The 25 Year-Old Freshman

When Jay graduated high school in 2002, he bypassed college to compete with a professional drum and bugle corps, eventually becoming head of percussion and winning a regional championship.

Over time, Jay sagely realized that “this was not heading toward a long-term career.” So in the fall of 2008, he enrolled in college as a 25 year-old freshman.

Like many new students, he allowed his study habits to coalesce randomly into a half-assed jumble of procrastination and stress.

“My strategy was to earn a 4.0 through losing lots of sleep cramming for exams and saving papers until the last minute,” Jay recalls.

He was earning good grades this first year, but as he reports: “it was killing me both physically and mentally.” Around this time, his daughter was born, straining an already tight schedule.

“It was a disaster waiting to happen.”

His words proved prophetic. This fall, during his first semester as a sophomore, Jay “hit the wall” with a pair of tough upper-level classes.

“Not knowing how to study or manage my time put me behind,” Jay says. He bombed his first exams, earning a D on one of them.

“I realized that I needed to re-learn how to study,” Jay says. This led him to Barnes & Noble, where he stumbled across an intriguing, yellow-colored book. This, in turn, led him to Study Hacks.

Things began to change…

The Transformation

“Following the advice on your blog,” Jay recalls, “I performed a post-exam post-mortem on my two bombed midterms and realized that my ’studying’ had consisted of rewriting the textbooks.”

“There was no understanding of the information.”

Inspired by the concept of an autopilot schedule and the philosophy of fixed-schedule productivity, Jay adopted the following structure for his week:

“It allowed me to study at maximum efficiency and still spend time with my family in the evenings.”

There are two things worth noticing about this schedule. First, it ends at 4:30 every afternoon. And second, it contains blocks labeled “prep course.” This is time Jay set aside as a shadow course: during these blocks he updates study guides and begins ridiculously early preparation for his real courses — preventing the need to add lots of extra study time right before exams.

And that’s not all.

Intent on mining the Study Hacks Canon for all it’s worth, Jay adopted the quiz-and-recall method for review and deploys the stealth studying strategy during walks between buildings. In class, he takes notes with a mixture of Q/E/C and focused question clusters, depending on the material. He also uses one of my all-time favorite strategies, the Sunday ritual — a block of time on Sunday dedicated to “hammering out a plan of action for the week ahead.”

The Results

“I have upped my grades in my two disaster classes to the middle B-level,” Jay reports. “And I’m striving for an A with two more exams left in the semester.”

Even more important: “My daughter gets to see her father in the evening free of hassle, and my girlfriend can enjoy our company without the distractions of open textbooks and half-written papers.”

Conclusion

The maturity that comes with Jay’s age, and the responsibilities of a family,  certainly stoked his motivation to make systemic changes to his student lifestyle. But the general lesson is applicable to any student: big turnarounds require big effort.

###

Spread the Word Contest Update: Congratulations to Nazim, who won my reader contest that asked students to help spread the word about the Study Hacks philosophy. Nazim personally recommend my books to dozens of students. He also donated his own copies to his school library, eventually getting them put on prominent display near the entrance. For his efforts he’ll receive a signed copy of a rare yellow-jacketed, galley version of the red book.

I’ve seen a recent uptick in e-mails asking how my strategic approach to academic advice might apply to health goals; most notably, avoiding those inevitable college pounds. As always when it comes to such issues, I turned for guidance to Study Hack’s resident fitness guru, Adam Gilbert of the exceptional My Body Tutor service.

Adam, there’s no real “secret” to staying fit, you need to eat well and exercise. Yet I keep getting e-mails from students who struggle. What’s the issue lurking behind the scenes here?

We turn exercise into an all or nothing game.  When we’re on, we’re on — and we feel like we’re making things happen.

But when we mess up and miss some days — which is inevitable — things snowball. Our short-term self argues with our long-term self that because we’ve messed up a little bit, it’s game over, and we can now default to eating poorly and stop exercising altogether.

Dieters are notorious for thinking like this. “Well, I had a small cookie. So why bother eating healthfully now?”, they rationalize. They then eat poorly for the rest of the month.

