Productivity Club is one of the many new clubs that have been added to the GZAAT this school year, created by two senior students: Nikoloz Salakaia and Shota Sikharulidze. The goal of the Club is to support the students to be more productive and the problem of procrastination.
According to Nikoloz and Shota, their idea for the club originated this summer of 2023 when they went to Harvard School for 8 weeks and observed the students’ study culture and different study techniques. They had a lot of assignments to cover each day, so they picked up different productive approaches and teaching methods that helped students be more organized.
Nikoloz noted: “At Harvard, there was an Academic Tutoring Program that included Accountability Hours. This was an opportunity for students who find it difficult to concentrate and take lots of time to study to resolve their problems.” The club founders liked this program and decided to implement it here in GZAAT, bringing up the Harvard techniques and methods for studying.
Overall, the Productivity Club offers two opportunities to students - the Accountability Hours and the Academic Toolbox. Accountability Hours is an opportunity for students, no matter if they are a member or not, to sign up for a session where 4 or 5 students gather with either founder. The sessions start by sharing every student's short-term goals and then starting to work on their assignments with a certain method and after an hour passes, each will evaluate how they were able to finish the assignment in the short period.
The second opportunity is the Academic Toolbox, a data engine platform that will be created soon, where all the gathered academic techniques for reading, writing, and generally studying will be compiled. After, once or twice a month the club members will have a meeting and share their experiences with different approaches, give feedback to each other, and bring up newly discovered methods that worked for them and would like others to consider trying.
Even though the Academic Toolbox is not available yet, it will soon be in production and ready to use for everybody in the GZAAT community. As mentioned before, it will feature many study techniques, so before creating the platform, the new methods should first be discussed by the club members during a couple of sessions.
As the final message, the founders added that joining their club would be more of an investment, as even though a person dedicates a short amount of time to this club - only five hours per month - in the end, they benefit a lot from increased productivity, newly developed study skills and the defeated problems of procrastination!