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Study Hacks Blog

The Grade Whisperer: Ron’s Feeble Focus

The Grade Whisperer is an occasional feature in which I use the Study Hacks philosophy of do less, do better, and know why, to help students overcome their academic problems.

Feeble FocusAdvice

A student who I’ll call Ron recently sent me an e-mail with an ominous title: Loss of Focus.

“I really enjoy most of my courses,” he started. “And I’m definitely not in the wrong major…But there are some courses that I find extremely difficult and uninteresting.”

There’s nothing surprising about this observation. As I’ve said before, you have to expect that not every course is going to incite scholastic reverie — some subjects you just have to grin and bear en route to becoming “educated.”

Ron, as it turned out, was having trouble with the “grin and bear” part of this equation.

“I sit down, stare at the books, and nothing happens,” he told me.  “After reading and solving problems for 15 minutes I get bored and distracted, start surfing the web, checking email or such.”

He concluded with a key question that I receive often:

You mention that hard focus is necessary. I agree, but my question is: How can I focus on difficult, unenjoyable, painful tasks?

It sounds like a job for the grade whisperer…

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Freestyle Productivity: Balancing Systems and Simplicity When Organizing Your Life

A Geek Goes Back to BasicsPlan.txt

I recently received an e-mail from a college freshman. He described himself as “kind of a techie person,” which he then unambiguously confirmed by noting that his productivity system made use of Evernote, his iPhone, a calendar application, and an online to-do list service.

“I like adopting new gadgets and technology,” he told me. “But I feel it’s becoming more of a hindrance than help.”

Fed up with the maintenance of his crowded stable of productivity tools, this student recently tried an experiment in simplicity: he used only a paper notebook to informally organize his day.

“These were the most productive days of my life,” he said.

Does this mean that the student was converted to productivity Luddite? Not quite. Though he had enjoyed immense productivity, he still felt a creeping dread about his new approach.

“I’m afraid that if I only depend on paper and pencil I’ll lose something important or it’d be too hard to navigate after a few days.”

This student’s problem is a common one: how do you balance high-tech rigid solutions with low-tech informal solutions when organizing your student life?

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The Ice Bath Method: Easing Into Painful Projects

A Difficult Talk

Bailey Next week, I’m giving the Theory Colloquium lecture here at MIT’s computer science laboratory. This means I’m facing one of the most common and most dreaded tasks of academic life: writing a talk.

Constructing good talks slides is grueling. The task is not so large that it can become a harmless background task in your life, and it’s not so small that it can be dispatched in a single inspired dash. In other words, like all medium-sized hard projects, it’s a catalyst for procrastination.

Here’s how I’m handling it…

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The Definitive Guide to Acing Your Schedule

Peer PressureCommon Studying

In the summer of 2000, a Dartmouth economist named Bruce Sacerdote published a paper titled Peer Effects in Randomly Assigned Roommates. His premise was interesting: Incoming students at Dartmouth are assigned to rooms at random. He knew, therefore, that when two roommates first arrive on campus, their behavior should have no more in common than any other pair of students.

Sacerdote’s insight was to wait until the end of the year and then look for traits that roommates had become more likely to share than random pairs. The idea was that these shared traits would be due to the roommates’ influence on each others’ behavior.

Sacerdote found that for some behaviors, such as major choice, roommates didn’t affect each other. But for one trait in particular, GPA, they had a lot in common. He attributed this finding to a simple idea: students’ study habits are heavily influenced by their peers.

It’s important that you recognize this reality, because these peer influences shape more than you might imagine about your own habits. Like a pair of behavioral blinders, carefully slipped into place without you noticing, peer influence may have prevented you from seeing a variety of radical strategies that could greatly simplify your student life.

In this post, I want to describe one such strategy…

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Are You Living Well or Preparing to Live Well?

Note: I started writing this article last April, when I was down in Rio de Janeiro. After my recent return from the similarly contemplation-inducing Bologna, I decided to finish it.

Ancient WisdomRio

When I began writing this article I was sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Rio, looking over the beach pictured to the right. To my ear, the waves in Brazil are absurdly loud, which had the effect of miring me in a haze of tropic contemplation. It was in this state that I happened onto a thought that I couldn’t shake: perhaps the students who are feeling the most run down and worn out by college should take a moment to ask themselves a simple question…

Am I living well now or preparing to live well later?

This question is not new. In tribute to the death of a good friend, Tim Ferriss posted a full length translation of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. I read this translation around the same time that I was thinking about this post, and one passage in particular caught my attention:

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The Rule of One: A Simple Technique to Create a Relaxed Student Life

Note (8/31/09): I’m leaving tonight to give a research talk in Bologna, Italy (yes, it’s a tough life I lead). I’ll almost definitely have internet access, but I’ll also be quite busy, so I give my typical warnings about being slow to post, answer e-mails, and moderate comments over the next week.

The (Over) Committed StudentThinking by water

Last week, I received an e-mail from a student who I’ve advised in the past. His new semester was about to start and he was worried about his schedule.

“I think I’m overcommitting myself,” he told me. “I considered dropping some activities, but it’s hard because I want to do them all.”

He then asked me to review the following “time budget” that he created for his schedule:

  • 5 courses — 24 hours/week in class
  • Lab volunteering — 15 hours/week
  • Peer educator and mentor — 10 hours/week
  • Exercise — 6 hours/week
  • Hospital volunteering — 3 hours/week
  • Executive of a club — 5 hours/week
  • Public speaking club — 8 hours/week

After reading his e-mail, I realized it’s time for me to revist one of the main themes preached here on Study Hacks: simplicity is beautiful.

The idea that doing less can actually make you more impressive is, of course, the cornerstone of my Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. I’ve also argued that doing lots of extracurricular activities is meaningless for your job hunt, and that overloaded course schedules are like a devestating virus that can destroy your life.

In this post, I want to add a new strategy to your minimilast arsenal.

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The Unsinkable Student Organization System

Back to BasicsFiling

As the back to school season transitions from looming to present, it’s time I turned our attention back to the technical details of becoming an outstanding student. In this post, I want to tackle a topic that’s relevant on the very first day of your new semester: staying organized.

Here’s the thing about student organization: what seems like a smart, comprehensive system to today you, will be later seen as a terrible prison that blackens your heart and steals your freedom by the future you mired in the middle of the semester. As you might have guessed, this future you will abandon your smart system and fall back into unorganized chaos.

I want to help you avoid this fate.

Below I describe a dead simple student organization system. It’s a collection of the three basic rules that I’ve used for the past nine years to keep on top of the information in my student life.

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