Study Hacks

Winding Down into Chaos

Here at MIT we’re rapidly approaching the worst part of the semester: the last 2 – 4 weeks. Just when I think I have everything under control — my autopilot is humming along, my fixed schedule is keeping my stress low, GTDCS is herding my little tasks — the end of the semester looms and threatens to destabilize my whole world. I know that my work load is about to spike as all my large projects become due simultaneously and every class initiates their own scramble to tie up all the loose ends.

I’m sure this experience sounds familiar.

Worry Not, I Have, as Always, a System to Help

I thought I might share with you the cobbled-together collection of big-picture strategies that help me navigate the end of semester crunch. I call it the 4D method because each of its four components — after some linguistic wrangling — starts with the letter ‘D’. The end of semester will remain hectic. But the four D’s will help you maintain your sanity.

The 4D Method

The method consists of four general strategies:

1. DROP
   In preparation for the increased load: drop or defer every activity or obligation you reasonably can. Early in the term, when life seems tame and under control, it’s easy to start initiating projects and agreeing to participate in events and activities. Then things get busy. Now is the time to undue that optimistic obligating in preparation for the battle to follow. Be ruthless.
2. DASH
   Many small obligations in your life resist dropping. Maybe you owe an article to a campus publication. Maybe you’re supposed to present the readings in an upcoming class. Before you transition into full on scramble mode, focus on dashing through as many of these remaining small obligations as possible. Purge the small and urgent off the face of your to-do list. Be a relentless completion machine — clearing your plate of the little things that might later gunk up the wheels of progress during the critical weeks ahead. Do this even if it means you are finishing small tasks well before they are due (the horror!)
3. DENY
   If someone tries to rope you into a new obligation, give them one of only two answers: “no” or “after the semester ends.” Stick to this. No matter how small or how tempting it is to offer up your time. For now, you need to keep things simple.
4. DIVIDE
   Once your schedule is cleared of the small stuff, start dividing up the final days of the semester between your major projects and obligations. Put aside, for example, an entire weekend just for studying for a given class. Maybe Monday and Tuesday will be for finishing the rough draft of your research paper and Wednesday for studying for another class and Thursday to polish the paper. These finalizing work pushes require a good consistent block of non-distracted time. Don’t let them muddle all together.

Clear Schedule, Clear Mind

The philosophy behind the 4D method can be summarized: simplify, simplify, simplify. You want your entire working life during the final weeks of the semester to be just about the major things you have to finish. You want to provide these major final projects uninterrupted blocks of concentration — unhindered by mosquito tasks sucking dry the life blood of your focus. The 4D method will get you there.

Keep in mind, however, this does not replace the ESS Philosophy — you still need to start major projects early. But even projects that have been thoroughly pulverized typically require major pushes at the end to finish them off. Combine this with the other big tasks that loom around this time of the term — test studying, final problem sets, class presentations — and even the most conscientious student will have her hands full. Let the 4D’s guide you home.

The Schedule That Wasn’t There

I had an interesting conversation last week. A friend asked about my schedule for the rest of the semester. “I have it all planned out,” I replied. “I’m going to alternate, back and forth, between working on the big research paper I have to write for my art history seminar and the early parts of my dissertation.”

The friend was quick to challenge me. This schedule, he noted, missed a lot. What about the hundreds of pages of weekly reading for my art history seminar? What about writing and grading problem sets, and prepping and running recitation sections, and student e-mail, and all the rest of the random logistical effluvia emanating from the course I am TA’ing? Or, for that matter, what about all the non-MIT projects I keep brewing? My blog? My freelance articles?

It didn’t occur to me to mention this work. These tasks — numerous as they may be — rarely make an appearance in my scheduling decisions. Why? Because I use a simple but devastatingly effective student trick: the autopilot schedule.

It works as follows…

The Autopilot Schedule

There are two types of work in my world:

• Regularly occurring tasks.
• Non-regularly occurring tasks.

The former typically outweigh the latter and take up the bulk of my time during. These regular tasks are so numerous that I don’t trust myself to schedule them, week by week, in a reasonably efficient and spread out manner. If I made scheduling decisions on the fly for all of my regular work, I would likely:

• Get behind on my regular work, letting it pile up and instigate last-minute scrambles.
• Make very little progress on my important non-regular work. “I’ll start that paper tomorrow, I have all this reading to get done today!”

