work where some people seem to do it all for the others while you just sit and watch. Do not be like one of such students and take an active role! Show some good work ethics and find a golden medium between a laid-back attitude and being a control freak. Be open to suggestions, yet learn to speak your opinion. It is a group project after all and everyone should do their best to be responsible and contribute!

5. The King of the Party

Sometimes it seems that it is not possible to survive through college without partying! While some of this is true since you do not have to turn nerdy and geeky being stuck in a college room with the books all the time, you have to remember of all the important deadlines and organize your parties (and the ones you want to join) wisely, so it does not affect your academic schedule and the other commitments. Make a party something to look forward to with no dark shadows from the tasks you have not finished yet!  Even if you are a king of the party and like to have fun, remember that you can do both, if you manage your time and the plans!

6. You Bite More Than You Can Swallow: Doing Too Much at Once!

It is no wonder that an endless list of homework to do, confusing classes, and all the extra-curricular activities can make things a little bit too difficult! As a result, you may get a bad habit of trying to do it all at once. You start multi-tasking and aim for finishing several tasks at the same time. You may be a member of several clubs and you try to join two or more group projects, yet you start noticing that you are stressed out and anxious. It is a normal reaction of your mind and body to biting more than you can swallow. The solution is to take one step at a time and form a daily timetable to make sure that you give your best to each task. When you cannot do your best in a club or fail your friends by not being there, thinking of a next activity, it is never any good!

7. Bad Sleeping Habits

This is definitely one of the worst habits a college student may get! It is also one of the most challenging problems to get rid of! As your sleeping habits get worse and start to affect your grades and health in general, there are several ways to stay away from trouble! Schedule some morning time at the college gym, for example, or team up with your roommate by making plans for a specified time. This way you can keep quiet when you have to study and party hard when you both feel like it! Make sure to go to bed at the right time and remember that sleeping is important even when you feel energetic.

8. The Lack of Fashion

Maybe not really a bad academic habit, but it still makes a certain impression about you! The talk is about a lack of fashion or a specific fashion a college student may have. Think of your favorite t-shirt and the sweatpants that you just put on and let go. While it is quite convenient, it makes you look stressed out and not so professional. Choose the clothes that make you look stylish and professional, making it clear that you care for your outfit. Once people notice that you care for the way you look, you are no longer “that college student”, but a “bright and motivated person”!

9. Spending Too Much Time Online

Not exclusively a college student’s bad problem, the time we spend online is more harmful to your life and success when you have to study and get the good grades. We often tell ourselves that “five more minutes” won’t make a difference and scroll down to another post on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Yet, it all takes time! Just make your online presence useful for your future major by making your profile look professional and combine your social networks knowledge and skills with the exploration of a subject that you study!

10. Getting Rid of Laziness

Laziness is always a trouble for a college student and basically anyone who tries to reach some progress and grow as a person! Do not waste your time for the meaningless and dull things that just take your time and teach you nothing. Join social clubs, get involved in volunteering, and explore the opportunities that a college life offers! Do not sit locked in your college room, meet people, smile to others, have fun at the party, share your knowledge, experience, and skills, and learn how to make new friends! Do not be lazy because listening to this bad habit is actually stealing your own life!

Take care and stay motivated,

Nerdify reviews team

It has been a packed weekend, hasn’t it? Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday (Nerdify’s marketing has been busy) – lots of holidays smashed together in such a short period of time. We do hope these few days have been a blast for you, guys 🙂

Now, it’s time to get Nerdy again 🙂 We thought it would be a good idea to tell you some secrets behind the success of the biggest names in the tech industry today. How did people like Jeff Bezos (who’s fortune recently surpassed $100 billion) and Steve Jobs manage to build such large companies?

We have done a thorough investigation and here are our findings. These are general rules that can be applied pretty much everywhere, no matter what you want to do in life.

