Marty Lobdell - Study Less Study Smart

1.) Write things down. Get organized. Google Calendar and Trello mean I never forget to do anything and I don't exercise brain power on remembering it all. This helps balance by being more relaxed. At night I don't worry about all the things I have to do tomorrow, which makes a lot of people sleep less. I say, "It's on my list, which I will tackle tomorrow." I sleep like a baby. I get things done. 2.) If you're looking for balance, take care of your body. 1 hour workout is 4% of your day. Make time for it, and do something active that you enjoy. (Even if that's playing DDR for an hour). Cook healthy meals in bulk ahead of time. Sick and dead isn't productive. 3.) Take breaks. When you feel your mind wandering, and you can't remember anything you've read in the past 5 minutes it's time to take a short break. Take 5 minutes, walk around the building, then sit back down. You might think you'll be so much more productive continuing to sit there working, but if you're working in circles or even making things worse, you are not being productive. Study Less, Study Smart is a talk by Marty Lobdell that eloquently discusses this. [this video] 4.) Focus. Remove distractions. Close all the windows you don't need to work. Close your office door, answer your emails only once an hour. Whatever you need to do to focus.

This makes some great points, and Martin Lombell has covered something very similar in a rather timeless one hour engaging lecture here: [this video] Some other diamonds I've uncovered or found while working on learning psychology are: - that students who organise fun and exercise on their schedule before studying, get better grades than the students who start by deciding when to study; - that most of us can learn much better with confusing, misconception-revealing content, over simple content - we all assume too much, as Veritasium covered: [link] - in principle, a desirable difficulty of varied content given in a medium that isn't lazy (read: you need to be able to get feedback, like a quiz, or rewriting, or tutoring) is the key way to establish viable long term learning; several other effects like Spaced Repetition only have benefits if you can stick to your motivation for learning, so you do need to prioritise motivation first. The article mentioned learning styles not being proven; in fact, one can argue the opposite is true; people who learn with mixed, varied content perform the best. But we also like the learning type which is comfortable for us; this boosts motivation. The problem is that studying students across a whole semester and multiple courses rarely happens, and studies focusing on how varying the learning content within a 10 minute window changed how much students learned, does not replicate the value of being familiar with a learning content style, nor the cost

Some of the teachers I have worked with do this; and there are some great teachers(lecturers) like Martin who teach effective studying techniques: [this video] Flashcards and Anki were incredibly effective for me. I am building a study tool which automatically generates them from lecture slides. Beyond that, it applies other psychology of learning techniques - It breaks up content into manageable chunks you can see your progress on (to boost your confidence of exam coverage) and has an exam-conditions like mode where it shows you relevant slides, then asks you questions and to freely recall by blurting onto a blank page everything you remember. It's then able to give you a realistic judgement of your learning and this way of learning by actively recalling freely is, though more intense, ultimately more effective than either reading, watching or quizzing in the long term. The part of learning that other flashcard apps miss, even Anki, is that students must be motivated. They must enjoy, visually engage, and be confident as they study. They must feel they are on a sustainable realistic path as they gather knowledge when on the way to their goals. And they don't have to study every day to do that - they just need to genuinely learn and be able to see the state of their progress... I am excited to be working on EdTech now[Revision.ai] which unveils and detects misconceptions to aid the student in eliminating them. Misconceptions are a massive opportunity - as much as spaced repetition

Oh, you're very welcome. This paper sent me down the rabbit hole: after graduating as an incompetent Electronics Engineer, I thought about the essence of competence and I stumbled upon this article. I'm always happy when I find a resource that addresses an abstract idea I'm thinking about but can't formulate for two main reasons: it always opens a door -if it has a name, it can be searched effectively- and it always amazes me how come I didn't think of it before. For instance, after graduation, I read a book titled "How to Study in College". Why didn't I ask such an obvious question before. I learned many things, one of which is the Cornell Note-taking method. I've always been interested in how to search for, acquire, and keep knowledge, how to apply it, how to manage it, and how to track its evolution -mental breadcrumbs, which idea lead to the other?- So it got me interested in how memory works: how we forget, how we remember, and what to do about it. It led to Hermann Ebbinghaus and "spaced repetition". I wasn't satisfied, though, for I wanted to know the underlying brain processes. The neuroscience behind it. This led me to Hebbian Theory and the concept of Long Term Potentiation. (The Brain from Top to Bottom - [link] ) which frankly blew my mind to a thousand shards: memory viewed in terms of ions . (Here's a very nice video from Carleton College "Neuroscience - Long-Term Potentiation" : [link] ) and here's a good presentation by Carleton's Dr. Matthew Hollahan: ("How W

1) Read the ToC carefully to see what each chapter is about. Identify which chapters/sections are about "Concepts/Ideas" vs. "Implementation/Technology". 2) Read the book's Foreward/Preface/Introduction where the author(s) often lay out a plan of action for reading the book. This will give you the dependencies among the chapters and which are the most important so that you can decide on your path of action. 3) If the book has appendices/introductory chapter which lays out some needed background knowledge refresher in Mathematics/etc. read these first. 4) Go through each chapter's beginning introductory section and last summary section in sequence for all the chapters. Now you have an idea of what each chapter is about (motivation and summary) even though much is still unknown. Mark/Underline/Annotate key points/terms as needed. 5) Now from (1) & (2) you have a set of chapters/sections dealing with the fundamental "Concepts/Ideas" which is what you now start studying in sequence. Have paper and pencil handy to mark/underline/annotate the text and take notes as needed. You could use "SQ3R" ( [link] ) and "Cornell Note-taking method" ( [link] ) as techniques. 6) Make another pass over (5) to better grasp the "Concepts/Ideas". For difficult to grasp subjects this might not be enough. Make a note of why; perhaps you still lack some needed background knowledge/Mathematics which you need to brush up on. Make sure you don't go too deep into tangents; sometimes it can be treated as a