In other words, an all or nothing mindset will inevitably slide into nothing.

How does one avoid this?

The real magic happens when you focus on recovering as quickly as possible from a missed workout. Is it going to take you a day, three days, a week, or three weeks to get back to exercising?

How quickly you can recover is what you should focus on — not the details of your over-complicated, reverse pyramid supersets.

For example, for quick reboots after missed exercise, I recommend the 20-20-20 workout: do 20 jumping jacks, 20 push ups, and then 20 crunches. Do that in a circuit 2 to 4 times. It won’t take more than 12 minutes, but it will certainly exert you.

This is an incredibly simple thing to do when time is short and you’ve missed a few workouts. In a dozen minutes you’re back in the game.

I can’t stress enough the importance of fast recovery of the exercise habit; even if the workout you return to is light. Falling off the exercise wagon generates a double-whammy of badness. First, you miss the health advantages of exercise. But second, and much more important, once you shift out of a healthy mindset, you start overeating crappy food, and this is where the real damage to your waistline is done.

So you would recommend having an variety of workouts at your disposal, from standard gym routines, to quick body weight circuits — like the 20-20-20 — that you can do in your dorm. The idea being that you can adapt to time constraints without having your whole system stall.

Exactly.

Justine Musk is the author of three novels with a fourth on its way. She specializes in dark fantasy and the supernatural, and has written for both adult and young adult audiences. She lives the standard writer-fantasy: making a living crafting titles dealing with subjects that fascinate her.

I’m bringing Justine to your attention because she recently published a pair of insightful blog posts that dissect her journey into professional writing. This story is relevant to our mission here, as the goal of becoming a popular writer can be a stand-in for almost any quest to “become so good they can’t ignore you.” And as I’ve argued again and again, it’s this building of an outstanding ability — not the display of raw diligence — that ultimately generates remarkable lives.

I will leave the task of fully ingesting Justine’s posts to you. But I wanted to first mention a few key observations:

1. She invested a staggering amount of practice.
   Justine wrote ten novels or novellas before selling her first.
2. Her practice was deliberate.
   For half of these failed novels she sought out agent representation, and even succeeded with some, only to receive rejections from the subsequent publishing house submissions. In these cases, she actively solicited feedback that she then used in her next projects. She also maintained both writing partners and mentors. In other words, hard work, in isolation, was irrelevant to her journey. It was the realization that she had a long way to go, combined with a quest for feedback to push her along that path, that made it work.
3. She was obsessively focused.
   “The art of any art is the art of obsession,” she said. “This is not something that people in general tend to understand. They encourage you to be well-rounded, which bemuses me in a society that tends to reward the specialists – the obsessives – those who decided to excel at one thing instead of becoming good at a hundred or competent at a thousand.”

To borrow Justine’s wording, it bemuses me that so many of my peers want what she has — a remarkable life fueled by an ability to do something interesting that people value — yet ignore almost everything important about her path to this end. They focus, instead, on proving their diligence with double or triple majors and meaningless pile-ups of extracurriculars, or tread water in what Justine calls a “gray area,” convincing themselves that they too could be remarkable if they only just applied themselves, spending their time day dreaming about defying the status quo, as if courage was the key to occupational reward, not the decidedly less sexy task of becoming excellent at something valuable.

If you’re suffering from what Justine describes as “lightning-strikes of yearning ripping through the different chambers of [your] heart,” take the time to read her posts in detail. They will help you better understand the subtle art of becoming remarkable.

E-mail Wizard

I don’t waste much time with e-mail. I typically check my inboxes two, maybe three times a day, and always process them back to empty.

(An exception to this rule are the copious e-mails from blog readers, which are shunted to their own inbox and which I work on once a day, in a pre-scheduled 30 minute slot that keeps my fixed-schedule intact.)

It’s a well-oiled, efficient machine, that keeps me connected to the world but also maximizes the hours I can spend in a state of hard focus.

There are three important points about this system that I want to draw your attention toward:

1. It’s simple to understand and provides obvious benefits.
2. Many people would love to do something similar.
3. Few of them actually do.

