How to Become a Straight a Student

Con disco biscuitts C over Page Title Page fundament initiate 1. Study Basics spirit 1 Manage Your measure in Five Minutes a twenty-four hours Step 2 def set aside got War on Procrastination Step 3 Choose When, Whither, and How Long position unmatchable Cheat Sheet Part 2. Quizzes and Exams Step 1 tackle Smart Notes Step 2 Demote Your Assignments Step 3 Marshal Your Resources Step 4 Conquer the Material Step 5 Invest in Academic Disaster Insurance Step 6 Provide A+ Answers The figure in drip through Part Two Cheat Sheet Part 3. Essays and Papers Step 1 Tar receive a Titillating Topic Step 2 Conduct a Thesis-Hunting ExpeditionStep 3 Seek a due s byh Opinion Step 4 Research exchangeable a Machine Step 5 Craft a Powerful Story Step 6 Consult Your Expert Panel Step 7 Write With forth the Agony Step 8 Fix, Dont Fixate The Plan in Action Part Three Cheat Sheet Conclusion Ac require it onledgments Getting in is just the beginning Copy serious Page Introduction My friends of all epoch wondered why I was n incessantly in the program library, merely instead in the takechild center acculturation, or at a companionship, or at an make upt. They said I do it entirely(prenominal) serve so undemanding. Anna, a straight-A college studentThis is non your average college speculate guide. Unlike the titles future(a) to it on the shelf, nvirtuoso of the advice presented here was devised by professors or self-proclaimed put one overnish skills experts. I promise that you wont reckon any mention of the Cornell note-taking method, amiable map diagrams, or any other optimal takeing proficiency crafted in an office or laboratoryenvironments far re remindd from the realities of typical college life. Instead, this book revealsfor the scratch timethe study habits used by real straight-A college tudents. solely of the advice that follows was press appe bed from a series of interviews I conducted with a heroic classify of top-scoring belowgrad uates. These participants were drawn predominantly from the Phi Beta Kappa rolls of more or less of the coun gauges most rigorous colleges and universitiesincluding Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartm verbotenh, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Amherst, and Skidmoreand they were c atomic number 18fully chosen to represent a wide variety of academic c erstwhilentrations. In each interview, I asked the student to detail his or her study habits.The interrogative moods ranged from the general (How do you whip the counsel to procrastinate? ) to the specific (What techniques or systems do you use to locate and organize sources for a research paper? ). If the questionnaire revealed the student to be a factory both(prenominal)one who earns high grades and by studying an excessive amountI discarded the responses. I was interested and in students who improve their grades through smarter, more efficient study skillsnot through coarseer hours and more painful study sessions. How did I know such(pr enominal) students existed?I am one of them. When I arrived as a freshman at Dartm come onh College, I had no idea how to prepargon for exams or write college- take aim text file. Like most students, I left high school believing that to study meant to reread your class notes and subsidizations as many a(prenominal) another(prenominal) a(prenominal) times as possible and that paper writing undeniable you to sit down in front of your com indueer and start typing until you blameless. The chore, however, is that college is not high school. The material to be mastered is ofttimes more alter and the professors move over higher expectations.In the college environment, impartial brute force study methods sess end up requiring a pass approximately of time and causing a lot of pain. Nevertheless, most students still rely on them. And this is why they find themselves regularly displace each-nighters and developing an an mark offonistic attitude toward their courses. The taxing encumbrances and spotty victor of these methods also underlie the greens belief that entirely geniuses and grinds shag score top grades. When I first entered college, I shared in these beliefs. But sooner long I became dubious. It didnt take long for me to decide that in that location had to be a better way to learn the material.The results of my studying using impartial techniques vary widelyId miss all told night hacking away at an essay and end up scoring a B-, or discontinue what I thought was a frantic last-minute review for a quiz and score an A. I constantly felt like I was stinker in my drill, and there always seemed to be in the buff deadlines on the horizon that I had to scramble to meet. It was truly a chaotic existence. But when I looked most, all of my friends seemed to be having the kindred experienceand none of them seemed go awaying to question it. This didnt sit right with me.I wasnt content to wager in long, painful stretches and frankincense earn only slightly above-average grades for my efforts. I wanted to be omitional. And I wanted to achieve this without having to sacrifice relaxation or my social life. To many students, such a goal may sound hopelessly hubristic. But Im an optimist by nature, and, observing the sorry republic of my current study skills, I was convinced that I could do better. It took me most of my freshman year to construct, through repeated experimentation, a toolbox of sufficiently improved study habits.But once I had perfected them, the results were profound. Of the xxx-six courses I took between my sophomore and senior years of college, I scored exactly one A- and 35 perfect As. The most stunning put in of this transformation, however, was how much less time I had to spend on studying. As my strategies became more refined, the hours required were reduced. By my senior year it got to the point where, during finals periods, I would sometimes pretend to be heading off to the library just so I wouldnt demoralize my roommates, who were preparing for yet another grim all-nighter.What was my secret? Efficiency. The simple virtue is that the brute force techniques used by most students are incredibly inefficient. When it move ups to exam preparation, passive review is not an effective way to learn complicated concepts. Its also mentally draining, which further diminishes the rate at which you barelyt absorb and internalize data. For paper writing, this same problem holds. When you approach the assess without proper preparation, it becomes incredibly tiring and you skunk end up spinning your wheels.after a while, even the formation of coherent sentences becomes difficult and time intensive. In contrast, the techniques I came up with were so streamlined that I could learn more material than my classmates and actually spend less time studying. By eliminating stupid habits and wasted effort, I transformed exam prep and paper writing from a dreaded chore to a targeted ac tivity. For a while, I was convinced that I was unique for having observe such a smart approach to learning. But, alas, this illusion was shortly shattered.It occurred during the winter of my senior year, when I was attending a ceremony celebrating my induction, along with thirty other classmates, into Phi Beta Kappa. This group represented, more or less, the thirty students with the highest G. P. A. s out of my class of over a thousand. Accordingly, I had arrived at the venue prepared to spend the evening with some serious nerds. