Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to think about anything except your EPPP exam prep?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could put all your other responsibilities on hold until you became a licensed psychologist?
If you find yourself asking questions like this, know that you are not alone. Most students who are busy with their EPPP test preparation also have to navigate around numerous other commitments including jobs, internships, housework and family commitments. In fact, TSM’s customizable schedule is tailored for exactly this sort of situation.
There’s no question that multitasking can be difficult. In fact, multitasking can be so hard that it’s tempting to let all your other commitment fall by the wayside until after you’ve finished your EPPP exam prep. Sometimes this approach can have disastrous consequences in your life.
A tendency on the opposite extreme is to continually procrastinate beginning your EPPP exam prep until your life is completely free from all other pressures, so that you won’t have to multitask at all. But doing this can also have negative consequences since waiting too long to take your EPPP opens one up to the ill effects of memory decay. Moreover, if you are waiting to begin your EPPP studies on the day your life is free of all other obligations, you may find that such a day never arrives.
While it’s important to learn to prioritize, it’s also necessary to learn to multitask. Most of our lives are filled with numerous responsibilities that we just can’t afford to put off until after we’ve received an EPPP passing score. The solution is to learn some of the secrets for effective multi-tasking so that you can achieve the right work-life-study balance.
Multitasking: A Mixed Blessing
The good news is that multitasking is possible if done in the right way. Humans alone among the animals have the capacity for multitasking because of the highly developed frontopolar cortex. An article on multitasking in Scientific American explains how this part of the brain “organizes pending goals while the brain completes another task” and “helps organize tasks and the order in which their components should be completed.” Etienne Koechlin, co-author of a study on multitasking, suggested that “the ability to hold more than one goal in mind at once might be unique to our species.”
But while the human being’s ability to multitask is a blessing, it also comes with a number of challenges. We’ve observed before that the brain can seize up if too many things are going on simultaniously, and we’ve written about the way too much stimuli in the brain can impede the development of long-term memory. But while it’s good to cut down on unnecessary multitasking (for examples, by turning off your phone when you’re reading and being proactive to limit digital distractions), some degree of multitasking is necessary in order to achieve the right work-life-study balance. In the following posts we will explain how to achieve this. We will show that by achieving the right work-study-family balance, even those with very busy lives can carve out time for EPPP exam prep.
Further Reading