It’s the contradiction of point 3 that motivates today’s post…

The Hidden Art of Practice

If you know how to do something, it’s easy to do, and it would make your life better, why wouldn’t you? This paradox confronts me every day when reviewing reader e-mails: Students know that certain advice — be it following an autopilot schedule or stopping pseudowork — would improve their life, but they just can’t stick with it.

Why does this paradox exist?

When I told you above about my experience with e-mail, I left out an important piece of the story: it took years of practice to get to this efficient state.

Today, I’m good at ignoring my inbox in the same way that your roommate can play Tears in Heaven on his guitar. It’s not that we’re special — we simply practiced.

Unfortunately, this omission plagues this blog. In almost every piece of advice I’ve described, I’ve failed to tack on the crucial caveat that regardless of how simple my suggestion, it’s still going to take practice to make it a reliable part of your life.

I want you to keep this idea in mind when you grapple with the Study Hacks canon. Don’t decide to adopt a strategy. Instead, decide to practice adopting the strategy until it sticks.

I know this is less exciting than the idea that an afternoon in my archives can make tomorrow’s midterm a breeze. But I hope that in the long run, this mindset significantly improves your success.

(Photo by jonicdao)

The Return of Q & A

After spending a nice evening yesterday working through my backlog of Study Hacks e-mail, I felt inspired to do an old fashioned Q & A style post. I like these posts because they allow me to cover a lot of ground quickly and reinforce some of the Study Hacks basics. If you’re amenable, I’ll try to work more of these Q & A dashes into my regular rotation.

And as always, feel free to e-mail me with your own student questions.

From the reader mailbag:

While most of your site deals with college and some grad school advice, I haven’t seen anything for med students.  Have you talked to any successful students in med school?

Cal responds:

I have. The consistent message I hear from med students is that there’s a unique best way to study for each course/professor combo. If you can find this best way, then the task isn’t too bad. By contrast, if you don’t, you can end up spending endless hours and still not score as high as you hoped. With this in mind, these students recommend that for every class talk to both the professor, and older students who already took the class, about the best way to study.

From the reader mailbag:

I’m currently very sick (sniffles, fever, coughing, sore throat etc.)… but I also have five very scary midterms coming up very soon. What’s your advice for dealing with sickness when deadlines loom?

Cal responds:

Assuming your sickness is merely tiring (like a cold) and not debilitating (like the flu), then I recommend that you adjust your detailed date/action style midterm study plan (you do have a detailed study plan, right?) so that over the next few days you’re only doing 1 - 3 hours of work on your test preparation. Do this work early in the morning and afternoon, and then spend your after-dinner hours relaxing until sleep.

Once you start to rebound, review the study tasks that remain and then make the best schedule possible for completing them. (This will likely include a few hard days.)

From the reader mailbag:

What are your thoughts on rewriting lecture notes?

Cal responds:

It’s a waste of time. The best students learn how to process the information as its presented and then record good notes, in their own words, on the fly.

From the reader mailbag:

I read your article about grand projects.  I’m really interested in business, economics, and travel, so I want to start an travel abroad program that takes students to China to study China’s different economic policies. Do you have any ideas for a more feasible grand project that involves econ and business?

Cal responds:

As I explain in this article about innovation, it can be difficult to think up feasible grand projects from scratch. For example, to start a travel abroad program out of the blue will almost definitely fail. (The logistics and experience required for such a venture are staggering!)

This is why I recommend the following three step path: (1) join a community related to your interest; (2) pay your dues; (3) complete small projects to gain access to larger, more impressive projects.

The support and resources of an existing community will enable you to accomplish much more than if you were working on your own.

From the reader mailbag:

I just found out my final exam schedule and it’s not pretty.  I have 4 final exams in 3 days!  I am extremely worried now and I just do not know what to do or how to go about studying for these exams!

Cal responds:

The dates of your exams couldn’t matter less! If you have a detailed date/action style exam study plan (sense a recurring theme to today’s post?) then you should have no trouble completing all the necessary preparation work. Whether the exams all fall on the same day, or are well-separated, this should have no effect on a study process that spans 2 - 3 weeks.

Feeble Focus

A student who I’ll call Ron recently sent me an e-mail with an ominous title: Loss of Focus.

