Study Hacks

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…

Productivity Glue

I dispense a lot of academic advice on this blog. I’ve dived into the details of note-taking and exam review and paper writing. Loyal readers can casually toss around acronyms like Q/E/C and Q&R, and chat lightly about focused question clusters and flat outlines. These strategies make the academic piece of college life easier. Underpinning this advice, however, and acting as the productivity glue that holds everything together, is the arguably most crucial component: time management.

If you can’t control your time, the smartest study strategies in the world won’t help you. As you might expect, I talk a lot about time management. (Indeed, an entire third of How to Become a Straight-A Student is dedicated to the topic.)

With this in mind, I’ve rounded up some of the best Study Hacks time management articles of the past year. If you’re having trouble keeping a handle on your schedule, hopefully you’ll find the help you need in the advice presented below.

A Study Hacks Crash Course in Student Time Management

Getting Things Done for College Students
The final article in a series that adapts David Allen’s GTD system to the specific demands of college life. This basic philosophy has provided the backbone of my task management system for at least four years now.

The Visual Panic Schedule
A simple technique for turbo-charging your time management during busy periods. It’s how I survive the end of the semester crunch.

The Auto-Pilot Schedule
The cornerstone of any efficient student’s time management system: fix your regular work to a regular schedule that frees you from having to think about when (or if) to do it. I can’t under-emphasize the stress reduction this approach provides.

Fixed-Schedule Productivity
Do you feel overwhelmed by all the work, and activities, and random crap that clogs your schedule? Read this article. The basic idea is to start with the workload you want, then ruthlessly cut, reduce, and cancel until you achieve it. Skeptical? It’s what has allowed me to work a 9 to 5, weekday-only schedule in one of the world’s most intense graduate programs.

Time Arbitrage
Not all time is created equal. This article teaches you how to rearrange your hours so that the activities that need the most attention get the spot in your schedule that can best provide it. Adopting this mindset can significantly reduce the number of hours you work without reducing the work accomplished.

Pseudo-Work Does Not Equal Work
This popular articles lays out the philosophy of pseudo-work: the hidden killer of student schedules. The core idea is simple: hours alone mean nothing. You have to factor in your intensity of focus. If you’re not managing your energy, and studying in long, fatigue-saturated, late-night marathons, you’re not really getting much done.

Don’t Use a Daily To-Do List
To-do lists by themselves are terrible time management tools. This articles introduces time-blocking, the only reasonable way for a student to plan his or her day.

A Time Management System for Students Who Are Terrible at Time Management And Tend to Hate it More Than Slow Torture Involving Electrical Current and Sensitive Anatomy.
An article from the early days that walks through a drop-dead simple system for students who are terrible at time management…but need something that’s better than nothing. I like to think of this as a solid first step toward a magic world of auto-piloted, fixed-scheduled, GTDCS super-studentdom.

Apply the Weakest Link Theory to Time Management
An important — though under-appreciated — article that focuses on a often overlooked piece of any time management system: how hard it is to restart after you fall of the wagon. (The savvy reader will appreciate the irrelevant, Malcolm Gladwell style, too long narrative-driven introduction. I believe it involves the space shuttle…for some reason.)

Rewriting Science…

The phenomenal success of Tim Ferriss’s recent book, The Four-Hour Work Week, brought to prominence a distressing trend that has been recently plaguing the self-help community: citing rough summaries of scientific principles as evidence for unrelated how-to advice.

The principle, in particular, that I’m interested in here is Parkinson’s Law. Informally, the law states:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

This was the opening sentence of the humorous essay Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson published in The Economist in 1955. The essay went on to explain the results of a study of the British Civil Service. (Click here for an expanded version of the essay published in Parkinson’s eponymous book on the subject).

Unfortunately, as we’ll see, in modern usage the study itself has been discarded in favor of this one sentence opening — a tendency that obscures its true meaning.

