Steve Pavlina reminds us how to approach big and small tasks in his posts about breaking problems down into microtasks.
 
Although a popular approach to tackling a goal is to write down the next 3 small steps you can take to accomplish it, often this is not enough to motivate us to complete the job. Writing out all of the small tasks that you need to do to get the job done will help to make each step seem manageable and clearly define the endpoint.
 
This is an example list of microtasks that I have just completed to improve a program that graphs some data:

• add legend
• fix axes labels
• add titles
• change colour scheme for lower graphs
• comment code
• check output graph (see if program is working properly)
• make needed changes
• regraph old data

This list is not perfect and may not make complete sense without proper context, but there are only a couple of really important points to remember.

1. Each step should seem quite manageable and easy to do in a short period of time (Steve mentions 10 minutes).
2. The list should also help you to see the end clearly.

Seeing the end clearly is important in that it reveals what you are working towards and ensures that you don’t continue to work endlessly when all your required tasks are complete.
 

At times we need a little push start to get us going on our goals. One of the best ways to do this is by precommitting yourself. This means leaving yourself only one option: to perform. (Also known as burning your bridges.)
 
How can we precommit? How is this relevant to learning?

1. Spend your money: Nothing makes me feel silly like a gym membership going to waste or a $200 textbook being used as a doorstop. When we decide to spend our money on educational materials, we feel compelled to use them; even if only a little.
   • If you want to study for the MCAT, sign up for a course. It will keep the MCAT in mind.
   • If you want to start a website, sign up for a year of web hosting.
   • If you want to learn how to draw, buy art supplies.

   As an addendum to this tip, keep the material where you can see it. It will remind you of all the money you spent and will force you to action.

2. 2) Schedule before you are ready: This can be a bit dangerous, but looming deadlines have a way of quickening our pace. You may want to schedule a meeting with your boss to discuss your results, even before they are completed. Schedule a study group to discuss an issue, even if you haven’t started. As long as you respect the person/group you are committed to, you will be very quick to act as not to disappoint them.
3. 3) Eliminate alternatives: Get rid of all the options that are not involved with what you want to accomplish. With healthy eating, throw out all of your unhealthy food; it is not a waste of money if that food is doing you more harm than good. If you have to study, unplug your TV and give someone the remote, and your video games. Go to an area where your only choice is to work on your task or starve.

While these tips can be a little risky and extreme, bold movements are the ones that will move us to act.
 
See this post from PickTheBrain.com entitled “Commit Yourself to Action by Investing in Success” for more on spending money to motivate yourself.

A frequent complaint of students, myself included, is that the scattered knowledge that we learn does not merge into a “big picture”. While I do agree that some of the onus (burden) lies on the professor’s shoulders, we are not just passive victims of information. One of the roles we may take in order to help contextualize the knowledge is to investigate the events that have led us up to this point. For example: How did we find out that we have white blood cells?
 
I’m not suggesting that you need to learn every little discovery that led up to one incidental fact, but if you have a broad understanding of how a particular phenomenon became interesting, you will understand the material in more detail.
 
Related to a previous post on Warming up before you study, understanding why lectures are important with context to the grander scheme of knowledge will help chunk the information into manageable, sensible pieces; not just an assortment of random facts.
 
What do I mean? How can we do it?
 
Perhaps an example will help. (In an attempt to compensate for my science-heavy posts,I will use an example from the arts.)
 
Fact: English (Shakespearean) sonnets are typically fourteen lines, written in iambic pentameter.
 
What do I know?:
- Shakespeare is a 15th century poet/playwright
- he wrote Romeo and Juliet, Othelo, The Tempest, Hamlet, etc.
- pentameter has something to do with five somethings
 
What am I curious about?:
- When did the sonnet come about? Why/how?
- Is there another type of non-English sonnet?
- Are all English sonnets from Shakespeare?
- Why are they different?
- If so when did this difference emerge?
- Does it have something to do with iambic pentameter? (Do I know what this means?)
- Why are sonnets so popular?
 
The key to answering many of these questions is to have some historical context on the development and the popularization of sonnets. Now the question is…
 
Where can we find this information?
 
