Study Hacks

Restarting is Hard to Do

Something that surprised me last fall, when I began to work more closely with individual students on productivity issues, was the difficulty of transitioning from chaos to control. It’s one thing to learn the type of systems used by the most efficient students, it’s quite another thing, however, to put these systems into practice. More often than not, my experience has been: the more productivity habits you start at the same time the higher the probability that you’ll abandon them all. It just becomes too overwhelming.

In this post, I want to talk about getting started from scratch. How to ease into that transition from a chaotic student lifestyle to relaxed efficiency; making changes that will stick…

Getting Started on the Road to Efficiency

Below I have described five small habits. If you’re new to student productivity, I would recommend that you stick to these five, and only these five, until at least midterms of the first semester in which you deploy them. If all goes fine, then you can consider adding some of the more advanced techniques discussed on this blog and elsewhere. (For a good example, read this article, which describes the collection of systems and habits I use regularly as a student).

From my experience, these changes are easy enough — and have a big enough positive impact — that they shouldn’t overwhelm your self-discipline. Once you get used to having some control you’ll be able to start moving toward mastery. Remember: start small. Keep improving…

1. Setup a Google Calendar.
   Keep your appointments, classes, office hours, meetings, and deadlines on Google calendar. The advantage of a web-based calendar, of course, is that you can check it from any computer on campus. The specific advantage of Google’s offering is the quick add feature, which lets you quickly type in new appointments in natural language (i.e., “midterm next Thursday” or “econ group meeting Friday from 1 to 3″). This is easy enough that you’ll actually probably keep the calendar up to speed. Especially if you use the browser plug-in version of the feature; keeping calendar updates just a few keystrokes away.
2. Choose your courses carefully.
   For your first term as a new and improved student, you need to avoid a killer schedule. Mix class types. Don’t have too many science courses or too many writing-heavy courses scheduled all at once. Don’t be afraid to schedule in a course that seems interesting but may have a reputation as being, well, not too hard. You need to practice having control over your workload, and this means starting with a load that’s easier to control.
3. Take an activity vacation.
   This piece of advice, first spelled out in this article, is tough for some to stomach. But I recommend it highly. Take a break from your extracurriculars. As I mentioned in the original article, this is college, not the Olympics, no one is going to fault you if you say “I need to take a semester break to refocus on my grades.” Your various club memberships and volunteer gigs will be waiting for you when you return. As with the last piece of advice, you need breathing room to start getting comfortable with being an efficient, organized student. Killing your activities — for just a semester — gives you the space needed to get comfortable with being in control.
4. Insist on a study plan for every problem set, test, and paper.
   When you’re first starting your student overhaul, it’s overwhelming to deploy too many complicated study rules; especially if they all demand stringent behavior controls. You need some flexibility in the earlier stages; some time to help you get used to having a plan and discovering what type of things work best for you. To accommodate this reality, follow this simple advice: have some plan for everything major assignment. For now, I don’t care what the plan says. Just have something, decided in advanced. that spells out, roughly, how you are going to complete the assignment (i.e., what specific actions…you’re not allowed to used ambiguous terms like “study”), and how you’re going to break up the work.
5. Establish a Sunday Ritual.
   I covered this advice in both a previous post and in How to Win at College. There’s a reason it keeps coming up: it’s simple yet yields tremendous results. The basic idea of the ritual is to transition from the debauchery of Friday and Saturday into the new workweek. I recommend it consists of the following: (1) eat a big breakfast, read something interesting, drink (lots) of coffee, and clear your head; (2) get your calendar and task lists up to speed, integrate in the loose stuff that gathered in the week; (3) go to the most deserted library on campus, and spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon working; and (4) conclude by setting up a schedule for Monday. You can vary this as you see fit, so long as you retain the basic structure of clearing your head, fleeing civilization, and getting stuff done.

Baby Steps

These initial changes omit most of the super-detailed strategy we love to dissect here on Study Hacks. Notice, there is no complicated time management system or advanced scheduling tactics or complicated note-taking formats. These are all tools that will eventually enter your student arsenal. But if you’re new to efficiency, resist their allure for now. Get used to having a basic plan, and knowing your schedule, and clearing your head on weekends. Do this during a semester with a light course load and no activities. Experience the rush of being in control of your obligations. Once you’ve scored that high, you’ll never want to lose it again.