The Misuse of Parkinson

Parkinson’s Law is widely cited in Ferriss’s book and in countless blog articles as evidence that when given a task, a human will fill whatever time was alloted for its completion. The conclusion: a feeling of busyness shouldn’t prevent us from reducing the time we set aside for work. In other words, they take the opening sentence from Parkinson’s essay and then interpret it literally.

The reality, however, is more complicated…

Inside the Civil Service

If you read deeper into Parkinson’s work, you soon discover that he is not making a general claim on how humans procrastinate. He is, instead, summarizing a rather rigorous statistical proof he devised to explain observations of a very specific context: the British Civil Service. Parkinson, it turns out, was intrigued by the following paradox: the number of people employed in the British Colonial Office bureaucracy increased even as the British Empire imploded — an event that decreased the amount of work available.

Parkinson’s Law is not a catch phrase, but instead a statistical model devised by Professor Parkinson to describe the factors that control the growth of bureaucracy. It’s central conclusion: growth is independent of the amount of work to be done.

Among the non-work related growth factors he identified were:

1. The tendency of slightly overworked officials to hire pairs of subordinates to relieve the strain — the pair being necessary to prevent any one from usurping the original official’s functionality. The added work capacity here far outstrips the demand.
2. The well-known ability of officials to create work for those below them.

Parkinson Doesn’t Care About Your To-Do List

In light of Parkinson’s full findings, the adage that “work expands to fill available time” takes on a new meaning. To Ferriss, and other how-to writers, it’s interpreted, as mentioned, to mean that individuals will procrastinate and drag out tasks to fill an arbitrary work day. To Parkinson, however, the adage was meant to highlight a truth about large bureaucratic organizations: growth can be unrelated to work.

Parkinson would be amused at best, and confused at worst, to see his conclusion applied to self-employed, blog-reading, high-tech entrepreneurial types struggling to maintain a work-life balance. It’s a worthy cause. But certainly not one that concerned the good Professor.

Finding New Relevance for Parkinson

At the risk of suffering the same sin I just urged you to avoid, I suggest, tentatively, that there is still some modern value to be mined from Parkinson’s work. When you forget the famous one sentence summary, and dive, instead, into the guts of his study, the following more profound conclusion shakes loose:

Well-established work cultures can harbor irrational behavior. Beware!

In the civil service, this meant employee growth can occur even as work demands decrease. For a college student, on the other hand, this could refer to the irrational belief that physical suffering — in the form of all-nighters and long study marathons — is the key metric for proper test preparation and paper writing.

This isn’t logical. As Study Hacks readers know, a little pre-planning and some efficient review techniques can eliminate the need for such suffering all together. But a strong work culture — as Parkinson observed — can exert surprising strength on your behavior.

Conclusion

To conclude, be wary of any writer, myself included, who uses a brief high-level summary of some scientific principle as justification for any manner of unrelated ideas. What lurks beneath the fortune-cookie headline invariably provides richer insight.

Summer Arrives

I returned yesterday from the dry, mid-70s weather of Provence, to be greeted by the hazy humidity of a Boston heatwave. As I sat shirtless in my dark apartment (lights are hot!), a box fan blowing at full intensity, the message couldn’t be clearer: summer has arrived!

For students like us, summer is a great time. Mainly because the intensity level of our lives plummets. For those of you taking courses, the vibe is more relaxed than the normal school year. For those who are working, the general wonderfulness of being able to be done — no late night reading, no looming exam deadlines — every day, at 5 sharp, is probably still sinking in. For those lounging on your parent’s couch: we’re insanely jealous.

Time to Get Some Things Done

To me, the best part of this slower pace of life is that it provides the time needed to make big progress on big projects. I’ve written many times before on how to keep your attention focused on a small number of projects to ensure consistent progress, but summertime projects are fundamentally different. Life becomes so simple, that many of the mechanisms described in these past articles — mechanisms invented to handle the chaos of life during the school year — are rendered unnecessary.