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise. Upon walking through the door that night, I was immediately struck by how many of the other students I knew socially.These were people who, given their level of visibility on campus, I never would slang imagined were scoring straight As. They were magazine editors, frat boys, and crunchy environmenta magnetic dips. I knew them from parties and campus clubs and through mutual friends. They were, for the most part, normal, well-rounded, and interestingnot at all the type of super-grind one world power assume would occupy such an elite level of academic achievement. The lesson of that night was obvious Perhaps I was not, in fact, as unique as I had first imagined.Maybe there were others out there who had find similar secrets to academic success. The writer instincts in me soon took over. Fascinated to know exactly how these seemingly normal students had takee so well, I sent all of my fellow Phi Beta Kappas a survey near their study habits. some were ingenious to share their methods and I right away confirmed that my suspicions were true. Not only were many of them using innovative, homegrown study strategies, nevertheless many of these strategies were surprisingly similar to those that I had developed during the previous few years.At the time I had just finished editing the manuscript for my first book, How to Win at College, so I wasnt exactly eager to get started right awa y with another monolithic writing project. But after seeing these initial survey responses, I knew I had stumbled onto something big. While most college students toil arduously through the study and paper-writing processes, there exists an elite group of undergrads who squander discovered unconventional strategies for earning much higher grades in much less time. I wanted to share these secrets with other students, and thus the idea for this book was born.Soon I was sending out more questionnaires to more straight-A students at colleges around the country, until I gathered enough responses, from students with enough different backgrounds and majors, to distill the advice presented in this guide. In the pages that follow, you go forthing discover the details of these often surprising study strategies. Ive included examples and moorage studies throughout the book to demonstrate how to kick in the advice in many different reallife academic situations. You will learn how to Manage your time and deal with the urge to procrastinate. Take targeted notes in class. Handle reading namings and problem sets with ease. Prepare efficiently for exams. Master the art of exam-taking. Write incisive critical analysis essays. Conduct thorough research. Write standout term papers. recollect, this advice comes from real students and was honed, through trial and error, in real college classrooms. This distinction is big. Its what separates this book from the many existing study guides that sit adjoining to it on the bookstore shelf.As mentioned, most study guides are written either by professors or academic skills experts, many years separated from their own college experience. The result is that the authors of these guides are disconnected from the realities of undergraduate life. For example, How to Study, by college professors Allan Mundsack, throng Deese, and Ellin K. Deese, suggests that students wake up at 7 A. M. each first light, go to sleep by 11 P. M. ea ch night, and on many days scroll only a hit hour of recreation, with the rest of the time dedicated to attending class, eating, or conking.One gets the flavoring that these professors havent spent much time socializing with students lately. Even their plan for Fridaythe biggest party night of the weekhas the student makeing until 10 P. M. , taking a one-hour break, thusly turning in by eleven. schoolchild Success Secrets, written by Eric Jensen, a learning expert and professional public speaker, offers equally out-of-touch suggestions. His tips to help you echo concepts learned from a reading assignment include put it in a picture or posteruse intense colors, act out the material or do a fun role play in your own room, or create or redo a song make a rap. Just try to imagine a sophisticated liberal arts major attempting to make a rap or so her recent reading assignment concerning post-structuralist interpretations of pre-Victorian English writings (Key question What word rhymes with Foucault? ) The granddaddy of all unrealistic study guides, however, just might be What Smart Students Know, by Princeton Review cofounder Adam Robinson. In this popular guide, Robinson suggestsand I swear I am not making this upthat students approach a reading assignment as a twelve- pace process Thats right, twelve separate feelings.Before you even crack the actual assignment, Robinson suggests that you jot down questions about the importance of the reading and then take notes on what you know about the topic, what it reminds you of, and what you want to learn. He then asks you, among other things, to read the assignment a total of three separate times, write and then rewrite your notes, represent the information in picture form, construct question charts, and devise mnemonics to help you memorize the concepts. Needless to say, this approach to a simple reading assignment is humorously unrealistic.I even did a little math. For a typical college-level liberal arts cou rse, a student might be assigned an average of two hundred pages of reading a week. In his book, Robinson provides a one-page sample reading and describes twenty-three different questions that students might ask about it. At this rate of twenty-three questions per page, spending thirty seconds on each query, we would end up spending around forty hours a week (i. e. , a full-time jobs worth of time) plainly completing one of the twelve steps on the reading assignments for just one class.Sounds like a great plan These examples highlight the simple truth that the advice in most existing study guideswritten by experts, not studentsis often impractical and time consuming. How to Become a Straight-A Student, on the other hand, is the first guide based on the experiences of real college students, and it was written to provide an alternative to the other titles on the market. In the pages that follow, you will find homegrown strategies that are harmonious with the demands of your day-to-d ay student life.They may not be as elaborate as the intricate systems devised by the experts, but theyre easy to implementand they get the job done. Best of all, when you start putting these strategies into practice, you will experience immediate results. have got in mind If you find a piece of advice that doesnt sort of fit your inescapably or circumstances, thats okay. In fact, you should expect this. Each of the students I interviewed for this book had his or her own unique take on the scoop way to study. Follow their lead and, when stuck, experiment.Replace techniques you dont like with ones that seem better. If these new techniques function, keep them if they fail, replace them with something else. The primeval to improving your grades without becoming a grind pukenot be found in any single study habit. It is, instead, rooted in the big picture decision to reject rote review once and for all and begin the flexible search for strategies that work better for you. Above all , remember that college is a multifaceted experience, of which grades are just one of many classic pieces.Its my hope that this book will help you painlessly conquer this one piece so you can have more time and skill to explore all of the othersthe friends, the unburdened idealism, the heroic beer consumptionthat make these four years so rich. A public complaint I hear from students is that they never