Life success is dependent on numerous factors, such as intelligence, professionalism, and ability to communicate effectively. Strong social skills also help students enjoy their college years by ensuring easier interaction with peers and teachers. Today, many people stay at home for self-isolation from the coronavirus outbreak and find it challenging to entertain. Why not use this time for personal growth by improving your social skills? Here are the five strategies from Nerdify that can help.

1. Maintain Contact with People Through Social Media and Messengers
Coronavirus outbreak is the period, when people are limited in live communication. However, the modern world provides us with numerous media for distant communication, such as social media and messengers. Use these means to stay in touch with people you know. It is good to start the conversation by sharing some interesting material you find. Do not just resend it, as people are often annoyed by suggestions to study something they were not looking for. Instead, introduce that content by stating the most exciting points or giving your impression about it. It will help start a conversation.

2. Ask People About Things That Are Currently Important
Today, many people are anxious and frightened, and the best way to manage these emotions is to talk about them. Ask your friends and acquaintances about their health and the possible dangers they feel. Many of us have grandparents and other family members in the risk group. You could ask your friends about such relatives, as it is likely a topic of their concern. Think of the other problems your important ones could be facing and communicate them about these issues.

3. Formulate Questions in A Way That Demonstrates Your Real Interest
Often, people consider interest in their lives as a sort of politeness and conventional manners. Your task is persuading them in your real engagement. Give some introduction to the question, as it highlights your interest and provides a person with the context of the question, which is often missing during communication through social media. Prefer open-ended questions, which suggest a description of the situation in several sentences rather than words. For example, asking “They say that coronavirus is especially dangerous for older people. How is your granny doing these times?” is much better than “Is your granny ill?”

4. Avoid Emoji and Express Your Feelings in Words
Although emoji were designed to facilitate communication through social media, they actually reduce social skills and emotional intelligence. You just substitute your facial expression, tone of voice, and other non-verbal clues with a picture that still could be interpreted slightly differently by another person. After you have chosen some emoji, stop and think, what emotion it expresses. Now, substitute this symbol with the words describing your feelings and ideas.

5. Be Patient to Alternative Opinions
Coronavirus is an issue of current interest and importance, and many sources are trying to benefit by creating “fake” news. Some people could believe them, repost, and try to discuss it with you. It could be annoying, but do not get anxious. Try to listen to them and focus on their emotions rather than unrealistic information. It is excellent, if you are aware of the real situation and have facts that disprove the “fake” news. But do not give them solid knowledge. Instead, acknowledge the fears and emotions of the person, then give your opinion without neglecting the information they state. It will maintain a positive relationship and make your opponent open to your position.

Following these Nerdify tips will help you maintain and improve your social skills while staying at home, as well as make your personal relationships with other people better.

Howdy, pals! Even though you may think that your time management skills in college are good enough, Nerdify reminds you that there are still some helpful tips and tricks. 

They will help you upgrade your knowledge and see how you can make your college life much easier and fun.  One of the reasons why your time management skills upgrade can be essential is because you may want to add more to your schedule and get involved in all the fun activities, yet there seems to be never enough time to do it all! Let us see how you can act as an engineer of your own time and resources in a little bit unusual way!

1. Learn to study in blocks!                                                                                           

The trick here is to approach the different study scenarios where you try different time passages or the time-blocks for your college assignments and the times of leisure. This way you can see how much time you may need to get focused in a proper way! While 30-40 minutes time blocks are ideal for studying before you take some rest, you may still need to make them either shorter or longer to see what fits you best. Remember that you have to take the breaks and switch from subject to subject to have a clear mind before you continue with the same or a completely new task. You can take a walk and have a cuppa before you continue with the studies.