So here’s what I do instead:

• I assign every regularly occurring task to a specific day in the week. (Sometimes I even assign the task to a specific time.)

For example, here is the schedule I am currently using for non-regular work in my student life:

• Reading for my art history seminar: Friday and Monday. If I don’t end up finishing, then I also use Wednesday before class.
• Develop new problem set problems: Thursday morning before class.
• Build a prep sheet for problem set problems: Thursday morning right after the problems are chosen.
• Prepare for office hours: One and half hours before office hours start on Tuesday. (The process is simplified by the prep sheets put together the preceding Thursday.)
• Work with graders to discuss problems, setup rubrics, and review procedure: Two hour meeting, in conference room, Thursday afternoon.
• Reassemble problem sets, print sample solutions, print graders notes: Tuesday morning before class.
• Write draft of Monday and Wednesday blog posts: Sunday morning.
• Edit and post blog articles: First thing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
• Reply to student e-mail for class: Right after blog posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and first thing on Tuesday and Thursdays. Also at end of work day.
• Work on non-MIT writing: Friday, Sunday, “early-evenings” during the week.

I call this an autopilot schedule. It took some tinkering, as it does every semester, to get it to a place that works. But now that it has been fine tuned, I no longer have to expend any scheduling energy to make sure I accomplish all of these regular tasks. They run, in effect, on autopilot — getting done when scheduled.

The Power of Autopilot

Here’s why I love having an autopilot schedule: my scheduling energy can be focused 100% on the large, non-regular tasks in my life. This is why I was able to tell my friend that my schedule for the next two months consists of alternating between my research paper and my thesis. All of that other crap he mentioned is already taken care of. I’m only interested in what happens in the time that remains.

Let me give you two reasons why you should consider placing the regular work in your life onto autopilot:

1. Your regular work gets done consistently and with a minimum of stress.
2. The clarity gained by having this regular work “taken care of” allows you to focus on the important big projects in your student life.

Getting Started

There’s no magic 10-step process here. Identify what work you do every single week and then start fixing it to specific days. You probably won’t get it right at first. The biggest mistake I make each semester when forming my autopilot schedule is to put too much on one day. So play with your work. Slice. Dice. Spread it out. When possible tie work to specific events. (Much of my TA work is attached to the hours immediately before or after classes or office hours.) These triggers make it easier to get started. If a given task is big and scary and ambiguous try to break it down and systemitize it. (A post for another day is the amount of mechanization I’ve applied to my TA responsibilities to minimize any wasted or unnecessary time spent handling papers.)

Once you get to the point where your regular work is getting done with a minimum of thinking, you’ve hit that low-stress sweet spot where you can start turning your attention to the bigger things. Like that terrible massive art history research paper that I have no idea how to start. Still working on a way to automate that too.

Related Posts

• Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours
  
• The Science of Procrastination: Researchers Tackle Willpower and our Ability to Control it
• The Einstein Principle: Accomplish More By Doing Less

A Student’s Worst Enemy

Large, longterm assignments are the bane of undergraduate life. There is no more tempting invitation to procrastination than to see “start work on major, terrible, huge assignment” on your to-do list. So what happens? This particular task gets skipped. Again. And Again. Until, finally, you enter “oh shit!” mode right before the deadline and begin that terrible last minute scramble.

The ESS Method

In this post I describe a simple system that will help you avoid this fate. I call it the ESS method (short for: Early-Small-Soon). It’s a generalization of the strategies that many of the efficient students I’ve interviewed over the years use to defang large assignments.

It can be presented in three rules — one for each piece of the ESS acronym…

RULE #1: Early

Start work on large assignments as early as possible. For projects due at the end of the semester, this might mean right after midterms. Don’t balk. You don’t need to start burning the midnight oil months early. But you do need to start thinking about what lies ahead. It helps if at the beginning of each semester you put a “project start” reminder on your calendar at an appropriate date for each of the major assignments you face. Once you reach that date it’s time to apply the next rules…

RULE #2: Small

Forget the end result. Focus, instead, on the next manageable chunk of work. Try to identify a chunk of work that will require somewhere between 2-6 hours. That is, more than you can whip through in one sitting, but not so much that you can’t find the time over the span of a week or two. At this point, the large assignment means nothing to you. This small chunk is what your world is about. It is what has to be done next.