In this post, I describe a simple technique, dubbed the 3×3 Method, that I deploy only during this season, to make sure that I don’t just get things done, but, instead, accomplish the crap out of really big things.

The 3×3 Method

This method can be summarized as follows:

Finish three big projects during each of the three months of summer.

My preferred implementation is deliciously low-tech. At the beginning of each month of summer: I print out a document that lists three project names, and, for each, a quick description of the completion criteria. I print this document then hang it on the bookshelf next to my desk at my office at MIT. This ensures that I see it every day.

Notice the following:

• There are no complicated rules for what work I do on what days and when.
• The autopilot schedule of the regular school year has been deactivated and replaced with something much more bare bones, covering only the essentials, like blog posts.
• Though I still capture to-do’s in my gmail based GTD system, I am much more lazy in reviewing those next action lists. I don’t want to get too caught up in minutia.

Living the 3×3 Method

When faced with a small number of projects and a lot of time, your mind turns out to be a fantastic scheduler. For example, I tend to fall into a rhythm where I alternate, day by day, between two of the projects. Once the first of the two projects finishes I substitute the third into the rotation. I sometimes will go 3 or 4 days in a row focusing on the same project when I’m near completion and want to get it done.

What’s important is that these rules don’t need a fixed, complicated work schedule. Your daily work habits will vary depending on your projects and your mood. As long as you maintain the general rule that all three projects need to be completed by the end of the month, the rest has a way of working itself out.

Choosing the Projects

There is a bit of an art to choosing appropriately sized projects. If they’re too small, you won’t get enough done. If they’re too large, you’ll be frustrated by lack of completion. Chop up things into a size that you think, with relatively consistent effort, will allow three things to be easily completed among your other summer obligations.

I also tend to vary the size of the projects, with some of the three being larger than others. I’m not sure why. The variety just seems to make work easier.

For example, on my list for June (which is starting 10 days late due to my vacation), I have the following three projects:

• A specific chunk of my dissertation. I had to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and decide which collection of chapters seemed reasonable to complete in 20 days.
• The final draft of a long-form profile I’m writing for Flak Magazine. I’ve been interviewing the subject since February; time to get this done.
• The annotated table of contents for a new writing project. I can’t talk about it yet, but you will know more, I promise, by the end of the summer.

Conclusion

Why three projects? I don’t know. That’s just what has always worked for me. Any less, and the projects tend to get too large, which causes my motivation to falter, which, in turn, causes me to not finish things. More than three, on the other hand, and I destabilize the relaxed vibe I like to ride during the summer months.

By all means: experiment. If, for example, you have one big thing you’ve been eager to conquer, then make this the 1×3 method. Or, if you have some crazy bucket list burning a hole in the pocket, do more. The ultimate observation behind 3×3 is to take advantage of the simple summer lifestyle to simply get some major things done.

Reviving The Walking Dead

I meet a wide variety of students in my capacity as a professional advice giver guy. The type that most concerns me, however, are those who are completely overwhelmed. Having worked closely this fall with several students in this state, I have learned an important lesson: extraordinary stress cannot be eliminated by extraordinary organizational strategies.

After a certain point, a schedule becomes too full: smarter to-do lists and more efficient review tactics, like a band aid on a sucking chest wound, will help slow down the bleeding, but miss the larger problem.

What does work? In this post I offer a simple prescription for those students who feel they are just a small step away from tumbling into a stress-fueled breakdown. It’s a devious little bastard of a tactic that I call the activity vacation.

The Activity Vacation

This strategy is simple. If you feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do as a student, commit yourself to the following: during the next semester you should be involved in exactly zero extracurricular activities. That’s right: nothing. No school newspaper. No volunteering at the hospital. No eco-rep position for your dorm or activity council for the student government. Revel in the luxury of answering every request that comes your way with a sonorous “nooooooooo.”

But that’s not all. Not only should you cut every extracurricular activity from your life for this one semester, but you should also choose the absolutely most interesting possible slate of courses. (If your custom-designed triple major doesn’t provide you this flexibility, consider also cutting out one or two of those majors!)

