This is my first time talking about 20 Time on this blog, so let me explain what it is. The idea behind this is that employees or students or anyone, can take around 20% of time out of their normal working hours to instead work on something else, something special and interesting to them, a passion project. In Google, these so-called passion projects led to ingenious inventions such as Gmail, Google Shopping Express, and many other world changing inventions.
For my 20 Time project, I investigated a phenomenon that affects many teens schoolwide, and probably worldwide. I did experiments about procrastination. I chose this as my research interest because procrastination is also something that affects me, and is often times my biggest adversity. In doing research on how to combat procrastination, I was actually able to help myself battle it.
You can get to my 20-Time blog right here: http://jeffrey20time.blogspot.com/
What I planned to do was to test various procrastination-combatting tips/methods and test it on some of my peers and myself. I thought that in this relatively large amount of time, I would be able to get a control experiment finished as well as perhaps 20 or so methods. That was rather optimistic of me.
I didn't realize that for each individual method, large amounts of testing was required to ensure accuracy of results. After I realized that just testing 1 or 2 methods took almost a month to complete, I readjusted my goals and thought that testing 5-10 tips in total was an achievable but also quite challenging goal. I finished testing 7, which I am pretty happy with. Another roadblock that came my way was that when I would tell my peers what methods to try out while doing homework, sometimes they would forget to use them or do something completely different! So I fixed this by creating a Facebook group chat (teenagers always are on Facebook these days) and I communicated with them through this helpful medium.
I made a data spreadsheet documenting the different times of finishing homework for me and my peers and you can help yourself in your procrastination by looking at some of these tips. The link is right here
One thing I learned from this project is that although people share many similarities in working habits, they are way more differences. Some of the methods I tested, I expected everybody to improve their working efficiency, but instead, some still were slower. Also, for the methods that I thought were probably not going to make a huge difference or be a burden on doing homework, they actually were able to drive some of my peers to finishing their homework hours earlier!
I also picked up some soft/process skills. Cutting up the workload and time management were quite important for me. Sometimes, I would fall behind schedule due to limited time at school or other groups pestering me to help them, but I would always go home afterwards and find time to catch up and get ahead.
If I could change this project in any way, I would definitely make it larger scale. The only people I was able to document in my studies were just me and 4 of my peers that took part in the experiment. Perhaps next time, I could do polls and surveys on the SHS Facebook group and allow for a broader scope of views on procrastination.
I learned something about myself along the way. I tend to work much better under deadlines. Towards the beginning of the project, I was lagging pretty behind in terms of goals, but as deadlines approached, I was much more insistent on my peers to finish their tasks and would almost work on 20 Time at home on a daily basis. It turns out, this worked well, as I finished about a day early compared to most of the other students in the class.
I'm not sure how I could continue this project in any way, but one thing is for sure. I will apply what I learned from this lab as much as I can in my life. This way, I'll be much more effective at finishing schoolwork and be able to put in more time to other things that I enjoy doing, going beyond just school, and sports. In my opinion, being effective at getting work done not only enhances your work ethic, but allows for a more enjoyable life.
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