4 Things to do online That Will Make Your Life Better: June

At the end of every month, I’ll be sharing things to do online, whether it be listening to a cool playlist, or a podcast or reading an interesting article.

Things to do online: June

I’m a fan of Dr. Andrew Huberman- a neuroscientist and a professor at Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Perhaps a little bit of backstory, I have a masters in Genomics and I’m absolutely fascinated by neurobiology. Dr. Huberman has a podcast “Huberman Lab”. You can find it on YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify. Listening to podcasts is one of my favorite things to do online.

The episode that I would like to share here today is “The science & practice of perfecting your sleep with Dr. Matthew Walker”. I was struggling with sleep, so I was looking for a deep dive into this topic for quite some time now and I found it! It’s quite an extensive interview but so insightful. Highly recommend it and even other episodes from the podcast.

Next is a blog post from my fellow blogger Joanna Goddard titled “How Do You Define Success?” I thought it was an interesting read since the meaning of success is so different for each of us. In my opinion it changes as we go through different phases of life.

For me as a 20-something year old, I would say success is defined as a time when I have the freedom to pursue things that are close to my heart, things that help me discover more of me. To be more present and content in the here and now and to know that right this moment is life, not what has passed or what is to come. What does success look like for you? Let me know in the comments!

The book “101 essays that will change the way you think” by Brianna Wiest is a game-changer if you want to discover how deeply some thoughts and concepts are ingrained in our mind just because we have accepted them as truths of the time. This book was on my read-list for a long time, and I finally finished it. I recommend it to everyone, at least read it once and then decide. You can purchase it here (India) and here (US).

It is actually a technique for increasing focus. Most of you might even know it as the 25-minute timer technique but now you know it’s called the Pomodoro Technique. It’s a great productivity hack and requires no set-up. Among the hundreds of productivity tips and hacks online, this one is probably my favorite.

Fun fact “pomodoro” translates to a tomato and a university student ‘Francesco Cirillo’ developed this technique in the 1980s. He named the technique after the tomato shaped timer he used. So, the steps are pretty simple:

• You choose a task you want to do.
• Set a timer for 25 minutes.
• Get to work until the timer goes off.
• Take a 3–4-minute break and repeat.
• After 4 intervals of 25 minutes, take a longer break (anything ranging from 15-60 minutes).

Why it’s helpful?

Now the idea behind this technique is to break longer tasks into smaller intervals of focused work. However, this probably won’t work if you are browsing online when the timer is ON.

The only thing you need to remember is that you need to adjust the timing of the work interval and breaks according to what suits you. You can even do more than 1 session in one sitting Make your own rules. The bottom line is to measure how much time you are allotting to a particular task and why.

Similarly, breaks need not be 3-4 minutes, or you don’t necessarily need to get up and move around. Although you should if you spend most day sitting. You can you these breaks to give your eyes some rest if you work on a screen which most of us do!

If you find you can focus on a task for an hour, then do so and then take a 5-minute break. During my previous job. I used to multitask because I got distracted by a lot of little things that needed to be done. But science tells us that you may multi-task, but it only negatively impacts your efficiency. So, I used this technique to complete the bigger tasks during the first half of the day and then tackle the details later.

In addition to that, I also used my breaks to get up and have a glass of water. I was surprised at how much I got done during these short time intervals. Have you tried this technique and if you have, how do you like it? Speaking of productivity, did you know meditation increases your productivity, check out these meditation myths debunked!

There you go, that’s it for this month! I try to discover at least 1a single new thing online, every week.

Listen, Read, Watch and Try out these recommendations; tell me which one was your favorite. Let me know in the comments if you discovered anything new online this month.