Assuming that you are a frugal student like myself and you want to save money, there are always 3-4 solid standbys:
- Google.com
- Wikipedia (Scholarpedia for niche science topics)
- Institutional / Local Library
- Your textbook
 
The first two are good for a surface level understanding of what you need to contextualize, and often this is enough. Just search for sonnets (or whatever) in both Google.com and Wikipedia. A quick glance at wikipedia answers several of my questions: there is another type of sonnet, the Italian sonnet. In fact it was an Italian who presumably invented the sonnet. Also, Shakespeare did not use exclusively English sonnets, nor was he the one to create it, only to popularize it.
 
If you want a deeper understanding, a quick glance at ones textbook my reveal what you need to know about sonnets. If you want a brief history of some topic, occasionally you may find a book (or several) writen exclusively on one niche topic. You don’t need to read the whole book, nor would you want to, but generally the first chapter or introduction serves to provide a brief history or summary.
 
Why would we want to go through all this work?
 
First, I have to emphasize that it usually a waste of time to read a book to understand one unimportant fact. However, if a whole lecture series does not seem to have an overarching theme, understanding its history will help you understand and see the importance behind the lectures. While you could be blasé about your learning, it is crucially important to you. At a university level, it becomes your responsibility to get the marks that you want, and pursue opportunities. There is much less hand-holding and clear instruction.
 
By taking the initiative and learning this bit of extra information on your own, you will decrease the effort it will take to learn future material and increase your likelihood of remembering it. I like to relate this to having a boat with a small hole in it. While it will take a bit more time to repair the hole in your boat than to just put it in the water, you’re going to save yourself a lot of hardship (*cough*) later on.

While reflecting on how I prepared for the MCAT, I realized that I was unknowingly forced to warm-up before every class.
 
The MCAT course I was taking (Kaplan) was in downtown Toronto, and I commuted with my father on his way to work. So most mornings he would drop me off at the McDonald’s, and I would go over the material I needed to before class. Frankly, I didn’t have much else to do other than people-watch, but construction workers aren’t that interesting at McDonald’s.
 
During this time I would reflect on what I had learned in previous classes, tried to fill in holes of knowledge, and previewed for my upcoming class. These 3 tasks are tremendously helpful in solidifying knowledge:
 
1) Reflect on past lessons
 
When you review material of the previous lesson, you begin to draw new connections that you may have missed in the first pass. This review will also help you understand concepts in upcoming classes, because, for the most part, your lectures will build on top of one another.
 
2) Find and fill in holes
 
The areas that you should devote the most time to are those in which you struggle. This may make intuitive sense to some people, but sometimes we forget to do it. You may be doing really well in the chemistry section on electron promotion, and since you are doing well on it, you just keep doing it to feel good. Although feeling good is… good, the goal here is to improve, so we have to tackle the rough stuff. In finding what you still need to learn, you may begin to truly grow. Interestingly enough, you mark increases will mostly come from the subjects where you can push that poor to a good (or even great), rather than pushing that awesome to a perfect.
 
3) Preview for the upcoming class.
 
Even before looking at the material for the upcoming class, it can help just to write down what you already know. I heard this tip relatively recently, and it can make learning quite exciting.
 
Let’s say that we will be learning about air pressure. So just write down what you know. Here’s my (partial) list:
- airplanes
- lift
- Bernouli (sp?)
- pneumatics
- pistons
- pressure, force, area, volume: some equation relates them
- P=FA?
 
Ok, I’m realizing that I am not as sure about my physics as I once was, but that’s ok. The important points here are that a) you are activating your brain to think about this topic and b) once you come across even a vaguely familiar point during the actual lesson, it will stick more firmly. Maybe it’s just me, but when I realize I know more than I thought, I get excited. Not sexually, but close.
 
Just like a good athlete, we must warm-up before training. The purpose of the warm-up is not to waste time or bore us; it is to prepare our minds and bodies for the upcoming task. Warming up before exercise or sport will prevent injury and increase performance. While the injuries are pretty minimal during study, warming up will definitely reduce mental anguish and increase the amount you can learn.

Via the Eide Neurolearning Blog, Newman, Keller and Just (2007) reveal that multi-tasking is doing two things poorly, rather than one thing well. When trying to perform a visual task and a language task, there is less activation in the language-processing parts of the brain and visual-processing parts of the brain then when each is done alone. That long sentence basically means, that our brains aren’t meant to do two things at once well. It will divide attention sure, but there is are less resources for each part of the brain. (Sharing is hard.)
 
