If your study time involves your phone, Facebook or Twitter, you will get less done because you will be distracted. Check out the chart that follows:
All of this means more time in the study sweet spot where you are really learning at an amazing level. The chart should show you that every time you are distracted you reset to zero and must refocus. Haven’t you ever reread a line from a book over and over? This is frustrating and distractions do this to you. You need to limit distractions. I would argue that little distractions are robbing you of precious study time. So when you think you are studying for two hours, in reality that is not what is happening. You need to subtract the lost time due to recovering from each of your distractions. Your phone is a classic time thief, as is Facebook, Twitter and even your iPod.
Many people study with headphones to limit outside distractions, but more distractions are being induced if you are stopping to select a new song after each song concludes. Deep practice is very exhausting, so be ready to get tired when you study deeply. Having a tenacious spirit will help you to stay locked in. As a child of God you have access to this mental state through the Spirit (Psalm 51:10).
Finally, you need immediate feedback in order to grow quickly. Look for real-time quizzing opportunities to check your level of learning. The summary section of the Cornell note should be done afterwards as a way to self check whether you can reproduce the most important facts in your own words. For those of you who are verbal learners, you will do well to explain the information to someone else. This will allow you to see whether you really know the information. Study groups fit this purpose well.
Great article.
ReplyDeleteIf people can learn this lessons while they are still a student it will help them in the workforce as well - because this is definitely relevant to work.
I just wish that workplaces themselves would understand this. So many of my distractions come from the workplace itself - people wanting me to drop what I'm doing and do something for them. This can leave me spending the whole day stuck in the 'warm-up zone', depleting my energy quicker than I should. I really notice the difference when I close Outlook, turn off my phone, and just spend the day doing some "real work".
I waste a lot of time with e-mail, but I do this to myself by checking it too often. When I get in early there are less people around to distract me and I can get more done. "Real Work" is an interesting phenomenon because what is easily observable as work for supervisors may not actually be that important to the bottom line of the organization. Workers will do whatever is supervised.
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