How to Study: A Brief Guide
I think that this kind of advice can be detrimental to people like me. It basically says force yourself to study 5 hours a day no exceptions. If you get a job or other extracurricular activities don't count it as work time.Well, I lived that lifestyle in high school. I studied 4 hours a day, limited every extracurricular activities to not interfer with my study time. At the end I believe I have missed a great portion of my life and it was not worth it.Studying everyday is a great goal to aspire for, but no way you need to study that much every day. Go to classes with the textbook, mark the areas the teacher lectures about. Take notes during class. Once in a while review the book and your notes. In the meantime make thought experiments, try to apply the information you learned on imagined cases you made up for fun.There is only so much willpower you can tap into. Once that is over you basically drift not being able to do anything. It is much better to live a balanced life and never put yourself into impossible workloads for a prolonged time.Another point is that these kind of study hacks work for people who can already study. If you are a procrastinator in soul (a deep procrastinator in Newport's terms), this advice won't help you. If you're procrastinating heavily your mind is trying to tell you that what you're doing is pointless.One powerful weapon to fight it is to keep an agenda. Plan your day before (for example using org mode or a simple paper agenda). Set very small goals and always reschedule if you need to. For example 22 Jan Monday: place the notes taken during X class in a file. 23 Jan Monday: Buy the book required for Y class etc.If you can keep your study material somewhat organized, you will find it much easier to begin studying. It is all about tooling like programming.One last note: studying in a silent place does not always work. Especially when I'm bored, can't start studying or mentally overwhelmed, it helps a lot to put on headphones and blast some talkshow in the background. The change in the tone and volume of the host and occasional jokes and laughter feed my stimuli seeking brain. After 30-40 minutes I can continue without listening anything.These reflect my hard-earned experience and intensive soul-searching :) YMMV