Study

Stop thinking and start listing!

A simple thought today. Lists are easy to consume, quick to compile in a rough form, easy on the eye, and a good way of getting your brain out of first gear.

Notepad (photo by abeall)

Perhaps I should have said that lists are:

easy to consume;
quick to compile in a rough form;
easy on the eye;
a good way of getting your brain out of first gear.

If you need to brainstorm, but can’t quite muster the storm part (or the brain part), try compiling a list of rough ideas/thoughts first of all.

I’m not talking about a wonderfully thought out to-do list. This isn’t time to worry about what’s important either. You needn’t number the list or think about an order of importance.

A simple list is just a way to get your mind wandering in a productive fashion. Doesn’t matter what the focus, just list! Don’t even think of it as work. Just see where it takes you.

There is a well-known tip for conquering procrastination. Take just 10 minutes of your time to start working on that project that you haven’t begun yet. 10 minutes is no time at all, so it’s pretty easy to commit to those 10 minutes. Since starting is usually the hardest part of getting to work, you’ll have crossed that bridge and are likely to keep going for an extra 10 minutes. And another 10 minutes. And so on.

Combine the procrastination trick and list-writing with the aim to spur you on to greater thoughts. It’s surprising how many ideas are suddenly unlocked from your mind just by drawing up a quick list when you’re working against the clock.

In the summer months away from campus, you’re probably thinking about what you want to do over this time. Spend 10 minutes listing what you’d like to achieve and it’s a quick way to form a basic plan. In no time, you have a major starting-point to work from.

Quick, give it a go! It’ll give you an idea how this type of exercise could also help with your academic work.

Tomorrow, I will look at why an initial listing like this can work so well at engaging our deep thoughts and bringing out the best in us.

Setting Effective and Respected Goals

Goals are not given enough respect. We treat them as an afterthought, or as a basic overview of what needs to be done.

But what if true commitment to success came from those goals? Under that viewpoint, would you give a bit more time to setting goals?

Like a throwaway comment, goals are generally boring lists (e.g. read Chapter 12, draft introduction, check Internet, compare lecture notes, etc.). These lists are usually vague in scope, regardless of whether or not the goals have an achievable target.

But a marker of true success may be as simple as having a well-structured goal. With this in place, reaching the goal may be the easy part!

I have made 3 observations of those who consistently set effective goals and go on to respect those goals:

1. Be exact

The trick here is to understand what you need before you begin working toward the goal. Firstly, you cannot set a vague goal like “Research Essay Topic” even if you think you know what that means. Without an explicit goal, you have the space to change goalposts when you can’t be bothered to step up a gear. Secondly, an exact number or reason gives your goal a proper shape. When you don’t set out the specific nature of what you intend to undertake, your goal is just a fidgeting blob of pointlessness.

2. Make the goal a proper challenge

A teacher mentioned a very good point to me recently. Imagine giving a young child a box of balls and a hoop…

Now, if you put the hoop a few feet away, tell them to start throwing the balls into the hoop, and then walk away from the situation, it’s not long before the child gets bored after a few tries and makes up a completely different game (like “let’s chuck the balls at passers-by” for instance). Sure, lacking a solid goal here may help the imagination, but it’s a poor strategy for achieving anything specific.

However, if you issue a challenge to the child to try and get 5 balls in the hoop in a row, there will be a lot more mileage in the game. By setting an effective goal, it holds the interest and gives motivation to succeed.

3. Don’t overcrowd with simple tasks and regular work

Goals should not be lists or an issue of tasks. If you like to write to-do lists, it’s wise to keep them separate, even if there is an apparent overlap or if some issues are direct repeats of the other list (hey, you get to cross out more than one thing when you’re done…now that’s productivity!).

The reason for this is to highlight the difference between what is truly a goal and what you would be getting on with anyway.

List too many goals and it becomes a list of tasks. Therefore, a clear set of goals should never stretch to more than a few points.

What methods do you use to make sure you achieve your goals?

The brilliance of calm urgency

Today has been fun. I was rushing about from one person to the next, attempting to set up an urgent meeting between extremely busy people.

I wouldn’t usually consider that as fun. And it wasn’t easy, but – with a little help from my friends – I did it.

This was only one of my tasks for the day. The backwards and forwards was taking place at speed, causing change every few minutes. Despite that, I still had to complete my daily tasks and respond to new jobs, phone calls, and so on, as the day went on.

Still doesn’t sound much fun, eh? But as I walked back up the stairs for about the millionth time (give or take a few…), it became apparent to me that I felt serene; I was calm; I was happy. Yet this peace was coming through my sense of urgency and it even helped boost my productivity. When I stopped for a moment to assess how much I had achieved in the day so far, I realised that many other tasks had been completed that I would usually expect to take longer. And this all happened while I was busy with a more pressing task.

(more…)

10 Steps to Active Learning

I was looking through Stella Cottrell’s “The Study Skills Handbook” the other day and came across a piece on ‘Active Learning’. I believe this is one of the most important factors in studying at university. After going through GCSE and A-Level experiences, there is too much emphasis on passive learning.

With passive learning, the student waits to be given what is supposedly important. It’s more a case of take the information that’s put in front of them and try to remember it, or copy it down without really knowing what the overall picture is.

Active learning, on the other hand, is about engaging with the subject and taking on the bigger picture. The student gets involved with the information and seeks out further ideas for development.

If you’ve ever heard a student say, “I couldn’t answer the question because the teacher didn’t teach us that,” then you’ve seen an effect of passive learning. Maybe you’ve said that yourself in the past. The learning tends to be in isolation.

When you get to university, you’re propelled into a setting that relies strongly on doing your own work, conducting your own research, using your own initiative. This is why active learning plays such a strong part in studying toward any degree in Higher Education.

So I’d like to share with you 10 strategies that Cottrell suggests to take your learning further and my thoughts and agreements with the suggestions:

1. “Prepare for lectures” – While many turn up for lectures, possibly without even knowing the title of it, let alone the subject matter, you can walk in with a 20-minute basic understanding of the topic of discussion for that day. When you hear the lecturer speak, the words will make sense and you will sense the direction in which the talk is going. The content may be more focused and technical in manner, but your initial search on Google, a brief read of the main Wikipedia page, and flicking through the topic in your textbooks will be worth it’s weight, because you can get on with processing the information and asking questions as you go along, while others will be writing down whatever they hear, because they haven’t had the basic insight that you have.