Perseverance and passion

These 2 points have been cited by everyone – Bezos, Jobs, Obama, Buffet and many others; and we think these are literally the most important factors for success – having a passion for what you do and having determination and tenacity to work hard for a sustained period of time. These two go hand in hand because it’s passion that gives birth to perseverance.

As Steve Jobs once said – “it’s so hard (to create anything) that if you don’t have passion, any rational person would give up. You have to work really hard for a sustained period of time. And if you don’t love it, eventually you are going to give up.” And that’s what happens to most people. Lot’s of people start projects/businesses, but eventually, a good chunk of them give up, when problems start piling up on their desks.

Jeff Bezos, when setting up his private spaceflight company Blue Origin gave it the following motto – “Gradtim Ferociter” which means “Step by step ferociously”. This is how he explains statement: “You can’t skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts”. People who persevere, eventually get sh*t done, which ultimately leads to success.

Don’t be afraid to fail

This is a very popular reason why people don’t want to start new projects/ventures – they are afraid that they will fail; they are afraid that people will judge them as a failure if they don’t succeed on their first try.

The reality is different, however – people who never fail, are the ones who never try anything. In fact, most successful entrepreneurs in the world have failed a lot before they’ve achieved great success.

Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He said: “I have made so many mistakes any mistake you can think of, I’ve made it. But if you’re building a product that people love, you can make a lot of mistakes”. Today Facebook is worth more than $500 bn. Not bad for a “made all the mistakes you can think of” scenario, right?

Jeff Bezos said, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon”. His reasoning is that continuous experiments (bold bets as he calls them) will not only offset any losses you make from failures but will eventually lead to high profits (because you would have acquired so much learning and knowledge from your failures). Companies that don’t promote experiments and are not prepared to fail from time to time, will eventually die. The important part is to learn from your mistakes.

Everything around you was built by the same people as you are

Steve Jobs once said: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again”, meaning that you don’t have to be special to act – you just need to have the will to get the job done 🙂

Nerdify’s Conclusion:

• The core of success is perseverance -> being able to work hard and staying focused on achieving your goal.
• In order to do that for a sustained period of time – you have to love what you do, or at least have an inner fire in you that disagrees with the status quo that keeps pushing you forward.
• Don’t be afraid to fail, it’s all part of the learning process.
• Finally – everything around is built by the same people as you are. You are just as good and as capable.

Good luck, guys! 😉

Howdy, pals! Even though you may think that your time management skills in college are good enough, Nerdify reminds you that there are still some helpful tips and tricks. 

They will help you upgrade your knowledge and see how you can make your college life much easier and fun.  One of the reasons why your time management skills upgrade can be essential is because you may want to add more to your schedule and get involved in all the fun activities, yet there seems to be never enough time to do it all! Let us see how you can act as an engineer of your own time and resources in a little bit unusual way!

1. Learn to study in blocks!                                                                                           

The trick here is to approach the different study scenarios where you try different time passages or the time-blocks for your college assignments and the times of leisure. This way you can see how much time you may need to get focused in a proper way! While 30-40 minutes time blocks are ideal for studying before you take some rest, you may still need to make them either shorter or longer to see what fits you best. Remember that you have to take the breaks and switch from subject to subject to have a clear mind before you continue with the same or a completely new task. You can take a walk and have a cuppa before you continue with the studies.

The difference in such approach is your being aware of how much time you are going to spend as you study. You do not have to fear that there are hours and hours of studies ahead before you can finally have some rest! Give yourself some credit and remember that you deserve something for a change. Such an approach will not only keep you organized but will help you to divide your homework assignments by the level of importance and complexity as you form your time blocks. Start with the easy tasks first, so you may get an idea of how much time you may need. This way you can also plan the times of leisure for the day ahead when you are the one in control of your plans with all the classes getting in the way!  