Then you can move on to the fun stuff…

(Photo courtesy of the contented)

Re-Thinking Productivity

There’s nothing more satisfying when reading than that magic moment when something flips a switch deep within the neuronal recesses of your brain, and completely transforms your world view. I wanted to share with you a collection of productivity-related articles that, for me, generated this feeling. They have helped challenge my own beliefs about what it means to be “productive.” Indeed, you’ve likely seen their influence ricocheting throughout many of the recent posts here on Study Hacks. These are the the type of articles that keep me excited to check my RSS feed in the morning.

I hope they have the same effect on you…

#1. The Alternative Productivity Manifesto

This attention-catching tirade on the counter-cultural The Growing Life blog, is motivated by a simple question: if our productivity has doubled since WWII, why aren’t we working 20-hour weeks?

This article is one of the first I’ve seen to note that many of the most popular productivity gurus — ahem, Mr. Allen — are not working in the interest of the people; their goal, instead, is to help companies squeeze as much work as possible out of us poor worker drones.

#2. Rethinking Life Hacks

Writing with the trademark tone of academic sophistication that separates the Academic Productivity blog from so many others, Jose investigates a damning question: when it comes to productivity advice, where’s the evidence?

Of particular juicy goodness, is his list of some of the top internet productivity gurus — Steve Pavlina, David Allen, etc — annotated with what, exactly, these people have achieved to justify their guru status. The result, as you might imagine, is not too kind to the gurus. Like any good academic, Jose concludes with some suggestions for a more systematic approach validating life hacks.

#3. The Planning Fallacy

The always thought-provoking Eliezer Yudkowsky, in a guest post on the I Will Teach You to Be Rich blog, describes a common cognitive shortcoming: we are terrible at planning. Again and again, research has revealed that our attempts to estimate how long things will take are really no different than our prediction of the best case scenario. In other words, we are hopelessly optimistic.

Understanding this ingrained flaw can transform the way you think about project planning, leading you to take on less and schedule more time for completion.

#4. How to Act Productive

The mysterious grad hacker lampoons hyper-stress work cultures in this hilarious, and often biting, 12-part satiric series. Each entry, from #8 Skip Meals to #2 Talk About How Much You Haven’t Slept, helps pick away at the shell of social convention that conceals our worst work instincts. It also draws attention to just how much of the stress and unhappiness in our work lives (especially student work lives) is invented; a show we put on to prove to others that we belong where we are.

The series is a must-read for anyone who: (a) owns a blackberry; (b) uses the phrase “how you holding up” as a standard greeting; or (c) thinks productivity advice is for other people, you know, those with much easier jobs.

#5. The Only Guide to Happiness You’ll Ever Need

The incredible success of Leo’s Zen Habits blog baffles many people. On the surface, he peddles the same life hacking-style advice as countless others, and his format, including inspirational quotes, long tip lists, and, of course, the ubiquitous pictures of generic people jumping or watching sunsets, reeks of cliche. But something about Leo stands him above the crowd.

At its core, Zen Habits tells the story of a real man, living on an isolated island with six kids and real problems, struggling — and more often than not, succeeding — to construct a life that is engaging, but also happy and, above all, peaceful. We see us in him, and his experiences give us hope.

This recent article is an example of Leo at his best. He summarizes the core components to living a good life. Though simple, this advice resonates strongly. Something about it just seems right. It sweeps away the gunk that builds up when you spend too much time down in the proverbial dirt of the life hacking world, trying to figure out how to make the little things slightly better, and provides, instead, a big picture target. If you set down a path to satisfying the advice given here, the rest seems like it will all just click into place.

E-mail Zero Redux

Two weeks ago, I introduced E-mail Zero, the concept of living life with no e-mail. The motivation was to investigate innovative ways to combat the stress and lack of focus caused by living in your inbox. My case study was MIT professor Alan Lightman, who though very busy and important, communicates solely by phone, mail, and in-person meetings.