RULE #3: Soon

Here’s the anti-procrastinatory glue that holds the method together: once you’ve identified your small chunk, set an arbitrary deadline for its completion. Depending on how busy your schedule and how large the chunk, consider time frames that are somewhere between 1 – 3 weeks. Make the deadline non-negotiable. This is when this chunk has to be finished. If it requires a mini-scramble when the deadline looms, then so be it.

The Method in Action

What’s interesting about the ESS method, and why, I think, I see variations of it pop up again and again among high scoring students, is that the arbitrary deadline trick actually works. Even though you know you made it up, we’re wired to respond to the pressure of deadlines, and this spurs you to accomplish that next manageable chunk.

Once you’ve finished one chunk, you plan the next, and your progress continues in this manner. As the deadline gets closer, the arbitrary deadlines tend to become more ambitious, and more gets done, until, well, you’re done with the whole assignment.

Yes, at the end, you still might have some scrambling. But the overall experience is significantly less stressful. Instead of grappling with one monstrous beast of an assignment, you are lightly sparring, week by week, with mini-assignments. By the time the final deadline looms, you have a base of quality work and not that much left to complete.

Related Posts

• Are you effective or just busy? Calculate your churn rate to find out.
• How to schedule your writing like a professional writer.
• 20 simple ways to defuse procrastination.

“Occasionally I end up setting aside one full day where I just lock myself
in my room with some food and grind through it.”
– Jeremy, a straight-A student from Dartmouth

Sometimes it Piles

The Straight-A Method preaches that you should know all of your upcoming obligations and have control over the hours in your day. Combined, these tactics help keep your schedule manageable. But college has a hidden evil streak. Sometimes the Due Date Gods collude to ensure you enter a period of extreme busyness.

When this happens, there is no avoiding the dreaded hard day. Sometimes relaxation and balance has to take a backseat to simply grinding through that work that just absolutely has to get done. (Though, hopefully, even this grinding is being done in focused chunks with sufficient breaks, good food, and in silent, isolated locations on campus.)

How do we best handle these occasional unavoidable pushes? Control them…

The Choice is Yours

When you spy a confluence of due dates lurking on the horizon, plan your hard day(s) in advance. Make sure they aren’t consecutive. If possible, place them near something exciting or relaxing (e.g., the day before a big party, or the day after a long-planned ski trip). Tell everyone you know about your schedule.

The advantages are as follows:

1. By planning the day instead of being forced into it, you feel more energized and in control as oppose to tired and abused.
2. Your advanced planning allows you to spread out the hard days in such a way that minimizes their impact.
3. By telling your friends, you’re more committed to actually following through with the planned work.
4. Once you’ve placed that day on your schedule, you experience stress relief from the knowledge that your workload is about to face a major reduction.

A Tactic of Last Resort

I should make it clear: the best strategy for hard days is to avoid them all together. But when even your most conscientious scheduling fails to keep up with the load, a strategically planned grind fest can make a big difference with a minimal impact on your stress levels.

Today I’m pleased to offer a guest post written by our good (and much cooler) friends over at Hack College. If you’re so inclined, check out the article I wrote for them: how I use “project queues” to stay focused. I think we can all agree: Nothing says Friday like co-located productivity fun!

Introduction

When programming, there are two ways to design a system: the bottom-up mechanism-based approach and the top-down policy-based methodology. From my Operating System Concepts book:

One important principle is the separation of policy from mechanism. Mechanisms determine how to do something; policies determine what will be done.

… The separation of policy and mechanism is important for flexibility. Policies are likely to change across places or over time. In the worst case, each change in policy would require a change in the underlying mechanism.

The Backstory

(Skip this part if you’re not interested in the knitty-gritty of computers.)

In the world of operating systems, there are two ways to accomplish something: a mechanism-based approach and a policy-based approach.

One of the things that makes Linux so great is its mechanism-based approach. Linux provides small but powerful programs to do simple things: ls, grep, rm, cat, less, and ps to name a few. Most of these microprograms can be mixed and matched to accomplish more complex tasks. Better yet, these can be built upon; most graphical programs in a Linux environment secretly call these command line programs to do the dirty work.

On the opposite side of the fence (usually) is Windows. Many design choices were made based on policies. A good example of a policy based implementation is a graphical program whose data files cannot be read without using that program or worse, a particular version of that specific program. Data hiding is sometimes necessary in computing, but in a Word file? C’mon.