How to Cut Activities Without Burning Bridges

There is some subtlety to temporarily cutting activities out of your schedule. A couple rules to help prevent lasting damage:

1. If the activity is one of the most important activities in your life and represents something that you really enjoy and that you want to focus on and build up to become a real skill during your college career, then politely inform the relevant parties that you need to take a break for one semester to focus on your academics and that you look forward to returning during the semester that follows. This is college, not the Navy: they’ll understand. (Important Caveat: Do not apply this rule to more than one or two activities! Focus, focus, focus…)
2. If the activity does not fit the above criteria, cut it for good. This is a time sink. Remember the laundry list fallacy: more is more stressful, not more impressive. The activity vacation is a good excuse to do some house cleaning.

The Benefits

The activity vacation provides three powerful benefits:

1. Immediate stress reduction: Your schedule is open and your courses are manageable. You have plenty of time to get things done. You can sleep. You can read. You can watch dumb TV. You can get a girlfriend and master guitar hero (preferably in that order). Life is good…
2. Re-engagement with your academic side: When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to develop an antagonistic relationship with your courses. They become the demon bastards that keep forcing you to stay up all night. You grow to resent them. And after this, your quality of life takes a turn for the worse. No fun! By instead adopting a slate of courses that you really enjoy, and then, and this is crucial, giving yourself the time to actually engage them, and get into the material, and do extra research and connect the assignments to other things you care about, you’ll rediscover that intellectual spark that can make college so enjoyable.
3. Discovery of the serendipitous: A common theme on this blog is that a lot of the most powerful (and non-time intensive) accomplishments arise, in part, from exposing yourself to randomness. The lack of regular activities during your activity vacation gives you the free time to seek out the random and interesting; e.g.:
   • Meet interesting people.
   • E-mail random bloggers, read random books, and go to random talks and conferences on campus.
   • Hang out in the media room in the library and browse random magazines.
   • Write lists that use the word “random” as many times as possible.
   • Pitch a freelance article.
   • Learn how to write a screenplay.
   • Hang out with people who are smarter than you.
   • Audit interesting courses.
   • Choose a course you love and start reading about cutting edge research or publications in the field. Chat about these with your professor.

If you want a role model in this regard, consider freshman Ben Casnocha, who recently posted a list of his notes from the 14 different speakers he went to hear speak this spring.

But Wait! If I Drop Activities for a Semester I’ll Never Get Into Medical School!

Sigh. I think we’ve covered this territory before; i.e., here and here and here and here and here and here and, of course, here.

Cue The Zen Valedictorian

I hope you didn’t think you’d get away with a major idea article that didn’t tie back to the Zen Valedictorian! You know better. But this is, in fact, a key hidden benefit of the activity vacation. Because it’s temporary, you’re more likely to give it a shot. Once in your vacation, however, you are, in essence, trying on the Zen Valedictorian lifestyle for size.

I’ll bet that once you’ve tasted what student life could be like, and get a glimpse, from your randomness exposure, of the type of cool, focused, innovative, and low time-intensive activities that you could be doing instead of your standard stress-inducing slag heap of boring extracurriculars, you might just become a permanent ZV convert.

At the very least you’ll learn to chill. A worthy goal.

Busy, Busy, Busy…

I have, once again, entered one of those delightful busy periods that threatens to rip all of one’s best laid productivity plans into a pile of once good intentioned but now useless shreds. The reasons fit the standard litany: end of the semester work colliding with a random cluster of grad student-ey administrative work colliding with three trips in four weeks.

We’ve all been here…

The Panic Schedule

Most students follow a similar strategy to cope with this scenario: the panic schedule. The idea is simple: you list out everything that needs to get done during the crazy period and then make some attempt to come up with a schedule that covers the crunch. Sometimes, however, this mega-list approach fails to provide the desired salve to your aching productivity soul. You don’t trust it. You find yourself constantly reviewing what’s coming up and trying to re-convince yourself work will get done. Deadlines collapse into other deadlines. Too much work is squeezed into too tight spaces, and soon your days fall back into chaos.

