The 10 Steps:

1. Pay better attention in class
2. Take more effective notes
3. Get more out of your textbooks
4. Plan like a general
5. Build a better study environment
6. Fight entropy and stay organised
7. Defeat Procrastination
8. Study smarter
9. Write better papers
10. Make group projects suck less

Impressions

Great overview of study skills - concise, fun and actionable. This book teaches you to become a more effective learner and boosts your productivity. It will not only help you earn better grades, but also cut down on your study time. Well researched, and the information goes beyond what you are taught at school. Granted, some of the techniques feel like common knowledge. I think it's still a valuable read though.

The mark of good learning isn’t that you got it right; it’s that you can’t get it wrong.

Summary, Notes & Quotes

Pay better attention in class.

Your mind does all the work involved in earning awesome grades, and the performance of that mind is dependent on the state of your body.

All the little mind hacks and study tricks in the world won’t help you if you’re constantly suffering from bad health due to poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and inadequate exercise.

Be deliberate about: Eating healthy 90% of the time Working out regularly - this can be fun exercise; join an intramural sport or DDR.

Get enough sleep - at least 6 hours a night.

Sit up front and be present.

When we forget things, we create friction that impedes our willpower to remain fully engaged in class.

Create a mindfulness habit. To me, being mindful means regularly considering the things that your life, and your goals, depend on - especially those that lie outside the current moment.

A mindful student plans for the next day each night, and thinks about what needs to be in her bag for that day.

Create a reminder, such as: A note by your door or on your desk A recurring daily task in your to-do app, an alarm on your phone, anything.

When you go for help, you should be able to show the professor all that you do understand up to an exact point.

“First you must try; then you must ask.”

Being an active participant is almost always better than being a passive observer. Speak up in class discussions and to take lots of notes.

Don’t do all your assigned reading. There just isn’t enough time.

Pay attention to how much of your exams actually focus on things you could only get from the reading.

Read as if you were having a conversation with an intelligent friend.

Before you dive into a chapter, flip to the back of it and see what’s there.

If text has special formatting, it’s a good sign that it represents a main idea, vocab term, or important process that you should learn.

Summarise what you read.

Without a good planning system, things will fall through the cracks.

You should find a day of the week that you use for planning. Sunday is a prime choice.

Work that requires lots of brainpower - reading, research, writing, creative projects, doing heavy math - is of the high thought-intensity variety. This work type requires long, uninterrupted stretches of focused work to be done properly.

You’re also much more likely to find yourself in the flow state while working on them.

Batch low-intensity tasks.

Create a daily plan as well.

Try to prioritise your daily list.

Timeboxing - scheduling specific blocks of time for each task on your daily list.

Planning fallacy - a phenomenon in which people’s estimates for the time needed to complete a task show optimistic bias.

Write down a list of tasks you need to do. Put an “off-the-cuff” time estimate on each one. As you finish tasks, write down the actual amount of time they took. Divide the actual task time by your estimate to get your Fudge Ratio.

Individual projects should be broken into steps and prioritised as well - and your goal here should be to create a list of steps that are actionable.

Optimise your environment in four major ways: Finding the best study location Selecting great study music/noise Limiting real-world distractions Limiting technological distractions

“I don’t feel like it - but I’m going to do it anyway.”

Building up a tolerance to uncomfortable situations will help you get over a lack of easily tappable willpower.

Willpower is a limited resource.

Once you’ve encoded a task as a habit, you’ll be able to complete it on a regular basis without having to use up a ton of willpower.

Scrolling through your news feed or watching a few funny videos on YouTube is easy, and it’s sort of fun to do. However, because it’s so easy and feels so unlike “real” fun, it’s easy to not feel guilty about it - which leads to a lot of procrastination.

Commit to having your high-density fun.

By deliberately postponing any distractions (that can’t be ignored altogether), you encourage your brain to spend more time in that flow state.

If the result of not doing a task is much less pleasant than actually doing it, we’ll always do it.

If you can simulate your exams during your study sessions, then you’ll experience much less anxiety and be far more prepared when you actually walk into your tests.

The closer your study conditions are to your test conditions, the more you’ll be able to reduce your anxiety come test day.

Anxiety actually blocks your ability to recall information easily.

Passive Learning - simply trying to expose yourself to information in the hopes that it’ll “sink in” somehow - isn’t very effective.

Your brain learns best when it’s forced to do things - work out hard problems, recall previous information it learned, etc. This is called Active Learning.

Spaced repetition is a learning technique that encourages you to study the things you’re good at less often, while quizzing you on the things you’re bad at more often.

Spaced repetition studying is most often carried out with flashcards, and the most useful program for practicing it is called Anki.

Tips for math studies:

• Learn to notice your confusion.
• Understand, don’t memorise.
• Do. The. Math.

Gather all the relevant materials and instructions you need to plan out the project and make sure you’re know all the criteria. After that, do a brain dump.

Writing Papers:

Develop a well-defined focus for your paper. Come up with several guiding questions that you’d like to answer.

Cal Newport’s book “How to Become a Straight-A Student” has an entire chapter dedicated to research.

Research Recursion Syndrome - the “unhealthy need to find yet another source” which can lead to hours of wasted time.

To start finding sources, use Wikipedia → sources at the bottom of the page.

You can also do this with general textbooks and other books such as popular science books. Beyond that, you can still use journal databases and Google Scholar to find even more sources.

Once, you’ve found a source, you want to save it in a place where it can be easily managed. skimming your sources quickly and creating short notes that reference page numbers.

List out all the main facts and points that are crucial to support your thesis and make sure you’ve got at least two sources for each.

Write an awful first draft.

It’s all about simply getting your ideas out onto paper.

When you write this awful, terrible, no-good first draft, write it in a place where you’re not emotionally invested.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings. Stephen King

Editing isn’t only about cutting things out. Editing is simply the process of revising your paper to make it better. That means adding needed detail, restructuring and reordering your points, and fixing mistakes as well.

Does my paper have good narrative flow? Do I have a clear main idea, and does that idea match up with the assignment? Does each section back up the main idea in a meaningful way? Is each section filled out with ample research? What can be removed or stated in a simpler, better manner?

Look for:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes
• Badly structured sentences
• Sentences or paragraphs that don’t sound right
• Formatting errors

Proofreading your writing in its final intended medium helps you pay closer attention to the details.

Take note of your common errors.

Get feedback.

Each person can read your paper for the first time only once.

Explain exactly what kind of feedback you want.

For group tasks:

Utilising the in-class time for your first meeting well can make your project go so much more smoothly.

Set up the collaboration and communication systems you’ll be using. Have everyone candidly tell the group what their strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. are.  Discuss goals for the project and, if you have enough details and time, create some rough project milestones.

Assign initial tasks to your group members based on their strengths and preferences.

If the project if substantial enough, you can actually list it as experience on a resume.

When in doubt, be the leader.

Note: this is a very fragmented summary as I didn’t feel the need to highlight a lot of sections throughout the book.

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