Anass

[...] Study Hacks Review of The Little Book of Productivity – Cal writes a thorough review dissecting my latest e-book.  His thoughts are interesting and mostly positive, while avoiding a sales pitch.  I think it’s definitely worth a read if you were considering getting the book, but wanted a more objective opinion. [...]

[...] Study Hacks Review of The Little Book of Productivity – Cal writes a thorough review dissecting my latest e-book.  His thoughts are interesting and mostly positive, while avoiding a sales pitch.  I think it’s definitely worth a read if you were considering getting the book, but wanted a more objective opinion. [...]

Scott Young should be ashamed of himself for repackaging other peoples ideas.

I disagree. Most ideas in the productivity community are shared in the sense that they appear on many different sites. This is what makes the community strong; the best ideas get shared, and polished, and revamped, while the worst drift off. I think Scott is merely capturing the best memes that have been circulating through this world.

With hope,

Brian

Could you please write a post about how to take notes from a textbook (esp. when you can’t write as much in it as, say, on a paper)? Texts are really dense, and it is hard to consolidate the info…

I’m not sure that textbooks are anything special when it comes to note-taking. Just follow your favorite approach, be it the Q/E/C method from STRAIGHT-A or the Morse-Code Method. See here for a review:

http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/05/26/monday-master-class-the-study-hacks-guide-to-note-taking/

Could you please write a post about how to take notes from a textbook (esp. when you can’t write as much in it as, say, on a paper)? Texts are really dense, and it is hard to consolidate the info…

Thanks,
John

You’ve touched on an important notion: the cult of productivity. Some people have ten different sites which they often go to for help with productivity, but it’s that very tendency to always be looking in different places for help that can keep one from actually achieving their goals.

Definitely a problem! To be honest, if I knew someone who was just getting exposed to the idea of productivity systems, and the like, I would probably give them a book like Scott’s and say “read this and don’t subscribe to any productivity blogs” (except Study Hacks, of course). In other words, there are only so many ideas out there, Scott captured the main ones, so either you know them, or you learn them from a book like Scott’s, then you get to work!

Yours is really a feedback mechanism to ask students to adjust their tasks so that each CAN be completed within a certain time block, Steve’s (and I assume Scott’s as well) don’t aim to get you to complete certain tasks, but to “do the best with what you have” with the goal of providing you with impetus to triage needless things from your schedule more ruthlessly.

Good nuance. In the context of procrastination, however, time-boxing (in the Scott/Steve sense) and sprinting-theory both have the same basic purpose of, as you note, not getting caught up in the difficulty of the entire task and just doing a dash of work of a pre-configured length.