Thanks to Mike Brown, over at the BrownStudies blog, I’ve found another fascinating E-mail Zero case study to share. I’m talking about Stanford Professor Donald Knuth, arguably the world’s most important living computer science personality (my advisor, no small shakes herself, recently won the “Knuth Prize,” a major honor). Professor Knuth is perhaps best known for his famed series: The Art of Computer Programming (named by American Scientist as one of the best twelve physical-science monographs of the century.)

On his official Stanford web site, Professor Knuth notes:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

He continues with a rationale for his decision:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

The argument here is obvious. But still, nonetheless, powerful. For some jobs, e-mail hinders your ability to perform at your peak. In such situations, it would seem, as Professor Knuth has concluded, you might have an professional obligation to stop using highly distracting electronic communication.

But wait! The good professor is the author of famous textbooks, and he is famously diligent about tracking down bugs (he rewards any reported bug with $2.56 — one hexadecimal dollar). He also plays a major role in the computer science community and is constantly, I imagine, in contact with all sorts of famous people and powerful academics and members of the media. He has to stay in touch with tons of people all the time!

No worries. He’s got that covered:

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode — like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol’ snail mail and send a letter to the following address…

But wait again! What if someone requires an urgent response? Again, he’s a step ahead:

I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming mail and separates out anything that she knows I’ve been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.

Okay, but what about us poor computer science students, with a textbook bug to report. We’re not going to take the time to buy stamps and envelopes — which none of us own. Once again, Professor Knuth has us covered:

My secretary prints out all messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance.

Two important things to notice here. First, these are specialty addresses. “tacop” is an abbreviation for his book, and “knuth-bug” is specifically for reporting mistakes in his book. Therefore, these e-mail addresses — which get printed and added to his snail mail pile — can be used only to ask a question about his book or report a bug. Anything else — as he clearly goes on to state — is discarded.

Knuth’s Two E-mail Lessons

Professor Knuth offers two important insights for our E-mail Zero discussion:

1. Some jobs are performed better without e-mail.
   Professor Knuth is quite insightful to notice that for some jobs — such as those that require long periods of concentration — on the whole, e-mail can do more damage than good. Sure, it’s convenient for some things, but it scuttles your primary professional purpose. When contemplating the E-mail Zero lifestyle, ask yourself the following two questions: What do I do that makes me most valuable? Would e-mail make me better or worse at this primary role? A simple idea. But as mentioned, powerful in its implications.
2. E-mail can be processed like snail mail.
   Professor Knuth was savvy to realize that certain groups he wanted to hear from — i.e., young people finding bugs in his books — would probably only communicate via e-mail. Having the messages printed and added to a snail mail inbox is a great way to keep these avenues alive without the distraction of a checkable electronic inbox. Of course, most of us don’t have a secretary to handle this printing. But I imagine that this is a perfect place for a part-time, out-sourced virtual personal assistant (VPA). Tim Ferriss, for example, talks frequently about his VPA who manages his e-mail and forwards him the most important messages. Imagine, instead, having a VPA paid only to check your inbox once a week. He filters out the obvious spam, discards messages that match some rules you provided, and then prints, scans, and sends you a PDF of the rest. Once a week (a month? every three months?) you can print the PDFs and sort them with your snail mail. Worried about urgent communication? Have your assistant sort these out and send them in a separate PDF that you print and process every week.

I’m just thinking out loud here. But we have to give Professor Knuth credit for giving us some outstanding new insight into the different roles e-mail might play in a hyper-efficient, hyper-focused work style.

Who else do you know that does or would benefit from the E-mail Zero lifestyle?

(photo from StanfordAlumni.org)

The Student’s Curse

After spending years confronting the peculiar peccadilloes of the student set, I’ve learned that one problem, in particular, looms above the rest. I’m talking, of course, about procrastination. For many students, it’s the personification of academic troubles: “if I could only stop procrastinating on my work, I would be doing fine.”

My experience has revealed that there are two types of procrastination. The first, which I’ll call light procrastination, is the standard resistance to shutting down e-mail or turning off the TV that we all feel. I’ve posted before on hacking this issue; simple tricks, like working according to a regular schedule, starting early rather than late, and keeping yourself well-fed.