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but going on MSN/AOL/Yahoo Messenger while studying doesn’t work. While you probably know this, the execution are where things get tricky. For the sake of the children, please sign out. Don’t worry, your friends will be there when you get back.

This will be the first of many tips on the MCAT. There are many resources out there offering techniques and advice; however, mine will be from a student’s perspective and, if you are curious, I did quite well: I scored in the top 1-2 percent. Even if you are not writing the MCAT, you may want to read these tips as much of the advice will be applicable for other tests.
 
If you are taking the MCAT, I suspect that you are either taking a test preparation course or have purchased materials to study by yourself. In either case, your strategy for approaching the MCAT will be greatly influenced by your learning source. Most of the time, the strategies offer are very well suited for all students and should be dealt with as such — e.g. keeping track of time during the test and pacing yourself properly.
 
However, certain strategies are catered towards a specific type of student, and because of this they will not work effectively for you. These strategies may not work because they go completely against your learning style and/or belittle your intelligence. You may have guessed that I have a vivid example in mind, and you are correct.
 
While taking the Kaplan MCAT preparation course, I was pleased with their approach to certain science based sections, however, I felt their Verbal Reasoning approach to be… stupid. It just didn’t jibe with me. I didn’t like the idea of summarizing paragraphs in the margins, nor did I appreciate the emphasis placed on noticing transition words. These techniques are good if do not know how to read for content and with purpose (which I know some people do not). Yet if you are in this boat you may find that this technique is slow and plodding. I know I did.
 
However, it can be hard to know when to dump a certain strategy and pick another up. In this case I looked at the ExamKrackers books to see what they suggested. While they are biased, they describe how the Verbal Reasoning Strategies employed by “other companies” (*cough*Kaplan*cough*) does raise the average VR score the most, BECAUSE it is geared towards those in the lower end of the score range. Of course it is easier to get larger gains at the lower end, but you won’t be able to reach the 10+ range with those strategies.
 
Your goal should be higher than a 9, so your strategy should be higher than a 9. At times we have to use our intuition to know what strategy will work best for us. You must have an awareness of how you are feeling during practice tests. As a cautionary note: this doesn’t mean that you can dump ALL strategies because you don’t like Verbal Reasoning. It’s still going to be a lot of work, but I recommend choosing a strategy that makes sense to you logically and intuitively.
 
(A bit of disclosure: Using the ExamKracker strategies I moved from a 9 to an 11. My instructor said he received a 13 in VR using the Kaplan technique, but he may be biased, and I don’t know what he got beforehand. Like always, you’ll have to make your own decisions.)

Instead of studying, I’m writing this post - yes, not very studious of me, but I think I deserve a break after 5 hours of studying. A technique I use for studying is time blocking. It’s a pretty simple concept, it’s easy to implement yet hard to master. For the longest time I never really had any sort of formula or pattern to my studying. I carried some really bad habits from high school over into my university career and never really learned from them.
My high school studying habits were very unstructured - they consisted of me picking up the text and reading it over once and saying “I know it”. That worked fairly well as most of the concepts where quite simple to pick up. Doing that in university as most of you know, simply doesn’t work. For me, it didn’t not work, but it didn’t work either. For several terms most of my academic performances were mediocre with a few bright spots here and there.
In the last two academic terms (I’m in school right now), I’ve been taking a far more serious approach to studying. The current way I study is simply to allocate periods of time to whatever I have to study. My studying process for soft courses (that is, courses that require no technical/computation skills whatsoever, but require in depth knowledge of material and memorization), is passive read once, active read once, make notes once, passive read notes, active read notes and group study. I find that this formula of passive, active, write, passive, active and interpersonal dialogue works best for me.
An example would be currently I’m studying for an Organization Theory and Design midterm that I have on Saturday. It takes me about 30 minutes to passive read through a single chapter which consists of ~50 pages. To active read, that is, repeat things in my head, connect various theories and concepts together and actually ingrain concepts into my grey matter, that usually takes 50-60 minutes a chapter. Making notes takes about an 1 hour to 1.5 hours per chapter, usually I like to make diagrams that aid in visualization of concepts (I’m a visual learner). Passive reading of notes per chapter takes about 10 minutes, and active reading takes about 30 minutes. Adding all of that up gives us a total of about 3 - 4 hours of studying per chapter to effective retain the material. The test I have on Saturday covers the first 6 chapters, so that gives me a total of 18-24 hours of pure studying time necessary to learn and retain everything. Finally, I have a group study session, which will probably last 3-4 hours. So in total I should spend 20+ hours for 6 chapters or ~300 pages of material.
Sure 20+ hours of pure studying sounds pretty difficult to get accomplished, but I started a week ago, so 20 divided by 7, gives me ~3 hours a day. 3 hours a day isn’t that bad, considering I only have about 25 hours of lectures a week. So I blocked out that time a week ago, and stuck to my schedule and here I am, today, feeling pretty confident and accomplished. I haven’t written the exam yet but I feel like I could do it half-baked, half-drunk and with a half-functioning hand.

