Hi, I'm Thomas Frank.

This is my tumblr, where I'll regularly post videos and stuff from College Info Geek, college tips and other content from people I admire, and the occasional gif. I also wrote a free book on earning better grades!

[thomasjfrank]

Today’s Work Playlist

[thomasjfrank]

Binaural beats, isochronic tones, Brain.fm - does "brain music" actually help you focus and study better? Let's find out.

[howihandlemostthings]

The Internal Dialogue I Have With Myself Every Working Day

[learnhowtoadult]

#GoodPoint

[thomasjfrank]

Here are some ways you can deal with lazy, unresponsive group project members.

[thomasjfrank]

Hey you. It’s time to quit procrastinating.

[thomasjfrank]

Five lessons I learned from reading The Power of Habit:

1. Habits can be broken down into a three-step “habit loop”: A cue, a routine, and reward. Without a cue to trigger a habit, it won’t happen. This means that working to remove cues to bad habits - or to include more cues for good ones - can help you build better habits. 2. Almost all habit cues fall into one of five categories: Location, Time, Emotional State, Other People, or the Immediately Preceding Action. Cues can sometimes be hard to identify, and some habits have multiple cues. Knowing the categories they fall into can help you pick them out and gain control over them. 3. For well-established habits, there’s actually a fourth part of the habit loop: craving. Established habits cause brain activity to spike right after the cue triggers the habit, rather than when the reward is received. For these ingrained habits, your brain already craves the reward. However, you can often use a healthier or more productive routine to get the same/similar reward. 4. Knee replacement surgery patients who planned - in advance - what they’d do to rehabilitate their knees during the most painful moments were the most likely to make full recoveries. Having a plan for what you’ll do at a pain point will make you much less likely to quit building a good habit, or relapse into a bad one. 5. Some habits help to create other habits. These are called “keystone habits”. By creating small wins, they boost your motivation to do other things. Figuring out a good keystone habit to start with can help you start to enact lasting overall changes in your life. For more detail, here’s a video I made about these lessons!

[thomasjfrank]

How to Build Self-Discipline

I find these words on building discipline from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to be incredibly motivating:

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

—But it’s nicer here…

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doings things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? 

—But we have to sleep sometime…

Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.”

[johnnylists]

10 Useful Websites For Students

1. getcoldturkey.com – Block out distractions on your computer.

2. instaedu.com – Find a tutor, or take up tutoring to make a little side cash.

3. hemingwayapp.com – Make your writing bold and clear.

4. gridzzly.com – Print your own graph paper.

5. memrise.com – Learn languages and vocab with spaced repetition. 

6. cheatography.com – Create and share cheat sheets.

7. engineeringtoolbox.com – Resources, tools, and basic information for engineering students.

8. studentrate.com – Find student discounts for everything.

9. openstudy.com – Form study groups with people around the world.

10. ratemyprofessors.com – Grade your professors, and find out who is worth taking.

[thomasjfrank]

Here’s a simple definition of burnout: Everything makes you tired. You don’t care about anything. Everything sucks. Burnout happens when you go through long periods with high levels of stress, and many students are dealing with schedules that have them on a collision course with it.

Luckily, though, there are actions you can take to avoid burnout - or recover from it if you’re already feeling it.

[thomasjfrank]

Hey guys! This week I made a video on how to avoid making dumb mistakes in your exams. Hope it helps!

[thomasjfrank]

If your upcoming exams are stressing you out, here are a few ways to reduce that stress!

[fernwehmadchen-deactivated20201]

Productive Sunday at Starbucks: businness law & maple macchiato

[thomasjfrank]

This week’s video can be summed up pretty well by something Bruce Lee said:

"Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."

[thomasjfrank]

Distractions and multi-tasking waste more time than we’d expect, because each distraction causes us to make our brains switch contexts. It takes time to re-engage the brain when starting a new task, and this time is called a Cognitive Switching Penalty. 

If you get distracted multiple times a day, these penalties really add up. You still expend a lot of mental effort, but you don’t get much done.

To avoid these penalties, build your ability to concentrate on a single task at a time - either until it’s finished, or for a set amount of time.

The videos goes over five methods of building or promoting concentration:

Precommitting to tasks

Using a Distraction Sheet

Using Forest (an app)

Practicing meditation

Preventing outside distractions

Hope you find this useful!

[thomasjfrank]

High school students,

PLEASE take some time to think about your life 4-5 years from now BEFORE you take a student loan.

Far too many people just take the money offered to them and think,

“I’m sure I’ll make enough to easily pay this back when I graduate.”

Please don’t be one of them! 

Do the math before you sign. Research what you’re likely to make as a new grad based on your major, and make sure it can cover what you plan on borrowing.

This is a decision that can affect the output of each and every 40-hour week you work after you graduate - it deserves at least an hour or two of research.

[psychoempathetic-deactivated201]

I think people have forgotten that education is supposed to be a tool to help you on your way to greatness, not the definition of how great you are.

(via procras-tea-nate)

[collegeessayguy]

[thomasjfrank]

Not sure about the music BPM rule, but a lot of these are good.