In this post I want to describe a simple variation to the panic schedule that helps me both plan busy periods and remain calm throughout.

Go Visual

For me, my panic schedules begin and end with the visual. Specifically, the first step I take when faced with a busy period is to print a blank calendar for the month(s) ahead. (I get my blank calendar templates from this web site.)

I then follow, roughly speaking, a process that looks something like this:

1. List out all the projects that need to get done during the hard period. Label each with its deadline.
2. Add all deadlines plus relevant travel, appointments, and other date-specific obligations to the calendar. (I tend to draw dark boxes around these items to make them pop out.)
3. Estimate the number of work days needed for each project.
4. Start adding project work days to the calendar. I sometimes invent extra visual flourishes to help distinguish certain important work. This helps me quickly visualize exactly when the most important projects are going to get done. (A necessary stress reliever.)
5. Shuffle, edit, and tweak until you feel confident that no one day is unrealistically packed and everything has a place.
6. Panic when you realize there is too much and you can’t satisfy (5). At this point start canceling and negotiating. Following the 4D method, you might start getting rid of obligations or re-negotiating different future dates for non-urgent tasks. Then go back to (5).

Case Study: My Visual Panic Schedule

I’ve included at the top of this post a scan of the visual panic schedule fueling my May. Notice the visual improvisation. I have stars around the editing work for my big research paper due next Monday (because not getting this done is a particular source of worry). In some places I added arrows. The big deadlines and travel dates have nice drop-shadows because, as everyone will admit, drop-shadows are awesome. Etc.

The big picture idea here, however, is that I have taken a lot of work that has to get done in a short period of time, and then made the plan to handle it visual. A 10 second glance at the calendar reassures me that everything will get done and that the schedule makes sense. A long list containing the same elements would not provide the same relief. My mind sees a list and thinks: “This looks long, is this really going to happen?” And then it stresses. On the other hand, it sees this calendar and can say: “Oh, I edit today. Good. ” And then it relaxes.

It’s a simple trick to improve a common strategy. And like the best simple tricks, its impact is significant.

Exam advice week continues here at Study Hacks. I’m posting Wednesday’s article a little early because I’ll be gone tomorrow morning and I wanted to make sure you got your productivity fix in a timely manner.

So Much Waste

Finals period is tough. I can’t change that. But as I watch students slog through this process I keep remarking at the amount of unnecessary stress. The main culprit: waste.

Too many students begin exam prep without a (sufficiently detailed) plan. They have, at best, only a rough idea of how they’re going to review before they dive straight into a pseudo-work grind. Cue the red-eyes; the coffee-stained hooded sweatshirts; and, of course, the early morning competitions to see who slept less. (“You went to be at 4 last night!? For shame! I’ve only slept 18 minutes in the past 9 weeks.”) It’s tedious.

Waste Elimination (The Good Kind)

Exam prep doesn’t have to be this hard. If you’re willing to spend a few more minutes planning, and if you can put aside that childish impulse to procrastinate on absolutely everything until the last minute (it’s not a genetic trait, chief, you’re just being a lazy ass), you can eliminate most of this wasted time from your prep schedule. This elimination, in turn, will push the experience from overwhelming and terrible to hard but manageable.

Trust me, it’s worth it.

In this post I explain the simple mechanical process I used to prepare for exams back when I used to have lots of exams to prepare for. (Ah, the joys of being a senior graduate student.) Yes, it requires that you start things early. But it works. You can follow the plan more or less blindly; avoiding the ill-fated need to draw upon your limited will power to make decisions on a daily basis.