2. Do not underestimate college help resources!

Most students spend the majority of their free time by trying to understand how to start with a homework assignment and how to approach an unknown writing format. Of course, there are countless questions that you try to look up online, yet it does not seem clear or your college professor has a different idea about certain rules. You can definitely save some precious time by turning to the writing help center at college and talking to your professor if you are unsure of a something. It does not make you any less smart if you take some time to speak of your concerns instead of acting cool and trying to find solutions on your own.

There are additional study groups and the special support classes almost at every college that will help you to get a guidance and assistance with the most challenging classes. If there are debates, conferences, social work, and laboratory experiments, make sure that you join the fellow students and stay as active as you can. This way you help to make your name known to others as your social network of friends starts to grow. Smart students will start to notice you and share their knowledge. Professor will see that you are a dedicated student who walks an extra mile to study. It will not only improve your chances for a scholarship and financial aid but will also help you to receive timely help!

3. Join College Study Groups!

Sometimes all your free time may be ruined by a single college class that you are struggling with! Even though you may do well in the rest of your classes, failing to understand a subject or follow professor’s speech in your English class or in Quantum Physics is a great challenge! Still, there is a trick that helps you to address the problem professionally – the college study groups. What these study groups offer is a unique advantage to focus on a single subject in a special way where you receive tutoring to cover the curriculum in a faster way. As you join the study group, you can research and ask questions without embarrassment as it is exactly why you are there. In order to help you through the class, you are offered a topic to work at, so you can collaborate with a fellow student on a group task. They call it an enhanced learning because you learn to share and work together starting from the class lecture notes to exploring additional subjects to help you understand the class in a deeper way. In a certain sense, it is like a free tutoring opportunity where you can finally liven up your study sessions and save some time that you spend trying to understand a complex assignment!

4. A Daily Schedule Approach!

While it may sound boring to you, it does help to challenge and upgrade your current time-management skills in college! A daily schedule approach will not only motivate you as a student but help you to manage your time in a more efficient way. Here is how it works:

• Make a list of your daily tasks that you have to complete!
• Write the next list with two columns of more important and less important tasks.
• Mark the tasks that are urgent and should be done with one color.
• Mark the tasks that can wait with the other color.
• Place a checkmark next to each task as you get it complete.
• Try to write down an approximate time that you have spent on each task.
• Make an additional list of all the fun things that you may want to do, so you can add it to your primary schedule!

As you try to work with a daily schedule of your college tasks, share it with your roommate and the fellow students, so you can see how it can be adjusted and what helpful techniques you may learn! Keep the daily schedule always by your side, so you can keep organized and focused!

5. Work at your soft skills!

Your personal development and growth of time management skills depend on the presence of soft skills. What it means, in reality, is your ability to be independent, adhere to strong ethics, and work at your communication skills. You have to stay patient and unbiased as you choose your sources and the books as you study. Setting the goals and trying to be flexible, you have to work at your character and coordinate what you have to learn with your true passions. The way how you approach your college life with all the studies and fun is a reflection of how well you can do in a future career. This work and experience have already started, so one has to be strong and seek for inspiration inside!

Some Nerdy tips and time management observations!

• Always have a time buffer because the days at college somehow go faster than you expect!
• Take advantage of the days and times when you feel creative and inspired. When you feel like working and know that you can do more, make sure that you do your best!
• Focus on one task at a time because even though you may be able to multitask, your brain easily becomes exhausted!
• Limit and challenge yourself with the deadlines because it keeps you more productive. If you have less time to get the task done, you work extra hard.
• Even though you may have flexible college deadlines, make sure not to procrastinate!
• Brainstorm the ideas and alternative solutions as you get stuck with your homework!
• Try to schedule the important tasks and meetings early in the day because the most challenging time is when you try to get ready for the actual task!
• Get rid of the most disturbing tasks first, so you can feel better about the rest of the items on your list!
• Always take notes and do not think that you can remember everything out there! Write it down and use it as a personal reference to turn to! It really helps to save some time!
• Do not forget to have fun and spend some time for yourself!

A kind reminder from Nerdify: your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow. Take care and practice time management!