How to Become a Straight-A Student

by Cal Newport

By placing themselves in distracting environments and insisting on working in long tedious stretches, these students are crippling their brain’s ability to think clearly and efficiently accomplish the task at hand. The result is fatigue headaches and lackluster outcomes.

A big part of the solution is timing—they gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts.

They replace long, low-intensity stretches of work with a small number of short, high-intensity sessions.

Finally, to obtain the highest possible levels of intensity, you need to choose the right locations, times of day, and durations to study.

The whole system can be summarized in three easy steps: (1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day; (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar; and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day.

Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with a specific time period during which you are going to complete it.

The main reason you break down your to-dos into time slots is to help you avoid the common student mistake of overestimating your free time.

Remember, to-dos and deadlines that exist only in your mind drain your energy, distract your attention, create stress, and are more likely to be forgotten.

Keep a work progress journal

A work progress journal is a simple tool that takes advantage of this reality to help you defeat procrastination. It works as follows: Buy a cheap spiral notebook, and keep it near your calendar. Each morning, when you work out your schedule for the day, quickly jot down in the notebook the date and the most important tasks that you are scheduled to get done. At the end of the day, if you’ve completed all of these tasks, simply jot down all completed. If you failed to complete some tasks, record this, along with a quick explanation.

“When studying for something I don’t especially enjoy, I try to make an event out of it.” Find an out-of-the-way restaurant, coffee shop, or bookstore café.

But you should be able to identify at least one hour, on each weekday, that is consistently free.

The idea is to build a routine in which you use the same reserved time slot each week to do the same thing, with the goal of transforming these slices of work into a habit, something you no longer have to convince yourself to do.

Plan them in advance. Don’t wait until the deadlines are so close that you have no choice but to buckle down. Instead, scout out one or two days to preemptively designate as “hard.”

By proactively scheduling hard days on a regular basis, you reduce their negative impact. When you are forced into an all-day work marathon against your wishes, you feel drained and abused. If that same day has been planned and hyped for the past week, you’ll come away feeling invigorated by your accomplishment. You expected the challenge, prepared for the challenge, and survived it. This strategy is more psychological than time saving, but the effect is powerful. Take ownership of your schedule and you are more likely to respect it.

there are some basic questions that we must address first: When during the day should you study? Where should you go to study? How long should you study before taking a break? The right answers to these questions will boost your productivity, allowing you to squeeze more work out of even less time.

Simon’s plan emphasizes an important reality about studying: You’re most effective between when you wake up and when you eat dinner. You should accomplish as much work as possible during this time.

you must minimize the amount of work you do after dinner.

admitting that she sneaks in work between meetings or classes, using small blocks of thirty or forty-five minutes at a time. If you follow this approach, you’ll be surprised at the amount of work you can squeeze into your hectic daytime schedule.

If you have an hour in between classes, head straight from the first class to a library, or similar study location, near the second class.

Identify a number of isolated study spots spread out across campus and rotate through these hidden locations when you study. Any place in your dorm or house is off-limits, as are the big public study spaces in your main library.

Always keep your eyes open for the next great hidden study spot—small libraries in the buildings of student organizations, a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, or the local public library are all potential concentration gold mines.

“to keep my mind stimulated, I regularly rotate between different venues.”

How long should you study? ANSWER: No more than one hour at a time without a break.

Your break needs to be only five to ten minutes, but it’s important that you take an intellectual breather during this period. This means you should find something you can concentrate on, for just a few minutes, which has nothing to do with the work you were completing right before the break.

Even when you feel like you are on a roll, keep taking regular breaks. Over the long run, it will maximize your energy and retention of the material.

Some cognitive science research concludes that about fifty minutes is the optimal learning period to maximize the material synthesized per time unit.

Without a break, retention is about 30% after 2 hours.”

Step #1. Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day • Jot down to-dos and deadlines on a list whenever they arise. • Transfer these to-dos and deadlines to your calendar every morning. • Plan your day each morning by labeling your to-dos with realistic time frames and moving what you don’t have time for to different dates.

Step #2. Declare War on Procrastination • Keep a work progress journal, and every day record what you wanted to accomplish and whether or not you succeeded. • When working, eat healthy snacks to maximize your energy. • Transform horrible tasks into a big event to help you gather the energy to start. • Build work routines to make steady progress on your obligations without expending too much of your limited motivational resources. • Choose your hard days in advance to minimize their impact. Step #3. Choose When, Where, and How Long • Try to fit as much work as possible into the morning and afternoon, between classes and obligations. • Study in isolated locations. • Take a break every hour.

If the test is worth less than 15 percent of your final grade, it’s a quiz; otherwise, it’s an exam. If the test is worth only 5 percent or less of your grade, designate this a tiny quiz.

Always go to class!

Identify the big ideas.

Exams in nontechnical courses focus entirely on big ideas—they require you to explain them, contrast them, and reevaluate them in the light of new evidence. If you are aware of, and understand, all of the big ideas presented in the course, these tasks are not so difficult, and strong grades will follow.

When you first arrive at the classroom, date your notes and record the title of the day’s lecture, if it’s available. If you’re using a laptop, create a separate notes directory for each class. Save your document in this folder with the date in the file name. This will make it easier to organize the material when you review.

“develop your own shorthand—‘esp.’ for ‘especially,’ ‘N.A.’ for ‘North America,’ etc.” Skip lines with wild abandon, use tabs freely, change the font size, write entire sentences in all caps, throw around asterisks like penny candy—have fun and do whatever helps you visualize the important concepts.

“The best advice I can give on note-taking,” explains Doris, a straight-A student from Harvard, “is not to try to write down everything the professor says, because that is both impossible and counterproductive.” Put simply: You can’t write that fast! And you will end up expending too much energy capturing exact words as opposed to identifying big ideas. Instead, remember the following structure: Question Evidence Conclusion Most big ideas in nontechnical courses are presented in this structure.

You should take advantage of this reality by recording all your notes in a Question/Evidence/Conclusion format.

Don’t be afraid to jot down “QUESTION:” and then leave the rest of the line blank as you begin recording evidence. Once you figure out what the professor’s talking about, you can go back and fill in this blank.

When you formulate a conclusion, you are cementing a big idea. If you can’t finalize a conclusion before the professor moves on to the next question, simply jot down “CONCLUSION:” and plan to come back later during a lull in the lecture, or immediately following class, to fill in the blank.

Take full advantage of lulls in the lecture.

“It’s important to read over your notes right after class to absorb them and make corrections and additions, otherwise you’ll be susceptible to entirely forgetting what was covered that day.”

Clearly label the topic of the discussion. If a student makes a point that strikes you as insightful, jot it down. If you think up a point that strikes you as insightful, first jot it down, then raise your hand and offer it to the class. Participation keeps you focused.

And, most important, if the professor chimes in, write down what he says and underline it several times. You better believe that his points are insightful. By the end of class, you will be left with a topic followed by a relatively short list of interesting insights.

Discussions are supposed to help jog your thinking and perhaps offer interesting ideas for ...

The key to taking notes in a technical course is to record as many sample problems as possible.

Smart students avoid these issues by working constantly on assignments, in small chunks, every day.

Bear in mind that even if you get caught up on all of your assignments for a given class, you should continue to work.

But on days where you happen to be ahead of schedule, and you have already put aside time to work on a certain class, take advantage of this fortuitous situation to get ahead. Once you get used to working a little bit every day, you’ll be surprised by how often this situation might arise.

“It’s important to triage your assignments: What do you need to read? What do you need to skim? And what can you skip entirely?”