seem to have enough time to finish all of their work. They vent about how many hours they spendlate nights reviewing in the library, weekends sacrificed to paper writingbut no study how intemperately they try, there always seems to be something else due.As Matthew, a straight-A student from Brown, explains, its easy for college students to become stuck in a state of permanent coerce in-up. Understandably, these students feel like they have reached their academic limit they believe that unless they forgo sleep or any semblance of a social life, there are but not enough hours i n the day to stay on top of all their schoolwork. lets start by getting one thing clear This belief is false. The problem here is not the amount of available hours, but rather how each hour is spent. I know this from firsthand experience.While researching this book, I spent time with some of the countrys most accomplished students, and I can assure you that no matter how diligent you deliberate you are, there is a Rhodes scholar out there who fits in three times the amount of work and activities you do and probably still manages to party harder than you would ever dare. I dont mean to imply that everyone should aim to become a drunken Rhodes scholar (though it would certainly be fun to try) rather, my point is that a surprising amount of work, relaxation, and socializing can be surpluscted from a single twelve-hour day.A lack of time, therefore, isnt enough to explain why so many students feel overwhelmed. So what does explain this phenomenon? The answer, as it turns out, has muc h more to do with how we work than what were trying to accomplish. As humans, our minds have evolved to prefer short-term assesss such as run away from that lion or eat food. Therefore, when you walk into the library on a sunlight morning with the goal of finishing all of your homework and writing a paper, your brain isnt happy. The idea of spending eight consecutive hours trapped in a study carrel is dispiriting.Plus, its hard to focus on for that long, so pretty soon fatigue will set in, your concentration will wander, and every distraction will suddenly seem impossibly appealing. Before you know it, the day will be over and youll realize that you havent accomplished much productive work at all. The next day, new assignments will pile onto those you didnt finish on Sunday, and the tedious process starts all over again. Jason, a straight-A student from the University of Pennsylvania, uses the term pseudo-working to describe this common approach to studying.The pseudo-worker lo oks and feels like someone who is working hardhe or she spends a long time in the library and is not afraid to crowd together on late into the nightbut, because of a lack of focus and concentration, doesnt actually accomplish much. This bad habit is endemic on most college campuses. For example, at Dartmouth there was a section of the primary(prenominal) library that was open twenty-four hours a day, and the students I used to see in there late at night huddled in groups, gulping coffee and griping about their hardships, were definitely pseudo-working.The roommate who flips through her chemistry notes on the couch while watching TV is pseudo-working. The guy who brings three meals, a blanket, and six-pack of Red Bull to the study lounge in preparation for an all-day paper-writing marathon is also pseudo-working. By placing themselves in distracting environments and insist on working in long tedious stretches, these students are crippling their brains ability to think clearly and efficiently accomplish the assess at hand. The result is fatigue headaches and lackluster outcomes. The bigger problem here is that most students dont even realize that theyre pseudo-working.To them pseudo-work is workits how theyve always done it, and its how all of their friends do it. It never crosses their mind that there might be a better way. Straight-A students, on the other hand, know all about pseudo-work. They fear it, and for good reason. It not only wastes time, but its also mentally draining. There is just no way to be wellbalanced, happy, and academically successful if youre regularly burning through your free hours in long, painful stretches of inefficient studying. The students I interviewed for this book emphasized again and again the importance of avoiding this trap.In fact, when asked what one skill was most important in becoming a non-grind straight-A student, most of them cited the ability to get work done diligently and with a minimum of wasted effort. So how do these students achieve this goal? A big part of the solution is timingthey gain efficiency by compressing work into focused bursts. To understand the power of this approach, consider the following simple formula work accomplished = time spent x intensity of focus Pseudo-work features a very low intensity of focus. Therefore, to accomplish something by pseudo-working, you need to spend a lot of time.The straight-A approach, on the other hand, maximizes intensity in stray to minimize time. For example, lets rank intensity on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most intense). Assume it takes ten hours to finish studying for a test by pseudo-working with a low intensity score of 3. According to our formula, this same amount of work can be accomplished in only three one-hour bursts, each with an intensity of 10. The work that took you all day Sunday to complete could instead be finished by studying an hour after breakfast, an hour after lunch, and an hour after dinnerthe rest of the day being free for you to relaxWith this formula in mind, you can begin to understand why many straight-A students actually study less than their classmates They replace long, low-intensity stretches of work with a scurvy number of short, high-intensity sessions. Of course, this is not the total story behind their success what straight-A students actually do in these short bursts is also crucialtechnique is just as important as timing. Part Two (Quizzes and Exams) and Part Three (Essays and Papers) of this book are dedicated to these technical details.But learning how to follow an efficient schedule, and banishing pseudo-work from your college experience for good, is a crucial first step toward your academic overhaul. To accomplish this transformation, however, you will need to gain control over your lifestyleand thats often no small task. For example, you will need to disseminate out the intense work sessions so that you have time in between to recharge. This requires basic time-management skills. Youre also going to have to overcome your urge to procrastinate, because scheduling your work is meaningless if you dont actually work in the time you set aside. This requires self-motivation.Finally, to obtain the highest possible levels of intensity, you need to choose the right locations, times of day, and durations to study. If you arent careful about how you select these three factors, you can unintentionally sabotage your ability to focus. This requires a smart planning strategy. Part One will teach you how to satisfy these requirements. It begins with the presentation of a simple timemanagement system, customized for the lodge in college lifestyle. Dont be frightened, the system is incredibly lightweightits knowing to require only five legal proceeding a day of planning and can survive periods of neglect.Part One then continues with a collection of battle-tested strategies to help you controvert procrastination. This advice comes straight from the experiences of real students and has been proven to work amid the chaos and distractions of the