Modulate to Graduate

For the record, I’m aware of my improper use of modulate in this context, but who can pass up a good rhyme?

One of the key tenants of computer programs these days is modularity. That makes perfect sense in my brain, but then again I like looking at the source code for Linux in my spare time. For those who don’t drool over code, think of modularity as Legos; a larger system built by many smaller, stand-alone parts.

The way us non-robots can implement such procedure is to break down tasks in life to their simplest level. Just about every single thing you do should have a consistent method of completion. Does this sound automatronic? It is. But the idea is to keep simple things off your mind, similar to what GTD tries to accomplish.

A Trivial Example to Demonstrate a Larger Point

All of this thus far may be a little too pie-in-the-sky. Let’s work with a concrete example. First, let’s talk about the how of something trivially simple: getting a phone number.

For most students today, the mechanism is: enter the data into my cell phone. It’s little surprise that everyone does this: it’s become the simplest single way to deal with the how of getting a phone number. The mechanism-based approach works well when getting the numbers out of your phone too: copy the data onto my computer.

Okay, this is lame, you say. Let’s look at the other way, the policy-based way of handling such a task. Policy just answers the what: record a cell phone number so it can be accessed later. When you are faced with the daunting task of recording a phone number for later use of some celebrity or CEO (or both), you might choke. Do I write down the number on my PocketMod? Should I just take his card and leave? Should I type it into my phone? By the time you figure out a mechanism to support your policy, you’re already toast.

Assembling the Blocks

The phone number example is trivial, but it proves a point. Have your mechanisms in mind when moving through the world. Whenever confronted with a task for your GTD, a phone number of an attractive member of the opposite gender, or a homework problem, train yourself to have knee-jerk mechanism based reactions. Break the problem down into discrete tasks and move forward. Your life will never be the same.

But wait! There’s more! Little did you know, I was taking you on a ride throughout this post. I used a mechanism-based style of writing! I wrote this post in several, small chunks that could be separated and still remain in context! Feel had?

My Schedule Should Be Terrible…

I should have an overwhelming, Malox-guzzling, stress-saturated schedule. Here’s why: I’m a graduate student in a demanding program. I’m working on several research papers while also attempting to nail down some key ideas for my dissertation. I’m TA’ing and taking courses. I maintain this blog. I’m a staff writer for Flak Magazine. And to keep things interesting, I’m working on background research for a potential new book project.

You would be reasonable to assume that I must get, on average, 7 – 8 minutes of sleep a night. But you would also be wrong. Let me explain…

For Some Reason It’s Not…

Here is my actual schedule. I work:

• From 9 to 5 on weekdays.
• In the morning on Sunday.

That’s it. Unless I’m bored, I have no need to even turn on a computer after 5 during the week or any time on Saturday. I fill these times, instead, doing, well, whatever I want.

How do I balance an ambitious work load with an ambitiously sparse schedule? It’s a simple idea I call fixed-schedule productivity.

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

• Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
• Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
• Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
• Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — “I do not want to work past 5 on week days!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at an example…

Case Study: My Schedule

My schedule provides a good case study. To reach my relatively small work hour limit, I have to be careful with how I go about my day. I see enough bleary-eyed insomniacs around here to know how easy it is to slip into a noon to 3 am routine (the infamous “MIT cycle.”) Here are some of the techniques I regularly use to remain within the confines of my fixed schedule:

• I serialize my projects. I keep two project queues — one from my student projects and one for my writing projects. At any one moment I’m only working on the top project from each queue. When I finish, I move on to the next. This focus lets me churn out quality results without the wasted time of constantly dancing back and forth between multiple efforts. (As also discussed here and here.)
• I’m ultra-clear about when to expect results from me. And it’s not always soon. If someone slips something onto my queue, I make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top. I communicate this date. Then I make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised.
• I refuse. If my queue is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time, I turn it down.
• I drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control, and starts to sap too much time from my schedule: I drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in my queue, I drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time: I quit. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end you’re judged on your large-scale list of important completions.
• I’m not available. I often work in hidden nooks of the various libraries on campus. I check and respond to work e-mail only a few times a day. People have to wait for responses from me. It’s often hard to find me. Sometimes they get upset at first. But they don’t really need immediate access. And I will always respond within a reasonable timeframe and get them what they need. So they adjust. And I get things done.
• I batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something I do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I write blog posts on Sunday morning. I do reading for my seminar on Friday and Monday mornings. Etc. Habit-based schedules for the regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.
• I start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that I know are important, I don’t tolerate procrastination. It doesn’t interest me. If I need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that my queue proceeds as needed, I do so.