The real monster, however, is what I call deep procrastination. This is a state, reached by an alarming number of students, in which the pressure of starting at the absolute last minute becomes necessary to motivate any work. Students who suffer from deep procrastination pull frequent all-nighters and are often found begging for extensions on assignments they couldn’t bring themselves to begin before the deadline.

This is a serious problem, and I want to offer an unconventional solution — born from experience — for eliminating its worse effects.

The Roots of Deep Procrastination

The most common reason given for procrastination: work sucks. You assume you delay because the chore itself is brutal. But is this true?

Think back to the last assignment that you put off until the minute. Now imagine during the upcoming fall semester you have no courses to take. Your professor says he believes in your talent and that he wants you to complete this one assignment at your own pace.

For most students, the work would be rather enjoyable. Be it a research paper or a big chunk of reading, there is something very satisfying about mastering material over time. It makes you feel competent (one of our three basic psychological needs), and most people, when not under incredible pressure, actually enjoy learning new things.

The reason, then, that some students suffer from deep procrastination: their schedule as a whole is too demanding. Put simply, there is too much work and not enough time. Night after night they forced into a situation where they have to work, probably late, and this sucks. After a while a resentment grows toward their schoolwork — it is making their life miserable. And once they resent the work — and get none of the joys of competency and learning and mastery that classes could provide — their mind starts doing whatever it can to avoid getting started.

Curing Deep Procrastination

So what works? Stricter schedules and more intense productivity rules won’t cut it. The problem is not disorganization, it is, instead, a deep-seated antipathy to student work in general. If you want to cure deep procrastination you have to remove the source of resentment. And this means doing less; much less.

Student’s who shift to schedules with much more free time find themselves handling their workload without pain. Without the pain, they don’t grow to resent their schedules. And without the resentment, no deep procrastination will arise.

This is somewhat unexpected, as making your schedule lighter makes it easier to procrastinate in the sense that you can get away with more last minute heroics. However, for most students, the opposite occurs. The light schedule takes away their fatigue, and a true interest in their work blossoms again. Guess what? When you’re interested in your work, it’s not that hard to get started…sometimes even real early.

Are You a Deep Procrastinator?

If your procrastination has gotten to the point where your grades are starting to suffer, or you’re frequently working into the twilight hours to make deadlines at the last minute, seriously consider why this is happening, then ask yourself what you might gain by rebuilding a happy relationship with your schoolwork.

Here are a few past articles to help you get started:

• The Zen Valedictorian
  Take a look at law #1 (underschedule) for a discussion of how and why to keep your schedule light.
• The Radical Simplicity Manifesto
  No-nonsense advice for achieving an underscheduled lifestyle. It’s based on the Rule of One: one major, one course load, and one extracurricular.
• How to Be Happy
  If you understand the science behind your happiness, you’ll be more likely to take you course load seriously.

Lightman Lives Lightly

At first glance, Alan Lightman is the poster boy for a fast-paced, turbo-charged lifestyle. He’s currently an adjunct professor of Humanities, Creative Writing, and Physics at MIT, where, among other feats, he introduced the Institute’s first undergraduate writing requirement and founded a science writing graduate program.

Professor Lightman is perhaps best known for his writing, including the bestselling book Einstein’s Dreams. His essays on science and life have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and, basically, every other impressive literary publication on the planet.

When you read Professor Lightman’s biography, it’s hard not to imagine the prototypical gung-ho celebrity intellectual, glued to his blackberry, making moves, and ping-ponging messages with movers and shakers well into the night. One can only guess how many messages clog his inbox. 10,000? That’s chump change for the average busy professor. A better guess might be closer to 50,000!

But then you look a little closer at his official web site and notice a curious note:

I do not use e-mail, but you can reach me at my MIT office: [address removed], telephone: [number removed]

If anyone could make an argument that he had to have e-mail, it would be Alan Lightman. Think about it. He has to communicate constantly with students and his colleagues. He also has to zip around manuscripts and magazine articles. And what about keeping in touch with all of his high-power friends and fans? Imagine all the cool opportunities that he’s missing by shutting off the electronic spigot.

But here’s the thing: he’s busier than you and me, yet he’s doing just fine without e-mail. It hasn’t stopped him from accomplishing his professional goals or living an interesting life.