typical undergraduate lifestyleit is simple, easy to apply, and surprisingly effective. This part concludes with a discussion of when during the day, where on campus, and for how long to study to maximize your productivity. The students interviewed for this book experimented extensively to find the right answers to these key questions, and, in this final step, I pass these answers on to you.Together, these basic skills are the foundation upon which all the advice in this book is built. Without them, youll be unable to implement the specific study techniques depict in the parts that follow. Master them, however, and you will experience improvements in all aspects of your lifenot just grades. Youll have more free time, youll get the sleep you crave, youll party harder, and youll be able to devote more aught to your extracurricular interests. So relax. You are about to take your first step toward a much more enjoyable and productive college experience. Step 1Manage Your Time in Five Minutes a Day Real straight-A students, like most reasonable students, hate time management. After all, college is supposed to be about intelligent curiosity, making new friends, and becoming obsessed with needlessly complicated drinking games. An overwhelming interest in time management is best left to vex business executives (or, perhaps, premeds). At the same time, however, you cant abandon all attempts to keep tabs on your schedule. As mentioned in the introduction to Part One, all of the techniques draw in this book require some ability to control your schedule.Ignore this skill, and you doom yourself to four long years of playing catch-up with your work. As Doris, a straight-A student from Harvard, states Time management is criticalits a skill that you absolutely must develop over the course of your time at college. Most students, however, misunderstand the skeleton of time ma nagementthey believe its used only to cram as much work as possible into the day. But this is not the main motivation behind controlling your schedule. As it turns out, a little planning goes a long way toward reducing your daily stress levels. Having deadlines and bligations drift around in your mind is exhaustingit makes it impossible to completely relax, and, over time, can lead you down the path toward a breakdown. However, once you figure out what work needs to be done and when, its like a weight being lifted from your shoulders. The uncertainty vanishes When you work, you can fully concentrate on the assignment in front of you, and when you relax, you can do so without any anxiety. I dont believe in giving up anything, says Jenna, a straight-A student from Princeton. Not my social life, not my extracurricular activities, not my academic success. Basic control over your schedule breeds balance. This is why time management, as Doris stated earlier, is the key to getting the mos t out of all aspects of your college experience. The goal of Step 1 is to present a time-management system that helps you achieve this stress-free balance without requiring you to sacrifice the spontaneity and inspiration of college. Specifically, we present a system tailored to the typical undergraduate lifestyle that meets the following criteria 1. Requires no more than five to ten proceeding of effort in a single twenty-four-hour period. 2. Doesnt force an unchangeable minute-by-minute schedule on your day. . Helps you remember, plan, and complete important tasks before the very last moment. 4. Can be quickly restarted after periods of neglect. We will cover the details of this system in a few simple steps and then conclude with a detailed case study so you can see how it works in a realistic setting. What You Need This system requires two pieces of equipment. 1. A calendar It doesnt matter what type of calendar, and its not something that you have to carry around with you. It c an be Microsoft Outlook or iCal on your computer, a cheap day planner, or one of those advertisement-laden freebies they hand out at orientation.It just has to be something that you can reference every morning that has enough space to memorialise at to the lowest degree a dozen items for each day. 2. A list close to piece of writing material that you can update throughout the day. This you do have to carry around with you, so make it something simple, like a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook each morning. The Basic Idea Record all of your to-dos and deadlines on your calendar. This becomes your master schedule, the one place that stores everything you need to do. The key to our system, however, is that you need to deal with your calendar only once every twenty-four hours.Each morning, you look at it to figure out what you should try to finish that day. Then, throughout the day, whenever you encounter a new to-do or deadline, simply jot it down on your list. The next morning , you can transfer this new stuff from your list onto your calendar, where its safe. And were back where we started. Thats it. Pretty simple, right? The whole system can be summarized in three easy steps (1) Jot down new tasks and assignments on your list during the day (2) next morning, transfer these new items from your list onto your calendar and (3) then take a couple of minutes to plan your day. at a time, well examine these steps in a little more detail. In particular, we need some strategies for how to plan your day each morning using your calendar and what to do when unexpected events interfere and turn that plan upside down (trust me, this will fade more often than not). Update Your Calendar Each Morning This is where the magic hazards. Every morning, spend a few minutes to update your calendar and figure out what you should try to accomplish. This is the only serious time-management thinking you have to do for the whole day, so the demand is pretty reasonable.This updati ng process should proceed as follows Find your list from the day before. It will probably look something like the example described in Figure 1. Dont worry too much about how this list is formatted we will discuss that shortly. For now, focus on the things to remember column, which contains the new to-dos and deadlines that were jotted down throughout the day. Figure 1. Sample List Tuesday1/24/06 immediatelys Schedule 1000 to 1200 Econ class 1200 to 100 Lunch with Rob 100 to 145 disposal reading 200 to 400 governance class 400 to 530 Finish government reading 530 to 630 leave French essay Things to Remember Econ study group, Thur. at 9 P. M. French quiz moved to Friday. Laundry Start researching summer internship opportunities. Transfer these new items onto your calendar. Write the deadlines on the appropriate dates, and write the todos on the days when you plan to complete them. Following the example of our sample list, you would first jot down the econ study group tim e under Thursdays date and the French quiz under Fridays date. You would then choose a day to do laundry and jot down a reminder under that date, and choose a day to start internship research and ot down a reminder under this date. You can move these items around on your calendar as many times as you want, so dont worry too much about which date you initially choose for a new to-do. However, try to use some common sense. For example, if Wednesday afternoon and evening are packed with meetings and work, this might not be the best day to schedule doing your laundry. Similarly, if you have a big test Monday morning, dont schedule a lot of mocking errands for Sunday youll need your concentration for studying.If something is not especially time sensitive, such as the