“I really enjoy most of my courses,” he started. “And I’m definitely not in the wrong major…But there are some courses that I find extremely difficult and uninteresting.”

There’s nothing surprising about this observation. As I’ve said before, you have to expect that not every course is going to incite scholastic reverie — some subjects you just have to grin and bear en route to becoming “educated.”

Ron, as it turned out, was having trouble with the “grin and bear” part of this equation.

“I sit down, stare at the books, and nothing happens,” he told me.  “After reading and solving problems for 15 minutes I get bored and distracted, start surfing the web, checking email or such.”

He concluded with a key question that I receive often:

You mention that hard focus is necessary. I agree, but my question is: How can I focus on difficult, unenjoyable, painful tasks?

It sounds like a job for the grade whisperer…

The Scatter Shot Attack

As I explained in my original post on hard focus, learning to concentrate when you don’t want to is a practiced art. A lot of students, however, are so turned off by hard work that they can’t even muster the small blocks of hard focus needed to start building toward something more substantial.

I have time-tested solution to this issue. I call it the scatter shot attack because it’s comprised of a large number of small tactics — not one magic bullet.

For example, here was my advice to Ron:

• Use Your Autopilot: Make sure your dreaded work is tackled within a trusted autopilot schedule. Having to decide each week when to do this work is an extra hurdle that you want to avoid.
• Use Location: Identify a unique isolated location for each type of dreaded work. When in that location all you’re allowed to do is work. Absolutely no Internet will be tolerated. If you want to go online, or otherwise change mental gears, you have to physically leave the location. No exceptions.
• Be Reasonable: Make sure that you’re scheduling more than enough time for each dreaded task. If your schedule is unreasonably tight your mind will recognize this reality and summon intense resistance.
• Embrace Specificity: Throw out your vague plans to “do reading” or “work on a problem set.” If you want your mind to cooperate, you need to reduce your work to a set of unambiguous and specific actions that will clearly fit into the time set aside.
• (Wo)Man Up: Finally, you need to recognize that throughout life you’re going to have to do work that you don’t want to do. This is perhaps the defining trait of being an adult. College is as good a time as any to recognize this fact, man up (or woman up, as the case may be), and just do it, even if you don’t want to. You’re not sixteen and living at home anymore…

I haven’t yet heard back from Ron, but I’ve recommended this same scatter shot approach to dozens of students who suffered from similar issues. If you know what you’re supposed to be doing, but just can’t make it happen, don’t seek a magic bullet that will make things instantly better. Instead attack the problem from multiple angles until your mind has no option but to submit.

I recently received an e-mail from a college freshman. He described himself as “kind of a techie person,” which he then unambiguously confirmed by noting that his productivity system made use of Evernote, his iPhone, a calendar application, and an online to-do list service.

“I like adopting new gadgets and technology,” he told me. “But I feel it’s becoming more of a hindrance than help.”

Fed up with the maintenance of his crowded stable of productivity tools, this student recently tried an experiment in simplicity: he used only a paper notebook to informally organize his day.

“These were the most productive days of my life,” he said.

Does this mean that the student was converted to productivity Luddite? Not quite. Though he had enjoyed immense productivity, he still felt a creeping dread about his new approach.

“I’m afraid that if I only depend on paper and pencil I’ll lose something important or it’d be too hard to navigate after a few days.”

This student’s problem is a common one: how do you balance high-tech rigid solutions with low-tech informal solutions when organizing your student life?

Freestyle Productivity

Having spent the last decade systematically experimenting with student organizational strategies, I’ve found that the following balance produces the most consistent results:

• High-tech and highly-structured solutions are best for capture.
• Low-tech and loosely-structured solutions are best for planning.

I use the term “capture” in the GTD sense of the word: a common place where all of the “stuff” in your life can be reliably stored so that your mind doesn’t have to worry about it. This includes tasks, appointments, and projects.

As the student from above noticed, it can be hard to use simple paper-based solutions for capture. The number of tasks in your life, for example, can be voluminous and soon overwhelm notebooks — transforming them into a mash of crossed out, unclear jottings.

