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There is just no way to be well-balanced, happy, and academically successful if you’re regularly burning through your free hours in long, painful stretches of inefficient studying.
gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts.
the list is a trusted piece of storage.
Because of your list, the deadline will not be lost. It will be scheduled.
Without a schedule, people don’t like to do menial chores unless they’re 100 percent necessary.
Without a system to capture them, we can’t expect Stephen to remember long-term ideas for any extended period of time.
Without time labels, Stephen would have had a much hazier understanding of his free time, so he probably wouldn’t have started this reading until later in the afternoon
“I don’t defeat the urge to procrastinate.”
sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arises—not destroy it altogether.
deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short-circuit their natural desire to procrastinate.
your ego is a powerful force. We procrastinate, but we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we procrastinate.
quickly jot down in the notebook the date and the most important tasks that you are scheduled to get done.
If you failed to complete some tasks, record this, along with a quick explanation.
It might be easy to tell yourself a few weak excuses for putting off a tedious assignment, but when you have to record these same excuses on paper their foolishness is exposed.
After seeing all of those excuses pile up in your journal, there will be no escape from reality: You are being lazy!
“It helps to simply tell your roommates of your goals, and have them guilt-trip you into working.”
Hydration increases your energy, masks boredom-induced food cravings, and staves off sleepiness.
too much caffeine in a short period will make you jumpy and unfocused.
“When studying for something I don’t especially enjoy, I try to make an event out of it.”
choose a location that takes a while to reach by foot so you won’t be tempted to leave right away.
The novelty of the location, plus its distance from campus, will help jump-start your motivation to tackle your horrible task once there.
You are sitting alone at a table in a public place, surrounded by strangers, and if you don’t start doing something soon, people will begin to wonder: Who is that odd student sitting alone and staring into space?
once you start slogging through your assignment, the pain will slip away, you will hit your stride,
identify at least one hour, on each weekday, that is consistently free.
the morning and early afternoon are the best times to find these consistently free hours.
Once you’ve identified these protected hours, use them to do the same work each week.
build a routine
good habits, like making sure I do [certain work at the same time each week], are really hard to get rid of.”
Once you have accomplished one big task, it becomes much easier to tackle more.
If you see a large number of deadlines looming just over the horizon, you can be sure that there will be some hard days in your near future.
Plan them in advance.
“If I work all day Saturday, I will let myself go out hard on Saturday night and take Sunday off.”
If all of your friends know that Tuesday is going to be a rough day for you, then you will be much more likely to keep busy and do the work.
If that same day has been planned and hyped for the past week, you’ll come away feeling invigorated by your accomplishment.
Take ownership of your schedule and you are more likely to respect it.
Straight-A students, I found out, devote a lot of thought to these questions;
Bring your materials with you throughout the day, and fill in any small patches of free time with productive work.
she sneaks in work between meetings or classes, using small blocks of thirty or forty-five minutes at a time.
be sure to avoid your dorm room or other public places as much as possible during the day.
Like an academic ninja, slip from hidden study spot to hidden study spot,
When you’re done for the day, feel free to go have fun!
“Work hard, play hard” is always better than “Work kind of hard, play kind of hard.”
the spread-out nature of this schedule makes it less of a strain.
“to keep my mind stimulated, I regularly rotate between different venues.”
Don’t underestimate the importance of psychology in becoming an effective student.
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.
Here’s the problem with rote review: It’s a horrible way to study.
this technique requires an absurd number of hours.
it’s really painful.
studying is like any other skill—and as with any skill, it can be done well or done poorly—
