I got a lot from this book. Especially helpful was his admission that when he finishes a book chapter he immediately summarises it. This is a good wayI got a lot from this book. Especially helpful was his admission that when he finishes a book chapter he immediately summarises it. This is a good way to review books.
The author—who, as an aside, is very, very funny (this book is not dry)—says that grades don’t need to be perfect, they need to be as good as they need to be to land you a job. Thus, study should be about getting good enough grades while leaving time for extracurricular activities such as networking, actually working, having fun, and building things. Your grades quantify your preparedness: a bad mark means you weren’t prepared. To get good grades, be prepared. This book helps you prepare by improving the quality of your learning and how efficiently you study. One cornerstone of his approach is the belief that your mind is for having ideas, not for holding him. He outlines many ways to store information in a way that’s organised and easily retrievable. Practicing his advice is hard, but deliberately seeking discomfort is a prerequisite for success. Do it anyway.
1. Pay better attention in class a. Don’t overload the system; be healthy: eat well, sleep well, exercise. b. Sit at the front of the class to reduce distraction and improve focus. c. Be prepared; be mindful. Plan tonight for tomorrow. d. Get help from your professor. Know in advance what you want to ask and be specific. e. Be an active participant instead of a passive observer: speak up in class discussions and take notes. 2. Take effective notes a. Don’t just write paragraphs of notes. b. 5 note taking methods: i. Bullet point outlines. ii. Cornell method: divide the page into 3 sections: Cue, note, and summary. Takes notes as usual in the notes column. Write questions in the cute column. Summarise at the end in the summary column. iii. Mind maps. FUCK mind maps. iv. Flow: a stupid name for writing things in your own words and linking ideas. v. Write notes directly on lecture presentation printouts. vi. Computers vs. paper: you can’t record word for word when writing on paper—we’re too slow. This is good. It forces you to process, synthesise, and retrieve knowledge in a way that makes sense to you. Computers allow notetaking, paper allows sense-making. 3. Get more out of your textbooks a. Don’t read all assigned readings. Read only what’s necessary. Prioritise primary readings. b. Know how you’ll be assessed: for essays, understand concepts. For multiple choice, remember key terms. c. Practice active reading i. Pseudo-skimming: skim unnecessary sections, slowly read important sections. ii. Read backwards: skip to the end and see if the information you’re after is mentioned there. If it isn’t, it likely wasn’t mentioned in the main text. iii. Help your brain recall what you’re reading about by posing questions. (This is a great point. Ask lots of questions about what you’re reading). iv. Pay attention to formatting (bolded, italicised, lists), as they usually frame important ideas. v. Highlight and make notes (highlighting does fuck all, and merely making notes isn’t helpful. What kind of notes? Etc). vi. Summarise what you read. 4. Plan efficiently a. Plan your entire education/as much in advance as you can. b. Plan your week on Sunday. Note everything you want to do this week. c. Manage task contexts: group tasks based on whether they require lots of mental energy or little. Batch low intensity tasks together and do them all at once (Terence Tao has a blog post on this). d. Determine whether you work better at morning or night. Do high-intensity tasks whenever you work best. e. Make a daily plan/to-do list. Optimise for 3 things per day. Do it either 1st thing in the morning or the night before. f. Do the most important things on you daily lists first. Prioritise what’s important. Use willpower on things that matter. g. Try timeboxing: schedule specific blocks of time, at specific times of day, for each task on your to-do list. This reduces decision-fatigue and analysis paralysis: all your decisions are made for you in advance. h. When people imagine realistic scenarios, they’re almost always very close to ideal scenarios. Know this bias and use it. Things take longer than you plan (planning fallacy). Things still take longer than you plan even when you know about the planning fallacy (Hofstadter’s law). Plan more time for things in advance. 5. Build your optimal study environment a. Location: when possible, surround yourself with serious, hardworking people. Their drive will rub off on you and spur you to do more. b. Figure out if you work better with background music/noise (hint: research says it’s bad unless drowning out worse distractions). c. Study alone, not with friends. d. Ruthlessly avoid distractions. Turn off your phone. 6. Stay organised a. Organise files on your computer. Always save and store documents in keeping with this organisation. b. Have a way of quickly capturing new ideas. For example, carry a pen and notepad with you everywhere you go. (New ideas are the foundation of your human capital. They are rare and expensive. Do not lose them). c. Try Evernote. d. Use a task manager: somewhere you can store tasks, be it a bullet journal or an app. e. Fight entropy: make time on Sunday to review your use of all the aforementioned productivity tips and make sure you haven’t started slacking. Be conscientious. 7. Defeat procrastination a. Get over I don’t feel like it. NEVER USE THIS EXCUSE. EVER. EVER! Say, I don’t feel like it—but I’m going to do it anyway. b. Willpower is a limited resource, so build habits that don’t need willpower to do. c. Avoid low-density fun (YouTube, FB doomscrolling). Commit to high-density fun (watching your favourite TV show; playing a videogame). Schedule high-density fun as a reward after completing all your work. d. Use the pomodoro technique when you just can’t seem to focus. e. Threaten yourself if you don’t do your work! (See Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker). Donate to a charity you hate if you don’t do your work; pledge to destroy something you love if you don’t do your work; etc. 8. Study smarter a. Ask yourself, Why are you studying? b. Replicate the test conditions. i) Gather all study materials ii) Identify the most important topics and terms and concepts iii) Complete a practice test that replicates exam anxiety. Get used to that feeling. Get used to performing under pressure. iv) Review and repeat c. Emphasise active learning: rephrase, pose questions, recall, etc. d. Use spaced repetition (see Gwern’s essay). e. How to study math: i) Notice your confusion: notice when you’re confused and do not move on until you’re not confused any more. ii) Understand, don’t memorize. Keep pushing until it “clicks”. You need to be able to explain what you’ve done to others. 9. Write better papers a. Do a brain dump. Think about the problem for a while, then write everything you think about it, questions, problems, references, asides. Everything. b. Develop a theme and ask key questions. c. How to conduct better research (see Cal Newport’s How to be a Straight-A Student). “Research recursion syndrome”: finding just one more citation. Have at least 2 sources per point, not much more. d. Write a shit first draft. Let it be shit. It’s gonna be shit. e. Read your paper out loud. f. Get feedback i) Get feedback from one person at a time. Edit after person 1, then present to person 2. ii) Explain exactly what feedback you’d like. iii) Seek feedback from experts and non-experts alike. 10. Make group projects suck less a. Meet, once, in person, as soon as you can. b. Avoid the bystander effect: make sure every task has someone specific assigned to it. c. When in doubt, be the leader. d. Choose an editor: someone who makes sure all the individual contributions merge into a cohesive whole. e. Use Trello, Slack, Google Docs....more
Loading...
