This is the most powerful resource you have. And it's really limited.
How many times have you started your week thinking "I have the whole week in front of me,
so I'm going to do X, Y, and Z first, then I'll get to the studies/work/tasks I'd planned?" When
you realise, it's Friday already and you haven't done half of what you planned because you simply
didn't have clarity about your priorities. There's a feeling of procrastination when you want to do
so many things. You don't know what to do, you don't know where to start... You become paralyzed.
The same is true for when you need to study English. You probably have a coursebook or
a textbook, whatever, just sitting on the shelf gathering dust, or infinite
websites and resources saved on your computer that you haven't looked at in a long time.
They also become a hidden form of procrastination without you even realising it.
So today, let's take a look at some apps that can really
help you with the tools that you need to beat procrastination, make better use of your time, and
achieve success while studying English no matter the objective you're trying to accomplish with it.
To start off, share with us the apps you normally use to help you study
English. Pause the video for a second and write it in the comments down below "I normally use
[name of the app], what I like about it is that..."
A productive day starts with a good night’s sleep, but not only that! Sleeping helps your brain
better remember the things you've learned. The first step that you should do for a few
weeks in a row before adding other tasks is to go to bed every day at the same time,
even if you don't fall asleep right away. To get you accustomed to that,
Insight Timer has numerous guided meditations, bedtime stories, and relaxing
audios to help you fall asleep more easily. "Make yourself as comfortable as possible."
You can also play relaxing songs or nature sounds on Spotify.
If you have a TV in your room, YouTube has videos with those sounds as well,
but played on black background videos so you are not disturbed by the brightness of the screen.
You may be wondering what meditation has to do with English or building a productive routine!
However, nowadays it’s so easy to lose focus,
become distracted, or even constantly switch between tasks when sitting down to study.
Meditation can be a huge help for your concentration and help you remain present and
focused on what you need to get done. My favorite apps to help you either get started on building
on the habit of meditating are Lojong and One Giant Mind. They have short, easy-to-follow
guided meditations that will help you feel more grounded. I highly recommend you do it
in the morning right after you wake up or during the day while taking a break between studies.
You can choose one of their activities while sitting down on your bed.
Start easy with 5 minutes, and as the weeks go by, you can increase the time you spend meditating.
The third pillar of being more productive is having an exercise routine. Exercising helps
you study and learn better by combating stress, raising your energy levels, and making you feel
happier and energized. You'll see how you'll feel more efficient at all tasks in your life.
Just like meditation, choose an activity you like such as walking (then, running), dancing, martial
arts, and start slowly to build on the habits. I really like to use an app called Run Keeper
even when I'm not running. It helps you track your progress when you walk and can be quite
motivating to see your performance increasing. Another great thing about exercises like
walking or running is that you can do them while you listen to podcasts,
like the RealLife English Podcast. By downloading our free app, you'll have
access to our podcasts and our Beyond Borders Talk Show with interviews with some of the world’s most
influential experts made especially for English learners. The best thing is once you sit down
to study, you can listen to the episode again while following the transcript and right after,
connect with someone to practice your English. That's right! By downloading the RealLife English
App, you get to practice your English speaking for free whenever you want.
So download it now in the Google Play or the Apple App Store
or simply download it with this link here or the one I've left in the description down below.
Now, after adjusting to a great routine of sleeping, meditating, and exercising,
when it's time to get your studies done, there are a few apps that will help you with that.
Google keep. The first thing I'd recommend is to have a note taking app such as Google Keep,
Notepad, or Evernote within hand's reach. One of the things that most impairs our productivity
is to get drawn by thoughts and ideas that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
So, it'll make a huge difference to have a place like these where you can write down
ideas that pop up into your mind so they don't distract you or break down your focus.
You'd be surprised by how many learners tell me they have trouble focusing on their studies.
There's a technique called Pomodoro that can help you while doing that. This technique consists of
many short breaks from time to time while working. For example, you work or study for 25 minutes
straight, without interruption, and then take a break from the screen or the books for 5 minutes.
After 4 cycles, you can take a larger break. The tide App has a section that combines the
Pomodoro Timer with sounds to help you concentrate.
Now, if you are more into games, there's an app called Habitica that will transform real-life
productivity in order to help you accomplish things, you can add your habits, to-do list,
and goals, and the app will transform it into an experience in which those situations become
a role-playing game with many features such as armour, pets, and even quests!
Notion is one of the most complete apps to manage tasks and content, but it can
be quite overwhelming to get started on it. So, I'd recommend you take a look at Trello first.
It helps you organise your studying projects into a board and at one glance what you're working on,
what you need to do, and what you have already done. It's like a whiteboard,
filled with lots of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you.
Now, when it comes to Notion, if you want to get started, our guest Shannon explained a really
nice idea on how she organises her progress in the more than 15 languages she's studied.
But I also am a Notion junkie. So I keep I have like a, it's almost like a journal,
but not really, but it's like my daily log. So it's like, what exercise I did,
what languages I studied, what I did to study those languages, and then a bunch of other habits
that I'm trying to build. And I track that every single day. And then at the bottom, it tallies
like a percentage of like, what percentage I've actually studied which language and all that.
One of the things that can kill your productivity is the frustration of not remembering what you
studied and having to revisit all your notes every time. You get the feeling that you're always stuck
in the same place, not being able to remember and then when you get a chance to speak you may
have a lot of vocabulary that you understand, but you don't seem to find them back in your memory
when it's your turn to say something. Well, apps like Anki and Memrise can help you
with that. They are spaced repetition software and what they do is give reminders of the words you
need to study based on the things you get right. You can add audio and pictures so they are also
good to practice listening and pronunciation. Gabriel Wyner, talked with Ethan about the
importance of personalisation when it comes to creating your flashcards on these platforms.
The main piece though is what are you reviewing, because if the thing you're reviewing is "girl."
What's the word for girl? And all you're doing is sort of deepening this idea that girl and Девочка
are the same then all you're doing is deepening a kind of shallow uninteresting memory. But if
instead you're showing the pictures, you chose to store that emotional reaction of "Whoa, that
wasn't what I expected" and we say "what's that?" and you're like "Девочка" that's what that is.
Then we are we are allowing you to review an emotional experience
and then you throw that in the computer program and you're like "okay, well, when should I-- When
should I have that emotional experience next?" and it's like "oh well, looks like your-- your
next due for that emotional woah in two weeks." Oh you got it right? Okay, cool. We're gonna wait
a month and then we're gonna stick-- You know, these pictures that you thought were emotionally
relevant in front of you and see where you feel there. And so that ends up being the whole
system. It's just-- it's a system for dumping emotional stuff into your head at the right rate.