How to Study Smart NOT Hard
I had to share this one today after a conversation I had in the library. I only came in for a few hours for the morning and got called out by a study group for “leaving early”.
After a lot of focusing on my study tactics and trying to get better results in less time, I know when I’m being effective in studying and (more importantly) when I’m not.
Spend energy when you’re actually learning something. Don’t waste time when you’re not. This shouldn’t even need to be said but it’s just not the culture in any college or school.
This should sum it up pretty well. And, sadly, it needs saying. Often. Repeatedly.
I define working ‘hard’ as putting in more time into studying. Working ‘smart’ means making the most of the time you spend studying, so you can get the same results off less time.
Nerve
The thing with worker bees and grinds is that they like to fix problems by throwing lots of time at it. Instead of making some cutting decisions, they prefer to play it safe and rely on time being their saviour.
If you want to study smarter, you’ll need the nerve to let go of the safety nets and make some bold moves. This is a scary thing to do. The smart thing to do is to use the fear to your advantage. It’ll keep you laser focused to committing. It will force you to find smarter tactics and strategies.
Self-imposed constraints: Parkinson’s Law and Time
Once you have the nerve, you can start raising the stakes even more. The first step I took was making this rule: I’m allowed to study after my last lecture, and weekends are off-limits too. To provide context, my last lecture usually finished by 12 pm or 1 pm. Roughly five hours of time I get to play around with. Factor in lectures, and I’m left with anywhere from one hour to four hours to get the job done.
This is Parkinson’s Law in action. The idea is that perceived (note: not real) difficulty increases when you give the job more time. You’ve probably already used this. An assignment can finished within one day of the deadline as easily as an assignment due a month before the same deadline. This is why you are able to procrastinate on said assignment, you’re giving yourself the wriggle room to slack off. In comparison, the wriggle room is slim when it’s due tomorrow, and there’s certainly no wriggle room in an exam. The sucker punch here? All three examples give the same payoff, yet some are faster than others
By making the Last Lecture Rule, two things happened. I gave myself no wriggle room, so I had to be in full execution mode and make the most of my studying time (the very definition of studying smart). Also, this put more emphasis on maximizing time by using the right technique and process, and less focus on working hard. Life is more fun when you learn to study smart first instead of studying harder.
What can you do? You need to decide when you’re NOT gonna work. 9am — 12pm? 1pm — 4pm? After dinner? Friday — Sunday? Figure out when you’re least productive and energetic, and make this your ‘No Study Zone’. Once you define this, you define when you’ll study
Self-imposed constraints: The 80/20 rule and Workload
Here is where I remind you again to download the ‘Unlimited Memory’ audio-book for free. Workload is a tough one to deal with no matter what class you’re taking. The higher your retention rate — the lower the workload you’ll have to deal with.
When you’re cutting off oxygen to studying, some things will need to die off. The trick is to hold onto the few fat and rich cows and kill the rest of the freeloaders.
I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that the majority of your results are coming from a select few of things that you’re doing. The rest is studying for studying sakes. Maybe you’re too scared to work less for fear of failure. Maybe you’ve tricked yourself into thinking you need to spend two hours studying for every hour of lectures (An arbitrary rule. I am living proof). Whatever it is, you’re wasting too much time psuedo-studying; studying that feels productive, but isn’t. If you truly want to study smarter, you’ll need to get some nerve and stop doing certain jobs and things.
Which ones do you stop doing? I can’t tell you that. What I can tell you is what I cut out:
- Unnecessarily large amounts of practice problems. It wasn’t like I was learning new skills from doing so many, it was out of fear of being under-prepared (which wasn’t true. I was quite prepared). The same goes for practice tests as well. Once I hit a critical amount, the learning curve flattened. Time to stop. Before, I spend 4 hours on practice problems, and usually in one block. Now I use two half hour blocks per week, and get the same results.
- I dramatically reduced the number of notes I took per lecture. Provided I knew why the concepts were important and how they worked, I was golden. Nothing else was needed. This is a screen shot of a lecture note I used to take:
And here’s a screenshot of the type of note I take now:
See how the latter is far more streamlined? This requires less time to write, less time to revise, and focuses on what matters, understanding big ideas over memorizing weedy details.
- Internet research. 80% of the research I did for essays was never used, so I’ve learned to restrict the oxygen I give to research. The true value comes from writing and giving my own ideas, and not someone else’s ideas.
How did I pull this off? A few pieces of food for thought:
- If I had a heart attack and could only study for two hours a day, what would I focus on?
- For each activity, if this was the only thing I did today, would today be a success? This cuts out the unimportant and irrelevant.
- What 80% of activities are time-consumers? This includes things that needlessly waste time, like cleaning desks and binge watching Steve Harvey on YouTube, as well as things that DO need to be done, and use too much time, like practice tests.
- Am I doing this activity to get results or to feel busy and productive, while avoiding productivity altogether?
Making the most of study time by using the best technique
Now that we’ve cut off some serious fat from your study regime, it’s time to carve up some serious muscle. To do this, we need to use the best technique, the techniques and processes that gives us the greatest bang for our buck.