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and “crucial” web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right.

Franklin’s Friends

In 1727, Benjamin Franklin gathered a group of friends into an organization he called the Junta. They met regularly for conversation and to discuss ideas — letting off the type of intellectual steam that can build up when you are living in what was then a colonial backwater. It’s rumored that an organizing rule of the group was that no one could arrive with a fixed opinion. Everything was open to debate and persuasion. It was self improvement on steroids. A time to challenge their minds. A time to grow. A time to repeatedly say the word “Junta,” because it’s awesome.

Franklin was on to something. This model worked for him and his pre-revolutionary acquaintances. And it can work for you too.

Let me explain…

From Colonial Philadelphia to Your Dorm Room

I want to make a bold suggestion: Find two or three friends who might also enjoy the type of productivity hacks discussed on this blog. Next: establish your own Productivity Junta. Meet once a week. Over coffee or beer. (Though not both…I’ve tried, the flavors don’t mix.) Discuss the problems, concerns, and successes you’ve been having with the technical aspects of being a successful, well-balanced, low-stress college student.

Specifically, address the following three issues (motivated strongly by the Straight-A Method Framework):

1. Stress and Productivity: Are you completing the work you need to get done without too much stress or guilt?
2. Study Strategies: Have you found sufficiently efficient study strategies for the classes you’re taking?
3. Secret Aspirations: Are you making progress on the big, ambitious, grand projects that you day dream about in your moments of optimism?

For each topic, allow every member of the Junta to answer the following crucial questions:

1. What worked toward answering this question positively?
2. What didn’t work?
3. What can I do to have more of (1) and less of (2)?
4. Why is there no more of that intoxicatingly quaffable beer-coffee mixture left?

The Junta Effect

The idea is simple. Gather some like-minded friends and discuss the gunk between the tire tread details of student productivity. Gripe about failures, learn from successes. Easy stuff.

The effect, however, is profound. By working through the technical details of your student life with others, you’ll be surprised by how many otherwise overlooked truths will shake loose. An idiotic study habit acting as an engorged leech on your free time. A big project that you’re afraid to start.

Best of all, however, is knowing that you’re not alone. By sharing your stresses and then working with others to reduce them is a liberating experience. It’s also an excuse to discuss over-complicated time management strategies. Which, as any regular productivity blog reader will tell you, is like crack to us.

Let Me Join You

I feel so strongly about the Productivity Junta idea that I want to help you get going. Here are my two extra special offers:

1. If you form a Junta, e-mail me the big questions or concerns that arise in your first meeting. I’ll respond with my own thoughts and commentary.
2. If you’re in the Cambridge, MA area, let me know! I am happy to attend a gathering of the first Cambridge area Junta to contact me.

I know it might be uncomfortable at first to involve others into your concerns of productivity, stress, and studying. But once you make that step, you’ll wonder how you ever survived on your own.

Also, the word “Junta” impresses chicks. Ask Franklin.

The Wonders of Arbitrage

In this article, I explain how to apply the well-known concept of arbitrage to the hours in your daily schedule. By taking advantage of the different values of these hours to different types of work, you can use time arbitrage to maximize your “productivity profit” — which describes the value you extract from the day in terms of both work accomplished and relaxation achieved. (We are at our best when we balance both.)

If you’re already comfortable with the concept of arbitrage, skip down to the section titled Time Arbitrage. Otherwise, continue on with the next section where we’ll cover the basics…

Arbitrage Basics

Arbitrage is a simple concept. In finance it describes the simultaneous purchase and sale of assets that generates a profit due to a difference in price. For example, let’s say that at this moment my most recent book costs $10 in Hanover because Dartmouth students are all brilliant and the advice is generally not needed. In Cambridge, however, it costs $20, because Harvard students need all the help they can get. If I put phones up to both ears and buy 100 copies from the Dartmouth Coop while selling 100 copies to the Harvard Coop, I’ve just made myself a tidy $1000 profit.