With this in mind, I implore you to shut the door, pull the blinds, and ask yourself, softly, the following question…

What would happen if you lived life without e-mail?

A Powerful Thought Experiment

I’ve been obsessed, recently, by this insidious little thought experiment. Over time, I’ve come to believe that for a significant cross section of society, life without e-mail would not only be possible, but would also reduce stress and not really cause any serious impact on their daily life or professional productivity.

First, however, let’s note who this probably doesn’t apply to: people with bosses. As has been often discussed, e-mail is asymmetrical. It’s easier to send e-mails than to receive them. Bosses want their lives to be easier at your expense. Ergo: you have to answer e-mail.

But what about the entrepreneurs or academics or writers or freelance consultants among you? Though your knee-jerk reaction might be “That’s impossible! My clients/collegauges/students/editors would never abide an e-mail free me!”, on closer examination, your situation just might be more flexible than you first believed…

Problems and Solutions

Let’s extend the thought experiment by facing our worst fears. What would become a problem if you were to lose e-mail? How might we fix it?

• Lose touch with friends. This one’s easy. E-mail is poor way to keep up with close friends. Many people, myself included, tend to have a call rotation that keeps us up to date with everyone worth pinging.
• My clients demand access. Yes. But this doesn’t have to mean e-mail access. Back in the good ‘ole days when I ran my own dot-com, we made good use of a regular phone check-in schedule and a sophisticated extranet that gave our clients the ability to check in on daily progress. At the time, this was crucial, because I was attending high school, and was a varsity athlete with daily practice, which meant that I was literally away from e-mail from 7 am to 5 pm most weekdays. They adapted.
• E-mail is the best way to send files. Register a files@<yourname>.com e-mail address. Give this to people that need to send you a file. You can check it when you know a specific file is being sent. Of course, never actually respond to any e-mails sent to this address.
• Too many people won’t go through the hassle of calling me, but they would have sent an e-mail. I’ll be missing out on this communication. Good! This filters communication down to the truly important.
• My business requires me to handle a constant stream of requests and queries from customers (or students). Build a custom web site form that allows your customers (or students) to specify:
  • the type of request,
  • a description of the request, and
  • a list of actions, if any, they require from you.

  If you want an example of such a form in action, check out the contact pages deployed by some of the more popular productivity blogs. (For example: 43 Folders.) If they insist that e-mail is the best way to contact them, build into your system the ability to do one-way e-mail. That is, to send a message, from the control panel of your request submission system, to an e-mail address, and have the reply-to address be set to something fake. You can automatically append a standard signature of the form: “please do not reply to this e-mail. If you require further information, you can…” (If you need to process a huge quantity of such requests, consider a professional grade ticket system of the type used by system administrators.)

• I’ll be left out of discussions driven by messages that are cc’d to multiple people. Very good! These are time wasters. If someone wants to put something on your plate they have to take the time to get in touch with you by phone, or in person, and explain, clearly, what is needed. If they need to check in on an ongoing project, the same holds: phone or in person. The result: less ambiguous crap. More focus.
• In general, I’m going to miss out on some communication. That’s fine. We don’t need to communicate as much as we do now.
• The editors/agents/clients I need to contact are only available on e-mail. Not true. People read letters and answer the phone. You just don’t want to make the effort.
• Regardless of what you say above, I can think hard and come up with some work, or clients, or opportunity that would be impossible without e-mail. I’m sure such things exist. Don’t do those things.

The Benefits

The benefits that arise in this thought experiment are two-fold: (1) less crap; and (2) more focus. You still accomplish the important stuff, but also free yourself from all the small, or annoying, or unnecessary, or, worst of all, ambiguous requests that eat up so much of our day. Perhaps even more profound, imagine the focus you could achieve if there was no inbox to check. Instead, you just worked until you finished what you needed to, then shut down the computer, and got down to the business of living life.

The Implication

I don’t know what to make of this thought experiment. Should we really turn back the clock on such a powerful innovation? Would we really want to? I don’t know. But Professor Lightman’s example does make one thing clear: regardless of how you personally feel, the e-mail zero lifestyle is possible. If you live in your inbox, it’s a choice you’re making; a choice you could reverse.

For the students among you, this is something to keep in mind as you plan your ideal life after college…