Even though I planned like 28 hours, I actually only studied for about 15 hours and as of right now I feel extremely confident going in. Tomorrow, I’ll go to my group study session and have no problems with explaining concepts and theorems to different people and get feedback on my knowledge. That interpersonal dialogue is usually the most important part of my studying process. It serves 2 purposes, it ensures you haven’t missed any important factoid or issue and gauges how well prepared the rest of the class is. If you leave the session feeling you’re 10x more prepared than anyone else than you’re in all likelihood going to do really well. If you leave the session feeling like you don’t know anything, then in all likelihood you know too little and you have about 24 hours left to cram. But if you did the readings and note making you shouldn’t have too much left to learn.

Time Blocking Studying (TNSTAAFL Studying Algorithmn)

1. Figure out how much you need to study - ie how many chapters? how many pages?
2. Calculate/Estimate the amount of time needed on a chapter to chapter basis or page to page.
3. Now using Outlook or Google Calendar, or a trusty whiteboard write down your studying schedule on the basis of the above calculations.
4. Stick to your damn schedule. If you don’t, stab yourself in the leg, Will Ferrell style.
5. Read Passively - read normally, don’t skim, but don’t force yourself to remember anything - the goal here is to get a general sense of organization and structure of the content.
6. Read Actively - now remember those damn concepts!
7. Make Notes - write those concepts, definitions and important doodads down. Draw diagrams if they help.
8. Read Notes Passively - again, there should be structure and organization to your notes.
9. Read Actively - internalize everything you’ve read and make the necessary interconnections.
10. Group Study! - quiz the hell out of people and get them to do the same to you, you’ll thank them when you’re writing your test and you encounter a question that you only remember the content on because your idiot friend said something stupid during your study session.

In all likelihood you will be over prepared if you actually stick to your schedule and will have loads of free time at the end. This is a good thing. It is infinitely better to have extra time nearing your exam/test than to have no time at all if you decide to put off your studying.

If this works for you, you owe me lunch.

This is the second of several parts on attitudes that will put more information in your brain and keep it there. These tips are meant to be applied in all areas of life, so that maximal learning happens on every front, not just the academic ones.

The first part of Intelligent Attitudes lists tips 1 and 2 and is well worth checking out. Feel free to read them in any order.

3) Find powerful reasons to learn

Simply, we should answer to ourselves: Why do I want to learn this? or Why is this worth remembering?

Tasks get accomplished faster and with more enjoyment when they have meaning or purpose. For the most part, I would hope that we could all have lofty and noble reasons for wanting to acquire information. Reasons such as learning purely for knowledge’s sake, intrinsic interest, or the hope to teach/benefit others later; even finding calm in the present moment can motivate one to study.

While these reasons may motivate us in a grander sense, I find they they may not permeate the present moment. Goals are only valuable to the extent that they affect us now. If the idea of teaching another is not exciting or powerful enough to motivate us to learn, then this idea is not useful. Often, it is other types of goals that drive our quest for knowledge.

Grades:
Learning in order to improve your GPA or ensure your future success, in graduate studies for example, can be a powerful motivator. It is a very measurable factor, thus making it easier to analyze objectively and quickly. You can see if you are improving, and by how much. (Although grades and amount learned are not always directly correlated.) While some say that grades are not important, it is hard to deny their blunt efficiency as a tool to compare and rank people. From this (and for other reasons I won’t get into), the grade point average can motivate.

