How to be productive?

The first thing that I am concerned about when I hear of a person who is not motivated is that he/she might be involved in studying the wrong career area. When someone is pursuing something in which he/she has an interest, motivation many times comes naturally with a thirst for more knowledge about the career area and its application in the real world. Perhaps, a person who has motivation as a problem may need to get to know himself/herself to determine which might be a most suitable career area.

Getting to know yourself and how your personality traits relate to people involved in various career opportunities is very important in your decision making process. During my many years in Human Resources and College Recruiting, I ran across too many students who had skipped this very important step and ended up in a job situation which for which they were not well suited. Selecting a career area is like buying a pair of shoes. First you have to be properly fitted for the correct size, and then you need to try on and walk in the various shoe options to determine which is fits the best and is most comfortable for you to wear. Following are some important steps which I developed during my career which have been helpful to many .

Fear not, Camilo. We all have days when we just don't feel as though we're firing on all cylinders, so you are not alone. Often, procrastination is a result of being overwhelmed--having so much to do or being so intimated by the task at hand that you just don't know where to start. One effective technique is to break the big to-do list down to easier-to-tackle tasks. For example, don't consider a big project in its totality, but rather its parts, e.g. making a research paper about brainstorming the topic, then the research, then the outline, then the introduction, etc. Divide what you need to get done into tasks, and intentionally build in breaks and "rewards" (like stopping for lunch or going for a quick run) for checking tasks off the list, then concentrate on the manageable task that's up next.

Many colleges have resources in the Student Success Center that teach skills like time management, and some offer videos and articles online that can be accessed even if you are not a student at that college. Oregon State University has a page dedicated to stopping procrastination at https://success.oregonstate.edu/learning/stop-procrastinating and Princeton has one at https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/understanding-and-overcoming-procrastination--and those are just a couple of options. An online search that includes ".edu" in your search terms will give you information from educators that address this issue all the time. You can do it!