internship research example from above, dont be afraid to put it on a day far in the future, at a point when you know you will be less busysuch as right after midterms or at the beginning of a new semester. Next, move the t o-dos that you planned for yesterday, but didnt complete, to new days on your calendar. In our sample list from Figure 1, the Todays Schedule column describes to-dos planned from the day before. As you can see, in this example, all the to-dos were completed except the Start French essay task, so you would need to move this task to a new date.At this point, your calendar once again holds everything that you need to get done. straight off its time to figure out your plan for the current day. Go ahead and trash yesterdays listits served its purposeand pussy a fresh sheet of paper to use as todays list. Divide it into two columns, as shown in Figure 1, and label them Todays Schedule and Things to Remember, respectively. Next, look at the calendar entry for the current day. It will probably contain a handful of appointments and todos. Your goal is to figure out how much of this work you can realistically accomplish.You might be tempted to simply copy all of these tasks into your Todays Schedule column and then overcompensate it as a simple to-do list for the day. Dont do this If you want to avoid getting overwhelmed by your work, you need to be smarter about your time. Here is what you should do instead Try to label each of your to-dos for the day with a specific time period during which you are going to complete it. Be honest. Dont record that you are going to study for three hours starting at three if you know that you have a meeting at five. And be reasonable about how long things really takedont plan to read two hundred pages in one hour.For simplicity, group many little tasks (errands that take less than ten minutes) into one big block (for example 1000 to 1045mail letter, return library book, buy new deodorant, fill out transcript request form at registrar). Leave plenty of time for breaks. Give yourself an hour for meals, not twenty minutes. And, if possible, end your day at an appropriate hour dont try to fit in work right up until sleep time because you need to be able to unwind and relax. In generalthough it may seem counterintuitivebe pessimistic. The truth is Things will come up.Dont assume that every hour that looks free in the morning will stay free throughout the day. Remember, the goal here is not to hug everything into one day at all costs, but rather to find out how many of the tasks listed for the day you actually have time to accomplish. If you cant fit all the to-dos into your schedule for the day, no problem Simply move the remaining items onto the calendar entries for future dates. You can deal with them later. Your final step is to record the tasks you will have time for into the Todays Schedule column of your list. As shown in Figure 1, label each task with its time.Thats it. You can now reference your list throughout the day to remind yourself of what you should be doing and when. But heres the important point The specific times on your schedule arent set in stonetheyre more of a suggestion. As we will discuss sh ortly, you will be free to move tasks around throughout the day, depending on your energy level and unexpected events that may arise. The main reason you break down your to-dos into time slots is to help you avoid the common student mistake of overestimating your free time. Many well-intentioned students use a simple to-do list to keep track of their daily obligations.But without time labeling, they have no idea how much they can actually accomplish, leading to an unrealistic plan. A twelve-hour day seems like a large amount of time, but when you trace for meals and classes and meetings and breaks and socializing, your schedule suddenly becomes a lot tighter. The equation is simple If you overestimate your free time, then you are likely to put off work until its too late. And this leads to all-nighters, panic attacks, and shoddy performance. A realistic sense of time is arguably one of the most important factors in succeeding as a student.After a week or two of time labeling your t o-dos, you will be well along your way toward developing this crucial trait. Use the List During the Day As you move through your day, use the rough schedule recorded under the Todays Schedule column to remind yourself what you should be doing. Keep in mind that the student lifestyle is, generally, quite unpredictable. Things will always come up at the last minute. Work will take longitudinal than expected, your roommate will point you toward some absurd Web site that immediately demands an afternoon of your scrutinyyou know how it goes.So adjust your time labels as many times as needed. But dont procrastinate excessively The list you constructed in the morning should contain a reasonable amount of work, so if your schedule doesnt become too unexpectedly crazy, you should be able to accomplish most, if not all, of these tasks. In general, if youre completing most of whats on your list at least five days out of seven, then youre as productive as any student realistically needs to be . If not, dont worrythe next section of Part One will teach you how to combat your urge to procrastinate.Remember, your list also serves another important purpose. During the day you will probably encounter various new to-dos and deadlines that need to be schedule. For example, a professor might announce the date of an upcoming exam, or a friend might give you the date and time for an upcoming study group. The key is to get these obligations out of your head as soon as possible so your mind is not unnecessarily cluttered. Jot down a quick reminder on your list, in the Things to Remember column, as soon as they occur. This takes only a few seconds, and then you can forget about them.The actual scheduling of these tasks will take place the next morning all you have to do for now is scribble a few words on a piece of scrap paper. Remember, to-dos and deadlines that exist only in your mind drain your energy, distract your attention, create stress, and are more likely to be bury. When y oure working, you should be able to concentrate on working, and when youre relaxing, you should be able to enjoy relaxing. But you cant devote 100 percent of your energy to any activity when you have important reminders alert around in your head.Few students have the energy to schedule every new piece of information that comes along during the day. Think about this for a moment If its the middle of the afternoon, and you are hungry, and everyone is just getting up to leave at the end of a long class, when suddenly the professor yells out a notice that a paper topic is due the following weekyoure probably not going to have the energy to stop packing up, take out a calendar, think about what steps are involved in coming up with a paper topic, and then schedule each step on the appropriate days.It would be nice if you did, because then you could purge the deadline from your mind and be confident that its safely recorded in your calendarbut this is unrealistic. And it violates our ori ginal criterion that any timemanagement system should require only a few minutes each day. Thats the power of the things to remember column of your list. You cant expect yourself to be able to think seriously about time management at all points during your busy day. But the act of pulling out a piece of scrap paper from your liberation and quickly jotting down anthro paper topic requires minimal energy, no thinking, and barely any time.You dont have