Sex:
Sexual drive is an ancient desire that can elevate people to untold heights or bring the mighty to their knees. Leaders can are often made or broken because of sex. Some even argue that this one desire is responsible for all great societies. As a result, to have this as a motivator for learning is very effective.

Yet how can knowledge be sexy? Oh, in ways too numerous to count. Common interests can often spark a magical sort of first impression. Someone mentions their philosophy course, you ask about a philosopher they might have studied, and your friend is subtly impressed. One is perceived in a better light if they are knowledgeable about certain subjects; depending on the person such subjects can include fine arts, economics, neurobiology, Tupac’s greatest hits, Tupac’s underground stuff, literature, etc. Even flirting and sexual practices are varieties of knowledge. Of course, this is a bit of a simplification, but if you can find personal reasons why learning a fact will improve your sexual potential, in any way, that fact will be firmly entrenched in your mind.

Impress:
Related to the two above, there are cases in which specific knowledge can be impressive (or at least interesting). Cocktail parties were made so that people would have a place to talk about philosophy, among other things. People also love when you remember things about them, such as their favourite book, things about their family etc. Knowledge about a company or institution will come in useful during an interview to show that you are a thorough and intelligent person. Hell, even sports knowledge can impress your date’s father in that awkward time by the front door. Remembering that all knowledge will be impressive in the future can help one to memorize even the most detailed facts.

Fuel for creativity:
Oh man, this is one of the greatest discoveries of my life. The reason I advocate creative outputs, such as writing, is that your vast pool of knowledge comes pouring out in ways that you may not have thought possible. Wit and humour are often simply the retelling of known things in a novel way. When you have more knowledge to draw upon, you can make connections between pieces of knowledge faster, these new connections are the basis of creativity. Creativity is not limited to writing; scientific discovery benefits greatly from the same fuel. Great scientist Louis Pasteur said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” More knowledge about a subject will give one a larger platform from which to jump to creative solutions.

I’m always impressed with the crazy associations our minds can make. Try just going through a train of mental associations, just saying what pops into your mind after the word “coffee”. If you tried it, you notice that you can get pretty far away from coffee. All knowledge is just more fuel for future creativity, helping those a-ha! moments come more and more frequently.

I would say that I use all of these desires/goals regularly in my learning. Some more than others, but I’ll leave you to figure that out. One of the main factors that motivates all of my learning (from feminine hygiene products to philosophy of mind) is that I believe this knowledge will eventually have a use. I also believe that the process of learning is intrinsically valuable (a previous Intelligent Attitude [#2]).

Some may argue that we shouldn’t have such “shallow” goals direct our learning and activities; however, I have two counter-points to this. Firstly, there is great energy in these desires that is often hard to embrace through other means. Ideas that can bring this energy are tremendously powerful and should not be ignored because of cultural biases. We should embrace the desires that motivate us, in order to learn and achieve more.

Secondly, to call the above categories shallow seems like a random categorization when we think about what results from them. (The ends justify the means?) Let me give you some examples. An Olympic athlete trains everyday for his/her whole life simply to qualify. The only things that motivate the athlete are the ideas that he/she will have the world record and that their place in history will be assured. After many hard years and one event, this athlete places first, giving hope and pride to their country. Is the accomplishment of the athlete less significant?

Songwriters write songs to soon women and men (often in sexual ways). Are these songs less beautiful and moving for their underlying motivations?

No, I would argue. Sometimes people, myself definitely included, get caught up in judgement of other or themselves based on the view that certain desires are wrong or bad. Yet they are quick to devour the fruits of the labour from these desires. Some dismiss those who experiment day and night to the chagrin of their families, but applaud the discoveries and prizes. People with far-out interests can be ignored, but adored for creative insight. This list goes on.

What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t worry so much about what other people may think about our desires and goals. They should empower you, and it is you that will know if your underlying desires are “good” or not. So, remember to create goals and reasons that empower you to learn. Whatever your desires may be, if they motivate you, this makes them good.

This will be the first of three (or four) parts on attitudes that will help you learn more in all areas of your life. Not only are these tips are useful in an academic sense, they are even more useful for learning as a whole.