I prefer simple online solutions that can be accessed from any computer. I use google calendar and google tasks because I can use them from my gmail account, which is the one website I know I will return to many times a day.

Though these tools are great for capturing stuff, they also turn out to be terrible for planning what to do with this stuff. Most people who’ve tried a systematic approach to planning know what I mean. (Who among us hasn’t assigned priority-based dates to our task list, only to find that we spend more time resetting deadlines than actually doing the work?)

As the student from above also discovered, a looser approach to planning works better. He used a blank notebook to organize his days. I happen to be a firm believer in the use of a plan.txt file, which is similar. As I explained in this earlier post, each Monday I record in a simple text file a plan for my upcoming week. There are no rules for this plan. Sometimes it includes pages of discussion about changing the rhythm of my work flow, other times it’s short and practical (e.g., “Monday is all about submitting this paper, Tuesday is about experimenting with the data collection tools…”).

The important point is that I trust my mind’s ability to build the type of plan that best suits the current situation. It will always outperform a rigid system.

This freestyle approach provides an answer to the quandary faced by the student from above. The reason he feels conflicted is because neither of his productivity approaches are best in isolation. He should continue to use his iPhone and fancy calendar applications to capture and wrangle the stuff in his life. At the same time, he should allow himself the flexibility to make weekly plans that are not constrained by strict rules.

A blank sheet of notebook paper, as he learned, can outperform even the fanciest scheduling system, so long as the work to be scheduled is held somewhere safe.

The Freesytle Lifestyle

I first promoted this approach to productivity in this post from last November. (I recommend that you read the original post for more detail and examples.) The idea is important enough, however, that I thought it was worth reiterating here.

Before concluding, I want to address the most common complaint about this philosophy: notably, the worry that freestyle productivity clashes with my canonical advice on autopilot schedules, time blocking, Sunday rituals, and similarly structured approaches to planning.

Here’s the important observation: freestyle productivity doesn’t eliminate structure in your planning, it just eliminates its status as unchangable. It’s perfectly fine for your plan.txt to say, for example, “I am going to keep using my autopilot schedule this week because it seems to be really helping.” At the same time, it’s also expected that your plan.txt might say, “I need to make the following changes to my autopilot because the timing is not working out,” or even “I’m dropping this approach altogether to instead try…”

In other words, the collection of productivity tactics I’ve presented on this blog can be seen as an arsenal of weapons at the disposal of your flexible and always evolving work plan.

Next week, I’m giving the Theory Colloquium lecture here at MIT’s computer science laboratory. This means I’m facing one of the most common and most dreaded tasks of academic life: writing a talk.

Constructing good talks slides is grueling. The task is not so large that it can become a harmless background task in your life, and it’s not so small that it can be dispatched in a single inspired dash. In other words, like all medium-sized hard projects, it’s a catalyst for procrastination.

Here’s how I’m handling it…

A Morning Brainstorm

This morning, I brought a notebook, a cup of coffee, and my dog, Bailey, out into the courtyard of my apartment building. I spent a half hour under the shade of a tall maple tree working out the big ideas of the talk while simultaneously frustrating Bailey’s life ambition to fully devour a tennis ball.

Then I put the work aside and did something else.

Later this afternoon, when I arrived at my office on campus, I spent another hour building the slides for the first 10 - 15 minutes of the talk.

And that was it for today.

Tomorrow I’ll make a hard push to finish a full draft of the slides, leaving almost a full week for my standard cycle of practice talks and polishing.

The Ice Bath Method

I want you to notice the general structure to my approach:

1. Start with a half hour brainstorming session. Go somewhere interesting, armed only with pen, paper, and caffeine. (Dog optional.)
2. Later that same day, use the results of your brainstorming to set the foundation for one hour of hard focus.
3. Wait until at least the next day to do your first multi-hour push on the project.

I call this the ice bath method in reference to the training methods of cold water swimmers, who prepare themselves for the bracing cold by a series of short exposures to ice water. I claim that it’s a smart strategy for any medium-sized project; i.e., a project too large to knock out in an hour or two, but too small to handle with a regular session in your autopilot schedule.

