NEW BOOK!
Explore a better way to work – one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity.

Study Hacks Blog

Plan.txt : The Most Effective Productivity Tool That You’ve Never Heard Of

The Two Faces of ProductivityPlan.txt

Productivity can be divided into two main concerns. The first is capturing and organizing all of the “stuff” you have to do.

This is the fun part.

This is where you buy fancy notebooks and configure Remember the Milk to auto-sync with your iPhone. It keeps productivity blogs in business and makes David Allen rich.

The second concern is actually doing the stuff that you need to do.

This is much less fun.

This post is about this second concern. I don’t claim to have a universal answer. But there is a simple technique that I’ve been using since last January, and that has significantly increased my churn rate. This technique centers on a small, innocuous text file sitting on my computer desktop — a file named plan.txt…

Read more

Does Being Exceptional Require an Exceptional Amount of Work?

The Obama MethodBarack in Crowd

In response to my recent article on Misery Poker, a reader commented:

I wonder about the really exceptional people. Does Barack Obama “build a realistic schedule”? … maybe extraordinary stress IS required to accomplish extraordinary feats

Another reader added:

I think extraordinary sacrifices are required for great accomplishments.

This is a fascinating argument. Study Hacks, as you know, is driven by the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, which claims that it’s possible to be both relaxed and impressive. But these commenters are pushing back on this world view. It’s one to thing, they note, to have a successful college career that is also relaxed, but is it possible to have an exceptional career without overwhelming amounts of work?

In this post I claim it is possible. And I’ll explain exactly how…

Read more

Do You Play Misery Poker or Quack?

College WoesPoker

A Swarthmore student recently clued me into an interesting fact about life at this competitive school:

The whole predominant atmosphere here is stress, stress, and more stress. We even have a term called misery poker.

Naturally, I asked her for an explanation. She responded with the following sample dialog:

“I have two midterms, a 10 page paper, and I’m headed to a conference next weekend,” says the stressed student

“Oh yeah?,” replies his bleary-eyed friend. “I’ll raise you all that, and add a lab report”

The winner is the student whose life sucks the most.

Read more

The Science of Student Burnout

Precursors to College Student BurnoutDeep in Thought

In 2006, professor Richard West of the University of Southern Maine, working with his student Stephanie Cushman, launched a study to find out more about student burnout. They hoped to answer two questions:

  1. How many college students experience burnout?
  2. Why do they burnout?

I recently stumbled across this paper in the Journal of Qualitative Research Reports in Communication. As you might imagine, I was quite interested in what they found…

The Study

Dr. West’s gave 354 students in an introductory communications course the following survey:

  • Please define or interpret what is meant by college “burnout.”
  • Have you experienced burnout in college?
  • What were the factors that contributed to your burnout in college

He discarded the surveys from students who had not experience burnout or who had defined the term to be something different than the phenomenon being studied. A rigorous coding technique was then used to categorize the responses to the third question.

The Results

Read more

The Goldilocks Strategy for Choosing the Perfect Workload

The Student Work Saturation Point

Tasting Porridge…

The hardest part of building a quality student lifestyle is figuring out how much stuff you should be doing. Some students are clearly slackers. And some are clearly grinds. But for everyone else, especially those trying to follow the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, a nagging question lurks: how do I know if I’m doing the right amount of classes and activities?

In this post I want to discuss a simple approach for designing an optimal workload. I call it the Goldilocks Strategy for obvious reasons: we’re looking for the proverbial work porridge that tastes just right.

To understand this strategy, however, we must first touch base with the reality of how our workload interacts with both our impressiveness and our stress…

The Work Saturation Point

Consider the graph at the top of this post. I’ve plotted two lines. The blue line represents your impressiveness and the red line represents your stress level. As you move from left to right, this represents an increase in your workload (both academic and extracurricular). Therefore, the graph shows how both your impressiveness and stress change as your workload increases.

Read more

Monday Master Class: How to Keep Life Interesting with a Saturday Morning Project

A Dash of SpiceWeekend Work

Have you finished your mid-semester dash? If not, make a plan to do it! I’m already hearing reports from readers of huge post-dash stress reductions.

Once you’ve completed this purge, return to this post. Below, I will teach you how to keep your newly stripped down student life from becoming too boring.

The Grand Project

Readers of How to Win at College know that I’m a big fan of what I like to call: “Grand Projects.” I introduced the idea on the blog early last winter, but haven’t given it much attention since then.

Let’s change that.

Here’s the basic definition:

A Grand Project is any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’

The purpose of a grand project is two-fold:

First, it injects excitement and possibility into your student life. As I said in last winter’s post: “[A Grand Project] focuses you through the small ups and downs that litter the standard student grind. It gives you higher purpose.”

Read more