[8] How to gain control of your free time.

Laura Vanderkam gives us some advices how to manage our free time.

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When Laura says that she is a specialist in time management, people thinks two things about her: first, that she is always on time (which is not true), and second, that she has some tricks how to find an extra hour a day. But, in fact, she does not. 

She has done a time diary project looking on a 1001 days in the lives of extreme busy women. She has kept a record of their activities for a week to find out how much they worked and slept snd the interviewed them about their strategies. During the project one woman has her water heater broken and she had to devote a whole Wednesday's night to clean up the basement. She found 7 hours in her busy schedule because it was her priority.

Time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but we can choose what to put into it. The key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. "I don't have time for it" often means "It's not my priority". We need to find what our priorities are, list them out and plan our weeks before they happen in order to find time for what is the most important to us.

Vocabulary

tardiness - slowness or lateness in happening or arriving.

- Sorry for my tardiness, my train was delayed and I had to wait for almost two hours.

savor - to enjoy an experience slowly in order to appreciate it as much as possible.

- I want to savor my time spent with you. It's wonderful.

payroll - a list of people employed in the company

- The boss in this company has 300 people on his payroll. Most of them are working in the offices.

scintillating - funny, exciting and clever

- I am having a scintillating conversation with Mary. She is so funny and clever!

hustle - energetic action

- Our team showed a lot of passion and hustle while doing that project.

Sources of pictures: 1, 

Sources of definitions: 1,

[7] Why some people are more altruistic than others?

Abigail Marsh talks about extraordinary altruism and people who care more about others than about themselves.

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When Abigail was 19 years old, she had a car accident. Some stranger stopped his car and helped her, saving her life. Years after that she became a psychologist and she researched on the phenomenon of extraordinary altruism. 

She says, that people believe that they are selfish by nature. So why some of them risk their lives for others? Is it also nature? Abigail started to test psychopacts in search of some characteristic features of their brains. She discovered that psychopaths have problem with recognising the expression of fear on other people's faces. It is connected with a part of their brains, called amygdala, which is responsible for it. Altruists, on the other hand, are the opposite: they have better ability to see someone's fear, and their amygdala is bigger than average person's. 

As a summary she says that it is the matter of nature that some people are more likely to be altruistic than others, but we all can develop this feature in our lives. 

Vocabulary:

gnawing - continuously uncomfortable, worrying or painful

- After four days without the food, we felt gnawing hunger. We were starving.

- I feel gnawing pain in my head. I can't stand it!

dart out - to move quickly of sometihng/ towards something

- Our dog darted out at the cat. It almost catched our furry friend!

- The mouse darted out of its mousehole, because it smeeled cheese.

swerve - to suddenly change direction

- The driver swerved to avoid the pedestrian on the street.

- I had to swerve because I saw a dog darting out at me.

welfare - help given to people of need (especially money from the government)

- Immigrants received welfare from our country, because they lived in poverty.

- Welfare was given to the poorest famillies as a help for upcoming Christmas.

innermost - most sercet and hidden

- In this diary I write my innermost dreams. I do not want anyone to know about them.

- No one knows my innermost desires. I am the only one.

ludicrous - stupid or unreasonable 

- I consider blood donation ludicrous. Why should I share my internal goods with strangers?

- I find it ludicrous to keep a mouse in cage. It only eats, sleeps and makes noise. What a stupid animal...

Sources of pictures: 1,

Sources of definitions: 1, 2, 

[6] How yarn bombing grew into a worldwide movement.

Magda Sayeg talks about how a knitted door handle changed the world.

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"Yarn bombing is when you take knitted or crocheted material out into the urban environment, graffiti-style (...) it means without permission and unsanctioned", says Magda. When she started, she didn't have any ambition in it. She wanted only to see something warm and fuzzy on the cold, steel things that she looked at every day. She wrapped the door handle into the knitted material.
Little did she know that it will change her life. After that, she started to looking for other places to wrap, so she wrapped the stop signal pole near her house. People were stunned - they used to park their cars and make photos of the wrapped sign. Magda wanted more, so she did the same thing for every sign in her neighbourhood. Then she started to think why people react so strongly to it and she discovered that in this overdeveloping world we want to see something relatable. She wanted to do it in a bigger scale so... She wrapped the bus.

After this incident she realised, that she may have started the yarn bombing, but she don't owns it anymore. People do it all around the world. Magda often travels to places that are wrapped into knitted material by other people.
At the end she encourages people to put down phones and controllers and try to do something with treir own hands.

Vocabulary:

enhance - to improve the quality, amount of something

- Training grammar will enhance your skills in English - you will be good at it!

- New equipment will enhance our earnings. We will earn more.

mundane - very ordinary and therefore not interesting

- Mundane things like going to work or paying bills do not excite me at all.

- Mommy! This day is so mundane! I am bored! 

inanimate - having none of the characteristics that any of living creature has

- Toys are inanimate - they do not live.

- Even if you think you teddy bear has soul, it hasn't. It's inanimate.

insurmountable (problem) - so great that it can't be dealt with succesfully

- This problem is so insurmountable. I cannot deal with it by myself. Will you help me?

- Are you Polish? Because you can solve every insurmountable problem.

ponder - to think carefully about something, usually for a long time

- He stopped for a moment to ponder his next move. He had to consider it carefully.

- I am totally lost. I pondered for a while where to go, but I have no idea.

Sources of the images: 1, 2,