Hey, what's up everybody?
I'm Tom from Collegeinfogeek.com and today I want to talk about a study tip that I recently
learned when I interviewed somebody for my podcast.
The guy I interviewed is named Cal Newport and if you haven't heard of him, he's written
a lot of different books for students that helped them be better in college.
There is something he told me that really, really stuck with me in the interview that
I want to share with you.
What Cal told me is, "Creating things of value requires that you go to intellectual combat."
This is something that I think I intrinsically knew and you might know yourself.
Gut it's good to have it reiterated because when you want to create something, when you
want to learn something or do something that's difficult, you really have to reach and dive
deep and give it the time it deserves.
I think that we don't give this concept enough respect in today's world.
I'm guilty of them myself because I run this blog, and I run this podcast, and this YouTube
channel and I want to share tools and techniques to make you more efficient.
But I think when we're focusing on these time management and task management tools and we're
focusing on study tactics like space of repetition, method of loci, all these kind of stuff.
We don't give creative work and we don't give learning the respect they deserve.
They really require concentrated difficult effort.
Learning is reaching and this is something we need to intrinsically know and understand
when we build our schedules.
Recently, I experimented with a productivity technique called timeboxing.
Basically, what timeboxing is is you create a minute, not by minute but hour-by-hour schedule
of your entire week or maybe day or whatever time period you choose.
You basically plan ahead what you're going to do hour-by-hour, so I took a Sunday to
plan all the content I wanted to create, all the video shooting I wanted to do, editing
I wanted to do, blog posts I wanted to write, things I want to read, etc.
I actually went hour-by-hour and said, "Okay, Monday morning I'm going to write 500 words
for this post I'm going to work on.
Then I'm going to start working on a video.
I've got an interview to do."
This is all scheduled out and my intent was that I would be externalizing some of the
motivation to do all this work.
I was hoping that I would be more productive because I would have this preset schedule
that was driving me forward instead of me having to make a decision every time I finish
a task.
Now, I knew going into the timeboxing experiment that this first week was going to be inaccurate
because there's this thing called a fudge ratio.
A fudge ratio is the difference between your mind's estimate of how long it's going to
take to do a task and the actual amount of time it does take.
The problem with human brains is we can't differentiate between best case scenario and
the average case scenario.
When we estimate the time it's going to take to do something, we think of the average case
like I think on average it's going to take me 15 minutes to get to work.
But our minds are actually generating a best case scenario because we don't think of things
that can go wrong.
Things do go wrong in the real world and we can't really think about these things that
happened beforehand, so hence, the fudge ratio.
The time it takes be on your initial estimate.
It's also called Hofstadter's Law.
[inaudible 00:02:54] Douglas Hofstadter, the author of a book on my shelf, "G�del, Escher,
Bach" and a couple of other books, said that Hofstadter's Law is take your time estimate
for something and double it even if you are taking it into account Hofstadter's Law already.
It's kind of recursive and it's humorous but it does have a good point that you need to
take your initial estimates and give it a fudge ratio.
Say it's probably going to take me a little bit longer.
I tried to implement a fudge ratio into my timeboxing experiment, but I knew it wouldn't
be perfect.
As I went through as you can see here on the screen, there are a lot of boxes later on
in the week that weren't checked off and there's a common thread between those boxes.
The common thread being these tasks were creative thought intensive tasks and I didn't get them
enough time for two reasons.
The first one and the base reason is I just didn't schedule enough time.
I didn't give these tasks the respect they deserve.
Somebody who's been writing for about 4-1/2 years now, I sort of assume that I'm going
to be able to create something really, really good in a short amount of time.
But when I'm wrangling concepts that I don't know a whole lot about and when I need to
do research and learn, it does take longer.
The other thing is I really sandwich these creative thought-intensive tasks between other
things and the other things worked always perfectly efficient.
I might not have got something done the exact time that I scheduled it, so it's sort of
eats into the time that I've already scheduled for the creative task.
As a result, my brain goes, "I don't have time to think about.
I don't have time to really dive into this creative task.
I'm just not going to work on it."
This is something that I learned during the timeboxing experiment, so if I do this again,
I know going forward that I have to respect the creative tasks.
I have to give them the time that they deserve.
Here's the best way that you can implement my experience into your own life.
Number one, think of your tasks in context.
There's two different contexts that I see for task management.
One is high thought intensity tasks, tasks that really require you to think, buckle down,
and reach.
These tasks require a lot of time and dedicated effort, uninterrupted work time.
There's also low intensity tasks, things like doing your laundry, going to eat with friends,
going to classes.
Just things that don't require as much mental reaching and the best thing that you can do
to really set yourself up for success on the high intensity tasks is batch the low intensity
tasks.
Plan your week ahead in advance, maybe take Sunday to do a whole week of planning if you
can and think about, "What are all these low intensity tasks that I need to get done?
How can I squeeze them into as few sections or segments of work as possible?
Doing this lets you have open time for the high intensity tasks, time that you need to
really dive in and work hard.
The other thing that you can do is to do regular self-evaluations to see what times of the
day you are best primed to do high intensity tasks.
Maybe you are a really good morning writer or somebody who can study well in the early
morning.
Maybe it's early afternoon for you or mabe you're a night owl and you found that like,
"Wow, it's midnight to 1:00 am and this is like my 'on fire' time."
But be deliberate in paying attention to those times because when you do that, you can intelligently
schedule your classes, your social life, and your work schedule around that to leave uninterrupted
blocks of time at those optimal time of the day.
If you noticed the [awkward jump cut 00:06:02] there, well I kind of forgot the exact lineage.
But it works, right?
Those are the main ideas in this video.
Number one, creating things of value and learning difficult material both require going to intellectual
combat as Cal says.
You have to respect the task.
You have to give it the time it deserves and don't allow yourself to be interrupted doing
that work time.
The other two ideas of supporting this main idea.
Number one, looking at your tasks in term of context and try to batch the low intensity
ones.
Secondly, try to evaluate what the best times of the day are for you to work.
By deliberately implementing these ideas into your life, you're going to be a lot more efficient
in your studying and get a lot more done.
Hey, thanks for watching my video.
If you enjoyed it, then you can support me by giving it a like in YouTube or sharing
with friends.
If you want to get more videos just like this every single week on being a better college
student, then click the subscribe button right there.
If this last video, a clip of it is playing right below there and you can click that to
watch it.
Also you can get a summary and links to anything I mentioned in the video by going to the companion
blogpost which you can find by clicking on the orange logo right there.
Lastly, if you want to get a free chapter of my book when it comes out, then you can
click that book and subscribe to the College Info Geek newsletter.
You'll also get notified when new podcast episodes and blogposts come out every week.
Lastly, if you have ideas for new videos or your just want to connect with me, you can
do so on Twitter or leave a comment on this video.
Thanks.