Arbitrage Beyond Money

The concept of arbitrage can be extended beyond finance. For example:

Geoarbitrage: Tim Ferriss has been recently promoting the concept of geoarbitrage. The basic idea: consider a task, like doing research for a freelance article, that requires 5 hours. If you’re being paid $1000 for the article, and it takes 10 hours total to finish, then the task of research is worth $500 to your editor. Assume, however, that a virtual personal assistant in Bangalore will do the same research for $10 an hour. You can now “buy” the asset (5 hours of research) for $50 in India and then “sell” it to your editor for $500, making a profit of $450.

Social Arbitrage: Keith Ferrazzi introduced the idea of social arbitrage to help explain the world of inter-personal networking. Assume you have two good friends. One is the CEO of a major tech company. The other is a freelance writer. Assume the writer is working on an important article about the tech industry. The cost to your friendship to ask the CEO to chat with the writer is small. It’s only slightly annoying — requiring maybe 20 minutes of the CEO’s time. The benefit to your relationship with the writer, however, is major. The connection will be key for him to complete his article (earning him money and respect). Therefore, you can “buy” the favor for cheap from the CEO and then “sell” it for much more to the writer. The introduction yields a large net gain to the overall strength of your network.

Time Arbitrage

Time arbitrage concerns the hours in your daily schedule. As with any arbitrage system, we need a notion of value. For time: value can be defined as the amount of productive work or relaxation accomplished during the interval. We also need a notion of buyers and sellers. In this context: the buyers and sellers are activity types.

Scheduling your day, therefore, can be seen as a market in which you are buying and selling hours to and from activities with the hope of making money through value differences. To understand what value differences you have to play with, we have to define the different activity types and how they value time.

• Concentration Activities:These includes studying, reading, working on a problem set, or anything else that demands concentration. Earlier hours are worth more than later hours for these activities. You have more energy earlier in the day and can therefore better concentrate. In addition, isolated hours are worth more than consecutive hours. That is, an hour surronded by non-concentration activities is worth more than an hour in the middle of a marathon session. Too much consecutive concentration and your mind begins to tire. (See this post on pseudo-work for a more detailed discussion on the importance of energy and focus in completing demanding tasks.)
• Mechanistic Activities: These include errands, producing flashcards, tracking down sources in the library, or any other activity that does not demand concentration to complete. All hours are worth the same for these activities.
• Relaxation Activities: These include any activities meant to relax yourself and generate contentment. For example, dinner with friends, going to see a talk, pulling together a pong game, web-surfing or watching TV. Later hours are worth more to these activities. Early in the day it’s hard to fully relax because you know you have more work left to do later. In addition, consecutive hours are worth more than isolated hours. Little bursts of relaxation don’t relax you as much as being able to really let go for a while.

Becoming a Time Arbitraguer

Here’s an exercise. Look at your schedule for yesterday. Map out how you spent your free hours. Label each of these hours with the appropriate activity type from above.

Now, imagine you’re an arbitraguer. You want to buy up the time from the day and then sell it back to activities in a way that maximizes your profit. The key here:look for inefficiencies. Find places were activities own time that is of low value to them. Buy it on the cheap. Then sell it to activities that value it much more. For example:

• Perhaps you dedicated pockets of free time in the early afternoon to relaxation activities, like surfing the web and watching TV. (This is the typical student mantra: “I’ll work later, when I have more consecutive hours of free time.”) You can buy these hours at a low price because relaxation does not value early isolated chunks of time very much. Next, resell the time to concentration activities, like working on a reading assignment. The latter will pay quite a bit more for these same hours.
• Maybe your night was spent in a marathon of concentration activities, like studying for a test. Buy these hours on the cheap and sell them to relaxation activities. Again, generating a tidy profit.
• Once you’ve sold your high-profit late and early hours, sell the remaining chunks to the mechanistic activities. All time is worth the same to these activities, so they can be used to fill in the holes left after you maximize the value generated by selling hours to the concentration and relaxation activities.

Living the Time Arbitraguer Lifestyle

The example activities given above were specific to college students, but the three main activity types — concentration, mechanistic, and relaxation — are applicable to all walks of life. In the business world, for example, concentration might cover working on a new marketing idea, mechanistic might cover answering e-mails, and relaxation might cover time with family. The valuation formulas still work.

The key is to understand that all hours are not made equal. When you begin seeing your free time in terms of the different value it brings to different activities, and you develop a thirst for maximum productivity profit, you’ll be surprised by how much more value you can wring out of each day.