Prevent Procrastination

20 time is a concept where students are given 20 percent of their class time to work on a project of their choosing.
My essential question is "Will understanding more about the brain's scientific reactions to circumstances help with problems, like procrastination?"
I was frustrated that I procrastinate so much in order to get work done and I have tried numerous "motivating mechanisms" to help me work more efficiently, all of which have failed miserably. I'm pretty sure I am not the only one with this problem so for my project I will try to use science to stop procrastination.
My goals begin with trying to inform myself about this topic thoroughly and then trying to implement tips I come up with in my life as well as trying these on some others.
I will measure my process and hopefully achievements by having a consistent task(s) that needs to be completed with different ways to go about doing the job.
My plan moving forward is to research for now, and hopefully start coming up with solutions soon.
Not only do I want to figure out how to prevent procrastination, I also want to learn what causes it because ideally everything we set out to do should be something we want to get done instead of putting it off.

Unit 7 Reflection

Unit 7 was about ecology, or the "study of house", whose main ideas in biology are, homeostasis, equilibrium, and interdependence. We elaborated on the known fact that environments are in best condition when they are in balance, or in homeostasis by learning about energy interdependence to ensure survival.  There are 6 levels of organization on the earth: organism, population, community, ecosystem, biome, biosphere that live in habitats and have niches. Personally I was confused between these two concepts but as we applied them more in our learning, I understood them better. Making up an ecosystem, are both producers (autotrophs) and consumers (heterotrophs). There are 5 trophic levels, including primary producers, primary consumers, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, and quaternary consumers. Factors affecting a population's growth are immigration, emigration, births, deaths, disease, predators, limited supply of abiotic factors, and population density and dispersion. All populations reach a carrying capacity (K), which is the maximum population that an environment can support. After a disturbance in an ecosystem a sequence of changes follow, which is called ecological succession. If something remains after the disturbance it is called secondary succession and if nothing remains it is called primary succession. Loss of species has shown to be tightly correlated with human population growth. 4 major threats to species' extinction are: habitat loss, introduced species by humans, overexploitation, and climate change. 
We did many extension activities related to ecology to supplement our learning this unit. First we watched a movie called "Bag It!" which brought light to the issue of plastic's negative impact on the environment. Also we watched a video called "Story of Stuff" which spoke about human waste polluting the planet intensely. Both of these informed us of how careless humans are when it comes to taking care of the earth and set out to motivate people to help the environment. Also, we did a group project on conservation biology, which was really fun and informative. My group made a video which you can watch here. To reflect on our project, we filled out a personal question sheet to see what type of person we are. I got a 13/20 for assertive and passive aggressive, a 14/20 for passive, and a 10/20 for aggressive. This shows that I like to avoid conflict more than anything even though I got pretty close scores for most of the traits. 

Story of Stuff Notes

• extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal
• linear system on a finite planet
• missing factors like people (govt.,corp.)
• govt. is more concerned about corps than the people
• we r running out of resources
• if u dont own/ buy stuff u dont have value
• use chemicals to help with resources  emitting toxins into our lives
• human breast milk has the highest dose of toxins!
• people work with this stuff because they have no other choice
• many toxins pollute as byproducts
• even if we move the pollutants to other countries, it comes back! as wind pollution etc
• externalized costs  real cost of making things aren’t captured into price
• we have become a nation of consumers
• 1% of things americans buy are still used after 6 months
• our “ultimate purpose” is to produce more consumer goods
• planned obsolescence: made for the dumps
• perceived obsolescence: throw away things that are perfectly fine! (trends do this)
• Ads make us feel unhappy of what we already have
• Though we have more stuff, our national happiness is decreasing
• we have no leisure time or we just shop in that time!
• incineration: BAD because it mixes and releases toxins
• recycling is good! but not enough
• there are points of intervention!

Conservation Biology Project