The difference in such approach is your being aware of how much time you are going to spend as you study. You do not have to fear that there are hours and hours of studies ahead before you can finally have some rest! Give yourself some credit and remember that you deserve something for a change. Such an approach will not only keep you organized but will help you to divide your homework assignments by the level of importance and complexity as you form your time blocks. Start with the easy tasks first, so you may get an idea of how much time you may need. This way you can also plan the times of leisure for the day ahead when you are the one in control of your plans with all the classes getting in the way!  

2. Do not underestimate college help resources!

Most students spend the majority of their free time by trying to understand how to start with a homework assignment and how to approach an unknown writing format. Of course, there are countless questions that you try to look up online, yet it does not seem clear or your college professor has a different idea about certain rules. You can definitely save some precious time by turning to the writing help center at college and talking to your professor if you are unsure of a something. It does not make you any less smart if you take some time to speak of your concerns instead of acting cool and trying to find solutions on your own.

There are additional study groups and the special support classes almost at every college that will help you to get a guidance and assistance with the most challenging classes. If there are debates, conferences, social work, and laboratory experiments, make sure that you join the fellow students and stay as active as you can. This way you help to make your name known to others as your social network of friends starts to grow. Smart students will start to notice you and share their knowledge. Professor will see that you are a dedicated student who walks an extra mile to study. It will not only improve your chances for a scholarship and financial aid but will also help you to receive timely help!

3. Join College Study Groups!

Sometimes all your free time may be ruined by a single college class that you are struggling with! Even though you may do well in the rest of your classes, failing to understand a subject or follow professor’s speech in your English class or in Quantum Physics is a great challenge! Still, there is a trick that helps you to address the problem professionally – the college study groups. What these study groups offer is a unique advantage to focus on a single subject in a special way where you receive tutoring to cover the curriculum in a faster way. As you join the study group, you can research and ask questions without embarrassment as it is exactly why you are there. In order to help you through the class, you are offered a topic to work at, so you can collaborate with a fellow student on a group task. They call it an enhanced learning because you learn to share and work together starting from the class lecture notes to exploring additional subjects to help you understand the class in a deeper way. In a certain sense, it is like a free tutoring opportunity where you can finally liven up your study sessions and save some time that you spend trying to understand a complex assignment!

4. A Daily Schedule Approach!

While it may sound boring to you, it does help to challenge and upgrade your current time-management skills in college! A daily schedule approach will not only motivate you as a student but help you to manage your time in a more efficient way. Here is how it works:

• Make a list of your daily tasks that you have to complete!
• Write the next list with two columns of more important and less important tasks.
• Mark the tasks that are urgent and should be done with one color.
• Mark the tasks that can wait with the other color.
• Place a checkmark next to each task as you get it complete.
• Try to write down an approximate time that you have spent on each task.
• Make an additional list of all the fun things that you may want to do, so you can add it to your primary schedule!

As you try to work with a daily schedule of your college tasks, share it with your roommate and the fellow students, so you can see how it can be adjusted and what helpful techniques you may learn! Keep the daily schedule always by your side, so you can keep organized and focused!

5. Work at your soft skills!

Your personal development and growth of time management skills depend on the presence of soft skills. What it means, in reality, is your ability to be independent, adhere to strong ethics, and work at your communication skills. You have to stay patient and unbiased as you choose your sources and the books as you study. Setting the goals and trying to be flexible, you have to work at your character and coordinate what you have to learn with your true passions. The way how you approach your college life with all the studies and fun is a reflection of how well you can do in a future career. This work and experience have already started, so one has to be strong and seek for inspiration inside!

Some Nerdy tips and time management observations!

