Josh's Blog

Category: Habits

  • Study Skill #10: Prayer

    One study skill that is often overlooked is prayer. We need God’s guidance and direction in our lives and His strength in our studies. Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.”…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Put The Reps In.

    If you have been following my blog, you might remember me quoting James Clear talking about a study where there were two groups of photography students. Group A was the “quality group”. They had to produce was one photo for the entire semester. It had to be a great photo, their best work. Group B…