to consider when to begin working on the paper topic, what steps are involved, or how many days it will require. You simply scribble down three words. The key is that the list is a trusted piece of storage. You are confident that tomorrow morning, when youre doing your only time-management thinking for the day, you will see that reminder and record the appropriate steps in your calendar. Because of your list, the deadline will not be lost. It will be scheduled. Restarting After a Period of NeglectTo date, I have yet to have successfully followed any time-management system without interruption for longer than two months. I try, but inevitably I hit a rough patch. Typically, this happens during the few days following a really busy periodIm so exhausted from the intensity of the preceding work that I find myself unable to even mention the word to-do without breaking into a cold sweat. This happens to everyone, and you can expect that periodically it will happen to you too. Dont fear these occasions, and dont let them make you feel like a failure.Theyre normal. The key point is that these lapses are temporary. After a couple days of swearing off my calendar, I always find myself growing uncomfortable with the increasing number of obligations that are free floating in my mind. Before I know it, Im back into the swing of using the system again, and no worse for wear. The same will be true for you. Once you have learned the power of feeling organized, you will have a hard time going long periods without it. Fortunately, the system described here is adaptable to these periods of neglect.If you skip a few days, all you need to do upon restarting is to dump all the to-dos and deadlines free floating in your mind onto a sheet of paper and then push these back onto your calendar for future dates. Case Study A Monday with Stephen Even the simplest systems can come across as confusing when first described. So lets go through a quick example that will show you how to put this system into practice. Stephens story is based upon the real-life college experiences of myself and the many students I interviewed. If youre already at college, what follows will seem familiar.If you havent yet started your undergraduate career, dont panic Yes, Stephen has a lot on his plate. Notice, however, how he uses our system to keep control of his many obligations. Though he cant finish everything in one day, he remains confident that everything that needs to get done will get done in time. As you read this example, imagine how Stephens stress might increase, and his efficiency decrease, if he didnt have his list and calendar to guide his actions and capture the new to-dos and deadlines that constantly pop up. Monday Morning Stephen gets up early because he has class at 930 A.M. a horrible thing. He grabs his calendar from his desk and roots around in his hamper to find the sheet of notebook paper that he used as yesterdays list. He has only a couple of minutes before class, but thats okay. Our system requires very little time. Figure 2 shows what Stephen finds recorded on his calendar for today. Figure 2. Stephens calendar entry for Monday Monday3/11/07 Finish reading for Tuesday Gov class. Gift for Dads birthday front step of research for Gov paperfind books, Xerox relevant chapters. Pay cell band phone bill. Return Marks CD. First half of Econ problem set (due Wed) Pick topic for Anthro paper (due tomorrow). Read five chapters from Anthro book (need to catch up for Fridays quiz). Dinner with guys7 P. M. Mollys Ill-conceived toga party10 P. M. Alpha Chi Figure 3. Stephens list from Sunday Sunday3/10/07 Todays Schedule 100 to 300read article for Anthro. 300 to 600write Government essay. 700 to 800dinner with Sarah 900 to 1000edit Government essay. 1000 to 1100start reading for Tuesdays Government Things to Remember Call home. Start researching summer nternships. Create schedule for practicing guitar? class Figure 3 shows what he finds scrawled on yesterdays list. There are several things to notice here. First, Stephen has a lot of work recorded on his calendar entry for today. More than he can probably accomplish in twelve hours, so some of these to-dos will need to be moved to other dates. Also notice Stephens schedule from the day before (Sunday). This is typical. A fun night on Saturday inevitably leads to a late start and a large workload on Sunday. Stephen was too ambitious with his planning, and by 1000 P. M. e was burnt out from working on his essay and ne ver got around to starting the Government reading he had scheduled. So this task will need to be carried over to today. Finally, notice how Stephens Things to Remember column from yesterday includes some long-term projects, such as Create schedule for practicing guitar. This is a great use of the list If you jot down ideas for extracurricular and personal projects as they occur to you, they will get moved onto your calendar and therefore wont be forgotten until you finally get around to doing something about them. Now lets see how Stephen gets a handle on all of this before class.What Does Stephen Do First? Stephens first step is to time label the tasks currently on his plate so he can determine how much he can actually get done. Between his calendar entry for today and the leftovers from yesterdays list, Stephen has a lot of to-dos to schedule. His strategy is simple He starts time labeling in order of importance until his schedule is full, and then moves the rest of the items to other days on the calendar. To effectively time label, however, he must first figure out how much free time he has available. Stephen quickly runs through the following in his headI have class from 930 to 1030, and another class from 1100 to 1200. Its unlikely that I will get any work done between my 700 P. M. dinner and the Alpha Chi party that starts soon after. I should also try to squeeze in an hour or two for a predinner workout (have to look good in that toga), so I should aim to be done with all of my work by 500. With his free time now identified, Stephen can begin to time label his to-dos. Here is his thought process In between class, from 1030 to 1100, I can squeeze in my three small taskspay cell phone bill, buy a birthday gift for Dad, and return Marks CD.After my second class, I will need to get lunch, but then I should get right to work on my Government reading because its due tomorrow Lets see, I have three Government articles to read, which will realistically take tw o hours, so I will label this task with 100 to 300. Hmmmm, I am running out of time here. I need to start that Econ problem set because those suck, and its due Wednesday morning, so Ill label that task with 300 to 430. Okay, I am down to my final half hour. What else has to get done? My Anthro paper topic is due tomorrow, so I will have to squeeze that in at 430 to 500. And thats all I have time for.At this point, Stephen is or so done. All thats left is taking care of the still-unscheduled to-dos by moving them to future dates. Remember, these include both the unscheduled tasks recorded for the current day and the things to remember items from yesterdays list. On yesterdays list I have a reminder to Call homethis week is so busyokay, Ill jot that down on the calendar entry for Friday, Ill be more relaxed by then. I really dont have time right now for these other two remindersstart internship research and create guitar scheduleso Ill jot those down on the calendar entry for the fir st weekend after midterms are over.I should have more free time then. Okay, whats left? The unlabeled items from todays calendar entry. No problem. I