• Always have a time buffer because the days at college somehow go faster than you expect!
• Take advantage of the days and times when you feel creative and inspired. When you feel like working and know that you can do more, make sure that you do your best!
• Focus on one task at a time because even though you may be able to multitask, your brain easily becomes exhausted!
• Limit and challenge yourself with the deadlines because it keeps you more productive. If you have less time to get the task done, you work extra hard.
• Even though you may have flexible college deadlines, make sure not to procrastinate!
• Brainstorm the ideas and alternative solutions as you get stuck with your homework!
• Try to schedule the important tasks and meetings early in the day because the most challenging time is when you try to get ready for the actual task!
• Get rid of the most disturbing tasks first, so you can feel better about the rest of the items on your list!
• Always take notes and do not think that you can remember everything out there! Write it down and use it as a personal reference to turn to! It really helps to save some time!
• Do not forget to have fun and spend some time for yourself!

A kind reminder from Nerdify: your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow. Take care and practice time management!

While students certainly work hard in high school, adjusting to the college workflow can be quite challenging for first-year students. Even when students learn to adapt to the heavy course loads typical of a university, as their academic career progresses into their junior and senior years, their classes become more challenging. To help students old and new deal with feeling overwhelmed, our Nerdify reviews experts have some advice below.

1. Plan Ahead

One way to make sure that you don’t have a last-minute panic about assignments you had forgotten were due is to organize all of your work well in advance. You can even start mapping out your semester during syllabus week, as professors will often give schedules noting when the big tests, assignments, and essays occur. Be sure to mark down the days of midterms and finals too, as those all happen in the same week and can accidentally be forgotten. Even if you have some of the same assignments due week-to-week, it’s still wise, say Nerdify reviews experts, to put them on your calendar so you remember them.

2. Be Realistic About Your Availability

Relating to planning ahead, it’s important that you are truthful with yourself about how much you can do in a day. We can quickly become overly ambitious by cramming too much in our days, falling victim to the “planning fallacy.” That is the psychological term for the cognitive bias we have in thinking tasks will take less time than they will actually require, leading us to snowball into falling behind as we run out of time in the day. It’s good to block out your day in your schedule, but you’ll need to think carefully about how much time it will take to get the work done that needs to be accomplished. A great way to find out how long a task will take is to time yourself the next time you complete a similar assignment, as you can use it to gauge how future projects will go, state Nerdify reviews experts.

3. Make Sure to Sleep Properly

One of the worst cycles to get into as a college student is to chronically undersleep. This might start from you not getting enough work done during the day and needing to study late into the evening, while still necessitating getting up early the next day. Since you’re tired the next day, you won’t be nearly as productive as you could otherwise be, so then you stay up late again trying to catch up. While it’s best to avoid this cycle altogether, realizing you’re getting trapped in it before it becomes a habit is essential, as many Reddit users state they can sometimes repeat this behavior for an entire semester. Be gentle with yourself and realize that you deserve sleep, no matter how productive you were or weren’t that day—learning that it will actually help you work better in the long run.

4. Get Moving

When you’re in the midst of panicking about deadlines, the idea of working out is probably one of the last things on your mind. As much as Reddit users hate to admit it, they, and science, find that exercise is an incredible stress reliever. Getting your heart pumping releases endorphins, which can help greatly improve your mood, and even help those with mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder (ADHD). Exercising in some way, whether that’s hitting the gym or just walking around, allows your mind to relax, as you don’t need to actively focus like you would reading, writing, solving math problems, etc. Stepping and getting a breath of fresh air allows your mind to rejuvenate, and you’ll be able to return to your work with a renewed perspective.

5. Chew Gum

No, really. Believe it or not, our Nerdify reviews team knows that chewing gum has been scientifically proven to help with anxiety and stress. When stressed, your brain makes your body act like it is in physical danger, even if the only actual “danger” is getting a bad grade. Reddit users remark that the act of chewing gum is like eating, and evolutionarily speaking it would make no sense to eat during life-or-death situations, so snaking on gum tricks your brain into thinking that you’re not actually in danger. Additionally, chewing gum increases the blood flow and oxygen in your brain, allowing you to think more clearly. Studies have shown, says Nerdify reviews team, that chewing gum can not only help you relieve stress before and after exams, but it will also aid your performance by helping your memory and recall of information.