The Principle to Amplify Your Focus and Stop Procrastinating

8/10/13

Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating « Scott H Young

Scott H Young
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Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating
This is a temporary archive of this page while we conduct the 2013 bootcamp. After August 21st, I’ll be taking down this page, so please print or save a copy (Ctrl + S) if you want to look at it later! If you want to access the other bootcamp emails, please join here (it’s completely free). Welcome to the first day of the free one-week learn faster bootcamp! Every day this week I’ll send you a new email with a new tactic for learning faster. At the bottom of each email there will be a specific, short, exercise so you can start making the new learning strategies into habits. Today we’re going to cover the most common problem you shared with me: improving your ability to focus and defeating procrastination. —Why is it so difficult to stay focused? Why do we procrastinate on the tasks we know are important? The research of Roy Baumeister provides an interesting clue. He has conducted experiments which show that willpower isn’t just a character trait, meaning you’re either lazy or diligent, but a resource that can be replenished and spent. In one experiment, Baumeister gave participants a task that required focus, such as solving a difficult puzzle. He www.scotthyoung.com/blog/day-1-bootcamp-2013/ 1/10

8/10/13

Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating « Scott H Young

found that those participants performed more poorly on tasks that immediately followed which required selfcontrol. This suggests that focus draws on an internal resource that when depleted makes our willpower weaker. After this experiment, he added another twist. Before the self-control task, Baumeister gave participants some lemonade to drink. Given a sugary drink, the participants willpower shot up again in the self-control task. Those given, a nearly identical, sugar-free lemonade performed as poorly as before. This shows that willpower can also be replenished, even with something as simple as sugar. —Baumeister’s experiments validate a new way of thinking about productivity, written about by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. (Their book, The Power of Full Engagement is the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of productivity) Schwartz and Loehr argued that the way we think about productivity is broken. Because of this broken thinking, we suffer from chronic problems like inability to focus and procrastination that never seem to go away. We never stop procrastinating, and most attempts we make to fix it are only temporary. In their book, Schwartz and Loehr claim the broken thinking is time management. This is the idea that the number of hours in our day is the biggest constraint on our productivity. If we were only able to use those hours more efficiently, we’d get more done. Not so fast, the authors state. Even if we could hypothetically create a schedule which fully utilized every hour in the day, it wouldn’t be sustainable. It’s our energy levels, not our time, that is most constrained. Any attempt to optimize time usage that neglects energy management will lead to disastrous results. Now Baumeister’s psychological research validates this hypothesis. There does, in fact, appear to be an important internal resource which gives us willpower and takes it away. —The first time I heard this idea it was a switch that flipped in my brain. Procrastination and inability to focus weren’t because I was lazy, they were because I was poorly managing this internal resource. Now we know that energy, not time, is the proper bottleneck in your productivity, how do you fix it? Schwartz and Loehr turned to one segment of the population which deals with very similar constraints: elite athletes. Being an athlete requires managing your body’s cycles of recovery and exertion very closely. Elite athletes know that the road to success isn’t in non-stop training. If the training is not followed by rest, the body will be overstrained and performance will suffer. Learning is exactly the same way. Without sleep, exercise and regular eating habits, your mind suffers. All nighters and 4am cram sessions do not help you learn. That may be unsurprising, but researching athletes also turns up another strategy they use to achieve peak www.scotthyoung.com/blog/day-1-bootcamp-2013/ 2/10

8/10/13

Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating « Scott H Young

performance: intensity. When athletes train, they realize it’s much better to push themselves to their limits and then relax, than it is to put themselves under mild strain for long periods of time. This is the principle myself and my students have used to learn faster, stop procrastinating and achieve focus: high-intensity learning. —High-intensity learning means that you learn deeply, with complete focus, for a small section of your day. After that, you relax and don’t force yourself to study endlessly. When I did the MIT Challenge, many readers commented on the difficult studying schedule I maintained: 6 days per week, often as much as 10 hours per day. What they forget, however, is how much relaxation time I had. I never worked past 7pm. I never worked on Saturdays. I even managed to take almost a month of in vacations throughout the year. My work was intense. Maybe even too intense for someone who hasn’t spent years training their energy management resources to top conditions. But it wasn’t continuous. I worked in bursts and relaxed the rest of the time. One hour of high-intensity learning can be worth 4-5 hours of low-intensity studying. Doing the right activities, which promote deep focus and excruciating intensity, can drastically cut the amount of time you need to spend learning. Yes, those hours of intense studying are draining. But, because they are intense, you reduce the total amount of time you need to study, giving you more time to replenish your mental resources for the next round. —Now that you understand why energy management and intensity are critical to learning, I want to talk about how you can change your studying patterns to facilitate this shift. The first trick is switching passive tasks to active ones. Passive tasks are things like watching lectures and reading books. They just involve you processing the information you’re receiving. You aren’t manipulating it in any way, solving new problems or organizing it beyond the organization it is already given. Passive tasks are low intensity, low-efficiency studying activities. Sometimes they’re unavoidable–you can’t learn without some first exposure and that may only be possible from lectures or a textbook. However, you can modify these tasks to make them more active, increasing the intensity and improving their efficiency. In Learning on Steroids we talk about these strategies in detail, but here are a few quick ideas: Watch lectures at higher speeds (download and use VLC player’s speed-up feature) Make deliberate connections between ideas in your notes, not mentioned by the instructor. Paraphrase important information you read in a separate notebook. www.scotthyoung.com/blog/day-1-bootcamp-2013/ 3/10

8/10/13

Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating « Scott H Young

After each page you read, cover the page and force yourself to explain, in 10 seconds, the main ideas of that page to yourself out loud. Every time you hit a fact to be memorized, link it using a visual mnemonic (more on that later in the bootcamp) Retooling how you watch and read can make a huge impact. The next target to strike is how you review and study. Once again, this is where a lot of students waste time with low-intensity passive strategies. Re-reading notes is a waste of time, don’t do it. If you’re in a technical class, your review should be in the form of Feynman techniques or practice problems. If you’re in a non-technical class, you should be generating questions to ask yourself and self-quizzing without looking at the source material. Self-quizzing is the best way to review. This involves asking yourself questions and answering without looking at the source material. Studies on learning efficiency show that this method can even be effective if you make up the questions yourself, in case you don’t have any questions to follow. Another tool for ratcheting up intensity is to drive towards your frustration points. When you’re watching lectures, reading books or self-quizzing, you should always be looking for which areas you understand the least or perform the worst. Once you locate those spots, follow up on them intensely with more self-quizzing, Feynman techniques, metaphors and linking. —Your First Homework Assignment This bootcamp isn’t just about reading–it’s about doing. I want you to take this advice and apply it immediately so you can see a permanent impact on your studies. Here’s what you need to do: Take something you’re trying to learn, and pick a specific activity you’ve been doing to learn it. (Watching lectures, reviewing notes, etc.) Now do EITHER one of the following: Find a way to replace it with a learning activity that is more active and intense. OR Find a way you can adjust the same activity to make it more active and intense. Once you’ve done that, hit REPLY and write in one sentence the change you’ve made. The next time you’re learning that subject, apply that advice and observe the results you get. Best, -Scott P.S. – Some students dislike active and intense activities because they are more uncomfortable. Don’t worry, they’re supposed to be. The idea is that, over time, you can use the more intense activities to reduce your total www.scotthyoung.com/blog/day-1-bootcamp-2013/ 4/10