can move the Anthro reading to tomorrows calendar entry, and then move the Government paper research to WednesdayI can work on it after I hand in my Econ problem set. Done Thats it. Stephen has finished all of his serious time-management thinking for the day. Before exit for class, he rips out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to use for todays list. He divides it into two columns and jots down the tasks he scheduled for the day. Figure 4 shows what Stephens list looks like as he bolts out the door.The entire process described above would realistically take only around three to five minutes to complete. The more you use this system, the more natural it becomes. Before you know it, updating your calendar and dashing off a daily schedule will become as routine as taking a morning shower. Remember, this is the only serious timemanagement t hinking that Stephen has to do all day. Now hes ready to face his Monday with his mind free from worry about tasks hes forgetting or due dates that are looming. He knows he has scheduled all the tasks on his plate and that they will get done eventually.He has a flexible plan. And he can trust it. Figure 4. Stephens list on Monday morning Monday3/11/07 Todays Schedule 930 to 1030 clear 1030 to 1100Gift for Dads birthday, pay cell phone bill, return Marks CD. 1100 to 1200Class 1200 to 100 Lunch/Break 100 to 300 Do Government reading assignment. 300 to 430 Start work on Econ problem set. 430 to 500 Come up with topic for Anthro paper. 500 to 700 Get huge. 700 Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party (Note to self Flex a lot at party. ) Things to RememberNow lets see how Stephen holds up During the Day on Monday The day starts off fine. Stephen successfully finishes the small tasks that he scheduled for 1030. During his second class, he remembers that he has s ome overdue library books that need to be returned. No problem. Stephen whips the list out of his pocket and jots down Return books under the Things to Remember column. A little later, the professor announces the date and time of the midtermsomething else that needs to be scheduled. Again, no problem for Stephen. He adds Sched. Gov midterm (4/5, 3 P. M. to his list, and then leaves the classroom confident that these tasks will be scheduled appropriately tomorrow morning. After a leisurely lunch, Stephen hunkers down in the library to tackle his government reading. The articles are a little shorter than usual, so he finishes by 230, which is nice. As he leaves the library, however, Stephen runs into a friend who convinces him to tag along on a Wal-Mart run. To be honest, it didnt take much convincing. College students, for some inexplicable reason, love Wal-Mart runs. After this (unavoidable) detour, Stephen gets back to campus by 330. Now hes behind schedule.Quickly checking his e- mail, Stephen sees a message from a classmate asking if he wants to join a study group at 400 to work on the Econ problem set. Swiftly adapting, Stephen once again whips out his list and makes a couple of rapid changes to the Todays Schedule column. He bumps up the Anthro paper topic work to start now, and then replaces his Econ problem set work with the study group that he just found out about. One of the big advantages of this system is its flexibility. Schedules will always change, but this the system makes it easy for you to regain your focus after getting sidetracked.Figure 5 shows the new state of Stephens list. Figure 5. Stephens list Monday afternoon Monday3/11/07 Todays Schedule 930 to 1030Class 1030 to 1100Gift for Dads Return Marks CD. Things to Remember return books. Sched. Gov midterm birthday, Pay cell phone bill, (4/5, 3 P. M. ) 1100 to 1200Class 1200 to 100Lunch/Break 100 to 300Do Government reading assignment. 330 to 400Choose Anthro paper topic 400 to 500W ork with group on Econ problem set 500 to 700Get huge. 700Dinner followed by inevitable embarrassment at toga party. (Note to self Flex a lot at party. )The Anthro work goes fine. Stephen finds a topic that he is happy with and then runs off to meet with his Econ group. During the meeting, the group agrees to meet again Tuesday morning to finish the problem set. Stephen quickly jots down Econ group10 A. M. under Things to Remember and then heads off to the gym. Hes done with work for the day. The Aftermath Because he finished a lot of work during the morning and afternoon before the party, Stephen was able to really relax and have a good time that night. In addition, he successfully recorded all of the new to-dos and deadlines that cropped up during the day.Instead of bouncing around in his head and causing stress, they were safely placed in Stephens system and will be scheduled in due time. Most important, none of this required him to explicitly think about time management beyon d the five minutes he spent planning that morning and the quick rescheduling he did in the afternoon. As suggested at the beginning of this case study, imagine for a moment what Stephens day might have been like without the simple time-management system. What if, instead, hed employed the strategy used by most students and simply tried to remember what he needed to get done?Its highly unlikely that the small tasks returning a CD, buying a birthday gift, paying a billwould have been completed. Without a schedule, people dont like to do menial chores unless theyre 100 percent necessary. Theres also a good chance that he would have forgotten about the Anthro paper topic altogether after the last-minute study group came up. What about the big-picture reminders from Sundaycalling home, scheduling internships, creating a guitarpracticing schedule? Those would have been pushed out of his head completely by the demands of near-future deadlines.Without a system to capture them, we cant expec t Stephen to remember long-term ideas for any lengthy period of time. Most important, without the system, Stephen would have completed much less schoolwork on Monday. The day would have focused, more or less, only on the Government reading, because that was the only big task actually due the next day. Without time labels, Stephen would have had a much hazier understanding of his free time, so he probably wouldnt have started this reading until later in the afternoon (for the most part, students dont like to start any work without a large block of free time ahead of them).Remember, however, that this assignment took a couple of hours to complete, so that means if Stephen had waited until the afternoon to start, he would have finished only this single task by 500, with the Econ problem set and Anthro paper topic likely falling by the wayside. Instead, Stephen ended up finishing six tasks by 500, leaving plenty of time for exercise and debauchery during the evening. As you can see fro m the case study, this simple time-management system, which requires only a few minutes of planning each day, made Stephen significantly more productive and significantly less stressed.It will do the same for you. In other words, five minutes every morning and a sheet of scrap paper in your pocket are enough to transform you from a stressed-out student struggling to get things done, into an organized, relaxed, finely tuned academic machine. If you remember one lesson from this book, it should be the lesson of this case study A little organization goes a hell of a long way. Step 2 Declare War on Procrastination In the previous section we introduced a simple time-management system to help you plan your day intelligently. That was the easy part.Anyone can spend five minutes to figure out what they should be