Feature image taken by Akiko Morioka.

With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting us all with life outside our homes, it has become vital to keep our spirits high as we stay locked in our homes. It has been a month since the lockdown and keeping up the motivation to do something productive has been waning gradually. As such I’ve sought for ways to increase my productivity and overall morale through keeping a good work ethic at home. One important activity I do is helping out my younger brother with his schoolwork during my free time. Shoji faced a particularly difficult time struggling with the work and distractions and the overall awkwardness of the work-home environment situation we’re now living in. Work has been hard for him to do and clearly with the piling missing assignments and no end in sight for his procrastinating habit, he needed some help to get things together. So I decided to help him with keeping up a good working habit to build up a better work ethic and to be organized so as to not miss anymore assignments and be able to the assignments efficiently.

Image taken by Kenji Tan.

After sitting down with him for a while and observing how he works, I quickly realized his need for improved organization. From his scattered desktop to him not knowing when an assignment was due, organization was definitely not his strong point. I helped him create folders to sort through all of his documents by class so that he could find whatever he needed with ease in the future. While observing him he seemed lost trying to find an earlier assignment he was working on for Design class. With this new organization, it will be easier than ever to find the right documents anytime.

Image taken by Kenji Tan.

Image taken by Kenji Tan.

Managebac was proving to be a source of solid grounding but also an area to slack off unnecessarily for him. Though it kept track of all of his assignments, his over-reliance on the website led to many of the assignments being overlooked or forgotten. Many of the assignments also get lost in the dashboard page since DLP started which makes it hard for him to know which ones he’s done and which he’s still working on. But most importantly, the due dates of the assignments. To solve this issue, I gave Shoji my advice on how I like to organize and keep track of work on my agenda. As a physical booklet that you can write in, its a more tangible form of a reminder of what you need to do, and being able to tick off the assignments once they’re done doesn’t just allow you to keep track of work, but it also gives you that satisfying feeling of getting work done, a feeling of accomplishment. So far, he’s seems to be doing a little better with getting the work done efficiently though time will tell for certain. My mother constantly keeps watch over him to make sure he’s doing work but I have confidence in my brother to use the techniques I’ve introduced to him to make his school life much easier to deal with.

Image taken by Kenji Tan.