Cal’s Patent-Pending Mechanical Exam Preparation Process

I’m not usually so formal with my habits, but, for the sake of exposition, I’ve clustered the main ideas into clean bullet points. As usual, I expect you to customize, challenge, and experiment with the system until it best fits your situation:

1. Gather and Plug.
   Spend 20 minutes on each course. Gather together all the material you need to review. This might require printing your notes off your computer. If there are any holes in this material — a missed lecture or, perhaps, an important reading you didn’t get to — make plans in the immediate future to plug the gaps.
2. Construct Battle Plans.
   Once you fill the gaps you’ll be left with complete collections of information to review for each course. Spend some time to come up with a review battle plan for each of these piles. These plans should consist of — and only of — specific review actions with well-defined endpoints. I can’t stress the latter part enough. I don’t want to hear about you blindly flipping through your book for hours. You need to specify exactly how you are going to review and how you’ll know when you’re done.
3. Take a Break.
   If you don’t have time to step away for a day or two, then you started too late. You need time to clear your head before the next step.
4. Make Your Plans Less Dumb.
   Look back at your battle plans with a fresh eye. Ask yourself: where can I make this more efficient? Most likely, you’ll find several strategies that are redundant or could be replaced with something more streamlined. It’s easy, in the heat of the pre-exam moment, to get overzealous with your planning. Always assume things will take longer and your schedule will be tighter. Be prepared by cutting, cutting, and then cutting.
5. Schedule Your Battle Plans Using the Two Day Rule.
   Assign the different pieces of your battle plans to specific days leading up to the exams. When doing so, I suggest the following simple rule which, if followed, will provide a significant stress reduction: schedule each battle plan to finish two days before the relevant exam. There is something magical about never having to study the day before the test. It’s like a whole different (relaxed) experience. I know, I know, you’re probably saying right now: “I can’t finish a day early! I’m such a wild and crazy procrastinator!” Sigh. Here’s my response: “Man up.” You’re not starring in a National Lampoon movie. No one is impressed that you can put off work.)
6. Execute.
   Notice I’m avoiding the “s”-word here. “Studying” is for pseudo-working grinds. You’re executing a specific plan custom-designed to minimize time and stress. Bonus: Kelly over at Hack College will pound one beer for every time you work the phrase “I’m executing a specific plan custom-designed to minimize time and stress” into casual conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex.

In Conclusion

A lot of this might reek of common sense. But that’s also the smell of advice that might actually work. Approach your exam prep like a robot and you’ll be surprised by how smoothly it goes.

Willpower as a Limited Resource

In January, I posted an article titled The Science of Procrastination. It reported on the work of Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist from Florida State University. Baumeister had demonstrated an effect called ego-depletion. The idea was simple: self-control depends on a limited resource — a resource that, like a muscle, depletes during repeated, continuous use.

The experiments were elegant and convincing. Give a subject two tasks that require self-control and they’ll do worst on the second. Replace the first task with something that requires no self-control and their performance on the second increases.

The conclusion: willpower is a limited resource. The more you use, the more you lose. So use it wisely during the day.

A Problem Emerges

In February of this year, an article appeared in the journal of Social and Personality Psychology Compass. It was written by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, a pair of pioneering social psychologists from the University of Rochester, who, over the past three decades, have innovated our understanding of motivation.

Their message to Baumeister: your experiments are nice but your conclusions, unfortunately, aren’t quite right.

Enter Self-Determination Theory

Ryan and Deci have been amassing, for more than a decade, a substantial body of evidence supporting a model of energy and vitality that they call Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

This model overturns Baumeister’s “willpower is like a muscle” message, and provides us with a more nuanced view of why sometimes we’re energized when we face work, and why other times we are very much not.

Self-Control is Hard; Except When it’s Not

Ryan and Deci’s SDT framework describes how we maintain and enhance vitality. The concept of vitality captures, roughly, physical and mental energy. Among other things, it’s often associated with “vigor,” feelings of positive affect,” and “calm energy.” In short: the opposite of the mood that fuels procrastination.