1) Be humble in knowledge

No matter how much you know in about a subject, there is still always more to learn. There are so many different ways to view current paradigms, and theories are constantly in flux. It is very difficult to be sure that one has heard it all. If you believe you know everything, there is no room for education. Making mistakes is one of the best and fastest ways to learn. Yet when our minds are closed off because we think our knowledge is fixed, when we find out what we “know” is wrong, we just freeze. As the study in the link shows, what we believe can shape our brains.

I’m sure you have experienced this: you are so sure about some fact; let’s say that it’s about the capital of Australia, which you believe to be Sydney. You’ve known this for so long. They even had the 2000 Olympics there!

But then your friend tells you that Canberra is the capital. You flatly deny it. “No way, Sydney has so many people.” You even start to yell, “what are you talking about?!” After much flailing and harsh words, you will come to accept that Canberra is the true capital; only through the influence of the internet’s second greatest resource. This information could have been more easily learned without arrogance surrounding our opinions. In the cases where there is no other direct proof, I have been known to simply dismiss someone’s claim as completely erroneous, rather than check it out.

My father once told me that one of his most cherished lessons came in university. Initially, I didn’t realize its importance, but now I am beginning to see its power. “Be slow to form your opinions, and slower to say them.”

The amount of knowledge out there is frightening and thrilling. To say that you have enough information about a topic to warrent having a fixed opinion is quite reckless. I have been guilty of running my mouth on issues from abortion to the importance of pi. Yet with such limited knowledge, I was a fool for doing so.

What is it that can change one’s perspective from smug inflexibility to maluble humble pie? Simply more information, an understanding of perspective, and an open mind.

2) All steps towards learning are important (even small ones)

This is an intelligent attitude for a few subtle reasons. Firstly, it gets you to start working. Even if it’s only a little bit of work, a little bit is way better than none. Such a seemingly obvious statement becomes more practical when we consider how many times we’ve done the opposite. We hesitate to start studying because it is complicated. We don’t read a philosophy book or art magazine because we worry that we won’t get it.

However, if we read over the text and understand even a little bit more, we have gained a greater footing on the mountain that is knowledge. In skimming over that magazine, the ideas and vocabulary are subtly entering your brain. All of this information will be easier to recall if it comes up again, and it will give you a peg for new knowledge on this subject.

Similarly, one of the great writing tips out there to get your flow going is just to write anything. You can let yourself write the crappiest first draft ever, but just write. When you forget about perfection, you allow yourself to get into a rhythm; this is when your real creativity can shine. In a similar way, when you untangle yourself from perfectionism, you lose the essence of the knowledge

The last way of looking at it is somewhat like the paradox of the heap. While we can all agree that one grain of sand doesn’t make a heap. A heap of sand is just made up of single grains of sand. So when do grains of sand become a heap? Or when do isolated facts become a network of knowledge? Although this analogy is a little funny, you can see that in order to build this amazing network of information, you need to start (and continue) with single facts and relations.

So read that one extra page, watch that video that is hard to understand, keep going for one more minute. In doing so you’re preparing your mind for future planting and harvest. And anyways, learning that one extra fact is much better than feeling silly when that exact section is on your test.

I have found that one of the best ways to implement this is through timeboxing. Just give yourself a set amount of time (like 30 mins) to work on something, say an essay. You don’t even have to finish anything specific. Just work for that amount of time, and even if you think it’s the worst work ever, it’s not so bad that you can’t handle it for 30mins . This is a really powerful technique to just get you going. And the awesome thing is that once you are moving, often your momentum will carry you a lot farther than you expected.

If you share a love of free learning - with no cost or boundaries - here is a wonderful resource from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT has graciously uploaded course lectures with topics ranging from astrophysics to feminist political thought.

As I love the idea of independent learning, content from one of the world’s most renouned universities is priceless. (That was sort of a pun.) I have more to say about pursuing knowledge independently, but I’m saving that for a later post.

Currently, I’m studying the basics of general philosophy and philosophy of the mind. This will go a long way in helping me out: “Mind and Machines“

Some courses even have video and audio available.

Did I mention “free“?!

Here is a list of the topics they cover (note that there are many courses within these broad topics):