doing. The real challenge is marshaling the motivation to actually do the work once its scheduled. Without some control over your schedule, you cannot be a happy and successful stud entno matter how good your intentions. As you might expect, in conducting interviews for this book, I put a significant focus on the issue of procrastination. Anyone who makes straight As has clearly found a way to consistently get work done when it needs to be done, and I wanted to find out how. As it turns out, however, I was in for a surprise.Every student I interviewed was asked the following question How do you defeat procrastination? As soon as the first responses were returned, it became clear that something was not quite right. I received answers such as I dont. Rarely. I didnt. I dont think that you can. These were not the responses that I expectedit didnt make sense Everything else they told me about how they studied and wrote papers clearly indicated that these scholastic studs were kicking some very serious procrastinatory ass, so why were they all claiming they didnt defeat procrastination?What was going on here? Fortunately, many students went on to qualify this f irst reaction, and it was in these qualifications that I began to figure out what they really meant. I dont think that you can, was how Lee, a straight-A student from Columbia, began his answer, but he soon added You just have to try to limit it. Ryan, a straight-A Dartmouth student, started by claiming, Really, I dont defeat procrastination. But then he continued Or, at least, I dont think I doalthough, I suppose, compared to the majority of students, Im not as bad as I think. I dont know that Ive yet defeated procrastination, was how Christine, a straight-A Harvard student, began before concluding but Ive found ways to make this inevitable tendency less destructive. Over time, these extended responses began to paint a clear picture. When the straight-A students answered I dont defeat procrastination, they really meant to say I dont defeat the urge to procrastinate. And this makes perfect sense. To put it simply, some work just plain sucks, and you, like the straight-A student s interviewed for this book, will want to procrastinate on this sucky work.Its unavoidable. Therefore, the goal in this step is not to teach you how to love all work and never feel like procrastinating ever again. Instead, Im going to describe some targeted strategies to help you sidestep this unavoidable urge when it arisesnot destroy it altogether. This is how straight-A students prevent procrastination from destabilizing their schedule. They dont rely only on willpower and good intentions, but instead deploy an arsenal of specific, tested rules that help them short-circuit their natural proneness to procrastinate.These students, of course, arent perfect, and they still occasionally put off work for no good reason. But overall their strategies made them significantly more effective at following a study plan then their peersand this made all the difference. What follows are five anti-procrastination battle plans drawn directly from my straight-A interviews. These techniques are no t suppositious they are exhaustively used by real students to beat down procrastination again and again. Trust them. Put them into practice immediately. Make them into a habit. The effect will be immediate.You may never fully rid yourself of the urge to procrastinate, and thats okay. But with the right strategies in place, you can rid yourself of the fear that youll always give in to that urge. Procrastination Battle Plan 1 Keep a work progress journal Think about the last time that you procrastinated on something important. You can probably recall some of the wishy-washy excuses your mind concocted for delaying the work. Something along the lines of I dont have all the materials here with me now, but if I waited until tomorrow, I could get tarted right away with everything I need, or Its getting late, and my concentration is waning, it would be a waste to start now, so I will wait to tackle this when Im fresh in the morning. Why are these excuses necessary? Why dont we simply thi nk This is boring, and Im lazy, so Im not going to do it, which is much closer to the truth? The answer is that your ego is a powerful force. We procrastinate, but we dont want to admit to ourselves that we procrastinate. So we make excuses to ourselves to avoid the truth. A work progress journal is a simple tool that takes advantage of this reality to help you defeat procrastination.It works as follows Buy a cheap spiral notebook, and keep it near your calendar. Each morning, when you work out your schedule for the day, quickly jot down in the notebook the date and the most important tasks that you are scheduled to get done. At the end of the day, if youve completed all of these tasks, simply jot down all completed. If you failed to complete some tasks, record this, along with a quick explanation. The system adds only an extra minute to your morning routine and requires only an extra minute each night before you go to sleep. Its simple enough to turn into a habit.Whats amazing, how ever, is the journals immediate effect. Having to record, in ink, on paper, that you procrastinated over a task for no good reason is a powerful pouffe to your ego. It might be easy to tell yourself a few weak excuses for putting off a tedious assignment, but when you have to record these same excuses on paper their foolishness is exposed. You can no longer get away with lame rationalizations. This is especially true if you continue to delay the same task day after day. After seeing all of those excuses pile up in your journal, there will be no escape from reality You are being lazyYour ego wont like this truth, so it will kick-start your motivation in an effort to avoid it. The journal, in this way, acts like a personal drill sergeant, sitting on your shoulder and yelling into your ear Soldier, I want you to go get me a pillow, because I know I must be dreaming. I thought I just saw you consider not starting your paper this afternoon, and I knnnoooowwww you wouldnt try to pull tha t crap with me standing right next to you Now go grab your notes and get workin before I make you record your laziness in ink where everyone can see it Many students, myself included, dont keep a journal all the time, but use it to help them get through unusually busy periods. For example, my work progress journal was a key force in getting me through my senior fall semester, which involved classes, grad school applications, and the writing of my first book. Others have had great success with the journal to keep focused on their LSAT preparation while juggling the demands of regular class work. Some students go so far as to use the system with a friend, agreeing to review each others journal once a week.As Christine from Harvard suggests If you have a friend in the same class, check up on each others progress. And even if you cant find a willing journal partner, there are other ways to use friends to jumpstart your drive It helps to simply tell your roommates of your goals, and ha ve them guilt-trip you into working. Procrastination Battle Plan 2 Feed the Machine Low energy breeds procrastination. Most students know the feelingyour mind starts to feel sluggish, you begin to read whole pages of text without call up a single word, and writing coherent notes becomes a Herculean task.Its almost impossible to motivate yourself to stick to a schedule under these mental conditions. Accordingly, during long work periods, you need to feed your body the fuel it needs to perform at it