Some of the ones I use include the following:
- You’ve seen that I break all my notes into question-and-answer pairs. This means that I can look at the question and test myself to recreate the answer. This is called active recall.
- Evernote also means that I can revise notes on my smartphone while walking to lectures. I’m deadly serious when I say you need to make the most of your time. I’m talking about minute-by-minute plays here.
- By using Evernote notebooks, I can use spaced repetition studying. In a nutshell, all notes that I can crush are revised even further into the future, while problem children win tomorrow’s attention. This isn’t the place for in-depth explanations, hit me up if you’re keen for more.
- Interleaving. When crunching through practice problems, it’s more effective if you pick two or three topics and constantly switch between solving these problems instead of focusing on one topic at a time. This means that I can get the same results off fewer practice problems.
- Listening to one type of music. Music means that I can cut out the random and distracting noise from the environment and get laser focused on what I’m doing. Current favourites include The Prodigy and Kylie Minogue. Video game soundtracks are cool too, I really like the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack.
- Distraction sheets. Instead of having random thoughts clog up the mental plumbing, I’ll keep a sheet of paper purely to write down thoughts. This clears up the mental RAM needed to attack whatever I’m doing with full force.
- Speaking of distractions, I use ColdTurkey to block off websites (hi Facebook) for periods of time. I want to use my mental energy for work, not for fighting off low-density fun like Facebook or YouTube. Other tools you can use include FocalFilter, SelfControl, and StayFocusd.
- Night plans and run sheets. When I’m studying, I don’t want to waste time and mental energy deciding what I need to do. To combat this, I’ll make a run sheet of all the tasks I need to do the night before. These run sheets are very detailed, often breaking it down minute-by-minute. The fewer decisions, big or small, that you have to make on the field means that you can spend more time in execution mode.
- Energy and sleep. I want to be firing on all cylinders when I work; I can’t afford the luxury of being tired. If you don’t have the capacity to do work, then no amounts of time will save you. Look after yourself. Sort out your sleep first. Then diet. Then exercise.
For more, I’d Google Cal Newport (the older stuff), Scott Young, and Thomas Frank.
It’s easier to get smart than stay smart: Feedback and experimentation
Once you’ve carved a mean killing machine for studying, you need to keep it lean. You need feedback systems, and I’ll describe three that I use.
Each day, you need to reflect on what happened, which tactics worked well and need to be repeated, which ones didn’t and need to be stopped, and possible tactics to experiment with. You might want to do larger weekly reviews each Sunday. This is to decide which tasks you’re doing that week, and at what time. What should I stop doing? What I start doing? What should I keep doing? The harder it is to answer these questions, the more valuable the feedback will be.
Here are a few examples of my own Stop/Start/Continue notes:
- Stop: Spending unnecessary time testing so many cases for so long. Be more aggressive.
- Start: Half my testing/self-kill-criteria by half.
- Continue: Using Paper Technique with no Snapchat and Google timer.
- Stop: Being frustrated when you aren’t making progress. Either use The Process or Move to another task.
- Start: Create run sheets with circuits, concrete “I can do that” milestones for ALL MANNERS of tasks.
- Continue: Prep work the night before.
To act on the ‘Start’ tactics, I use daily goals. Personally, I call them Mission Objectives because that appeals to me, it feels more like a game. These should be things that you know that you’re capable of — ‘I can do that’ — yet probably wouldn’t do them if you didn’t give them attention. Personal examples include:
- One mini analogy in CHEMMAT 121, using the concept breakdown and “Why?” to accelerate this (which are skills I built at that point)
- Break down one lecture’s concept into smaller components.
- Make one Cause-and-Effect comment either during work or during lecture. (see below)
- Create two analogies across the lectures. (This wasn’t a good one since there are other skills I needed to develop before trying this one).Keep a Post-It note stack on the desk during the 101 lecture.
The other system is Cause and Effect. For this, you’ll want to keep a stack of Post-It notes or a small notebook nearby since this is in-the-moment data that we’re getting. Any time something happens and it effects you in some way, you need to write the following:
When X happens, it has Y effect on me.
Now you’re getting information on yourself, what you like, what you don’t like, what makes you tick. This is information you can cash in on when you’re planning new strategies and tactics to experiment with. Here are some of my own statements.
- When I get a 131 Peerwise Live question correct, which was particularly difficult, I feel fucking awesome and accomplished.
- When I haven’t specifically defined the rules that determine what needs to be revised (CHEMMAT 121 Test 2 prep, corrosion,which I kinda actually know pretty well) and what doesn’t need to be revised, I am indecisive and lose time and attention.
- When my 121 revision isn’t particularly time pressured or big or challenged, I don’t work as hard.
- When I think about how I’d rather be coding, I don’t work as hard.
A full analysis for one day might look something like this:
Closing
The guiding principle here is technique over time. Everything from Self-imposed constraints: Parkinson’s Law and Time onwards can be use to dramatically change how you study. Once you get to the point of studying smart, life becomes much more fun.
If you really want to be pro, the best work smart and hard ;)
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