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Study Skill #9: Teach to Learn Better
Recently, I have been teaching what I learned through conversations with my friends and on this blog. It has helped me to think through what I need to do to apply what I’ve learned. It challenges me to do what I advise other people to do. To pass on what you’ve learned is to challenge…
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Study Skill #8: Focus Defined Differently
According to Daniel Goleman, focus is not keeping your attention focused on one thing for an extended period of time. Focus is bringing your attention back when it wanders. Our brains are wired to be distracted a good chunk of the time. The goal is not letting that distraction de-rail our work but bring our…
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Study Skill #7: Write It Down
Simple, yet powerful. If you think of something you need to do that isn’t truly urgent, write it down. Don’t give it the power to derail your study session. Keeping a notebook next to you as you study is a very useful tactic. I need to get back into doing this, it helps me significantly.…
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Study Skill #6: Implement Your Intentions
I know I”ve talked about implementing our intentions before, but it is worth repeating. If we are going to study “when we feel like it”, it won’t happen. But, a simple plan can almost triple our chances of following through. A simple intention on paper (whether digital or physical): I will study for 30 minutes…
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Study Skill #3: Sleep
The next study skill is sleep. Yes, sleep. It has been relatively well established that you need sleep after learning to kind of hit “save” on what you are learning in the deeper stages of sleep. But, recently science is pointing to the fact that we need sleep before learning to prepare our brains. Without…
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Study Skill #2: What is it that I don’t understand?
Thomas Frank, the self-proclaimed “College Info Geek”, recommends a tactic from Dale Corson, a former President of Cornell Univeristy. He advised students to work through their problem one sentence at a time, asking: “What is that I don’t understand?”. This allows the students to be able to point to exactly what they don’t understand when…
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Study Skill #1: Visualization
I have been learning about how to study more effectively. For the next few blog posts, I would like to look at some of the things I learned. The first is using visualization for memorizing things. I got the idea from a TED talk where they said to attach something you want to memorize, a…
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Hello. I am Josh. I am a Recovering Productivity Junkie
I like to read productivity books. In fact, most of the books I read are either on productivity, habits or personal finance. I have a list of my favorites that will likely show up as a blog post in the near future. Recently, I realized I’ve read so much looking to “fix” my life and…
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The Big 3
In Michael Hyatt’s book Free To Focus, he talks about coming up with his “Big 3” for the week. He looks at all he needs to do for the week and eliminates some, automates some and delegates some. With what he has left, he assigns some to the “back burner” list, things he needs or…
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When We Do Hard Things.
When we do hard things, we learn about ourselves and the world we live in. When we do hard things, we get stronger. When we do hard things, we can take on bigger challenges if we just keep our eyes open and learn. This month, I was worked on a hard thing. I was working…