The first step of the method is designed to overcome your resistance to starting. Staring at a blank computer screen that needs to soon contain a hundred slides is daunting. Brainstorming under a tree is romantic, and therefore much easier to actually do.

Once you’ve taken some action, it’s easier to dive into the second step which requires some hard work, but is limited to only an hour. This limit will help you follow through.

The third step is where the real hard work happens. Because you’ve already made non-trivial progress during step two, however, this work is much easier to start — you’re not staring at a blank screen, you’re instead continuing with a specific set of known next actions.

The ice bath method is simple, but it’s also how I manage to get started on (and finish) terrible projects surprisingly early.

Spread the Word

The first month of a new semester is the perfect time to motivate students to overhaul their study habits. With this in mind, I want to humbly ask you to consider helping me spread the word to the stressed out, unhappy, pseudo-workers among you.

Here are three specific ways you can help…

1. Leave an Honest Review on Amazon.
   Students take Amazon reviews seriously when considering book purchases. If you had a good experience with my books, please consider leaving an honest review (click here for the red book and here for the yellow book). The most useful reviews tend to include specific details about how the book helped.
2. Mention the Books to Your Academic Skills Center.
   Several students have reported mentioning the books to their academic skills center on campus. In many cases, the centers subsequently started recommending the books to students who are struggling. This is a great way to impact a lot of your classmates.
3. Buy a Copy for a Friend.
   Do you have a friend who seems overwhelmed by college? Buy him a copy of the red or yellow book. I suggest writing my e-mail address on the inside cover and letting him know that he can always e-mail me with questions about applying the advice to his situation.

If the Study Hacks philosophy of doing less, doing better, and knowing why has improved your life, please consider taking a few moments to spread those same benefits to others.

Thanks!

In the summer of 2000, a Dartmouth economist named Bruce Sacerdote published a paper titled Peer Effects in Randomly Assigned Roommates. His premise was interesting: Incoming students at Dartmouth are assigned to rooms at random. He knew, therefore, that when two roommates first arrive on campus, their behavior should have no more in common than any other pair of students.

Sacerdote’s insight was to wait until the end of the year and then look for traits that roommates had become more likely to share than random pairs. The idea was that these shared traits would be due to the roommates’ influence on each others’ behavior.

Sacerdote found that for some behaviors, such as major choice, roommates didn’t affect each other. But for one trait in particular, GPA, they had a lot in common. He attributed this finding to a simple idea: students’ study habits are heavily influenced by their peers.

It’s important that you recognize this reality, because these peer influences shape more than you might imagine about your own habits. Like a pair of behavioral blinders, carefully slipped into place without you noticing, peer influence may have prevented you from seeing a variety of radical strategies that could greatly simplify your student life.

In this post, I want to describe one such strategy…

The Definitive Guide to Acing Your Schedule

Studying for a class starts out as a crap-shoot. Until your first exam (and, more importantly, your first post-exam post-mortem) you have to take a random stab on how best to prepare.

Or do you?

One of the “laws” that emerges from peer-influenced study habit formation is that you must attack each course by yourself. Sure, you can bitch with other students in the same class, and maybe perform the occasional group study session, but in the end, it’s you alone battling the mysterious forces of your professor and his capricious whims.

Here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to be this way. Consider the following simple strategy for improving your performance in given course:

1. Setup a separate chat with your professor, your TA, and a student who took the same course in a previous semester.
2. In each chat session, ask the same question:
   

   If you were to write an advice guide about doing incredibly well in this class, what would the chapters be?

It takes around an hour to complete this exercise. But it’s results are near magical. Gone is the guesswork about notetaking, reading, and how best to review. In its place is specific advice that is tuned to the specific challenge you face. You’d have to be a real slacker not to do well with this treasure map in hand.

Yet almost no student does this…

With this in mind, I hope the advice in this post serves two purposes. First, it’s a great way to do better as a student; so try it. Second, and perhaps more important, it can act as a gateway that helps you move beyond the blinders of peer influence, and start seeking your own approach to mastering the college experience.

The most effective strategies for improving your student life are often also the simplest. You just need the ability to see them.

(Photo by jackbrodus)