The SDT model makes several predictions about what affects our vitality levels. Perhaps the single prediction most relevant to our discussion of willpower:

• Autonomous self-regulation (decisions made based on your own deeply held interests) is less depleting than activities that are controlled (decisions made based on other sources, from societal pressures to external control).

Ryan and Deci’s response to Baumeister is that self-control can deplete willpower. But, if the activity is autonomously self-regulated — if it derives from a deeply held interest or value — then willpower (as described by vitality) will not be depleted; in fact, it might even be enhanced.

In short: the effect self-control has on your willpower (vitality) depends not on how much work you’re doing, but the ultimate reason why you’re doing it.

Putting the Theory to the Test

In a series of experiments, conducted in 1999 by Ryan and Deci, along with Glen Nix and John Manly, also of the University of Rochester, this hypothesis was put to the test.

Experiment #1. The subjects were given the Wisconsin Card Sort, a standard cognitive problem-solving task. Half the subjects were self-directed. They could solve the task however the wanted. The other half were other-directed. They had to follow the strategy of the previous subject.

Happiness and vitality were tested before and after the task. As predicted by SDT: vitality decreased for the other-directed subjects but stayed the same for the self-directed. Happiness increased for both cases. (People are temporarily happy when they do well.)

Experiment #2. The researchers investigated a more subtle form of control. They turned their attention from external control (the experimenter giving instructions) to internal control (in this case: ego.) The subjects, who, like in the first experiment, were college students, were given a series of puzzles to accomplish. The task-directed group were given some background on the artist and told about the comics in which the puzzles originally appeared. The ego-directed group, on the other hand, was told that the puzzles were increasingly being used to measure intelligence and perceptual skills. A story was weaved about the Air Force using the puzzle to screen pilots. Both groups were given positive feedback throughout the experiment.

Once again, the non-controlled, task-directed group had vitality stay strong, while the ego-directed group crashed and burned.

Same task. Same positive feedback. No external control in either case. By simply turning the framing of the experiment to one of supporting ego, the task became not about a freely made decision or interest, but, instead about the maintence of others’ perception of the subject’s abilities. By doing so, the task became a willpower drain.

Implications for You

As college students, we’re quick to blame feelings of burnout or mental malaise on the amount or type of work we face. (”Not another paper! I’m tired of this!”)

The work of Ryan and Deci, however, gives us new insight into the source of these student slumps: The “why” matters. We can harness this insight to generate a collection of concrete strategies to avoid such low points:

• As much as possible, engineer your student life to make the source of your actions intrinsic — that is, freely chosen and connected to an honest interest.
• Run fast as hell from any large commitment that you feel like you’re expected or have to do. Over time, these will keep draining your vitality until you spiral into a burnout.
• Be careful about asking for advice from authority figures. Hearing, for example, a parent telling you that you should follow a certain path can have the effect of making the related actions feel controlled — even if you might have arrived at the same conclusion on your own. Mentors are safer as they exist outside of an existing framework of control in your life.
• Spend the time necessary to figure out what’s important to you and what’s not. Without real values, almost any activity will be arbitrary or controlled by outside forces.
• Leave your schedule open enough that, on a regular basis, you can pursue random, interesting opportunities as they arise. These provide the vitality equivalent of booster shots; keeping your zest for life strong.

In Conclusion

Procrastination remains inevitable. But the hope provided by Ryan and Deci is that for many activities it’s allure can be weakened. When you’re doing something that you choose to do, it’s just not that bad.

Not surprisingly, this empirical research resonates well with the optimal lifestyle approach described by my anecdotal experiences. I’m talking, of course, about the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. When you read the story of a ZV-practioner like Tyler, with his defiant choice of a classics major, a focus on research he enjoys, the lack of resume-fodder activities, and his open, random-event rich schedule, it’s hard not to imagine Ryan and Deci smiling with approval.

Keep these experiments in mind next time you feel like your college schedule is becoming too much to bear. Remind yourself often of what is perhaps the most important question you can learn to ask: why?