Mondays are busy days for me.  Unfortunately, they are also the days that I am most prone to distractions, with the possible exception of Fridays.  When you work in an office, distractions like funny websites and coworkers to chat with can be a problem.  When you work at home and can technically do whatever you want without anyone knowing, distractions can become a disaster.  Students find themselves in an awkward place here: they are constantly asked to do work at home — and they aren’t even getting paid for it!

When I was in school, there were certain things I had to do if I wanted to get any real studying done.

1) Listen to music without words. On the other hand, I knew a lot of people who could only study in complete silence.  Whatever works.

2) Find a place where you have to be productive. For me, this was either the library or my desk at work, which involved a lot of down time.  At either of these places, distractions were at a minimum for me, and the more I got used to studying in these places the more natural it felt.  Find these places for yourself.

3) Silence the phones. How much studying are you going to get done if you’re chatting?  Remember, the sooner you get things done the sooner you can catch up with people.  Let that be your motivation.

4) Schedule your day. I had to plan when I would work and when I would take a break in advance.  Trying to “catch as catch can” always led to forgotten assignments.  I used (and still use) daily to-do lists to keep myself on track.

5) Only work when you’re productive. Some days I know that I’m not going to get much done.  So I take care of the bare minimum and do some rescheduling to be more productive the next day.  This way I’m not fighting my own inertia.  I also try to work/study only during the day, because after dark I am completely useless and would much rather goof off.  If you’re better at working during the night, try scheduling your personal time during the day and your work time after dark.

Remember, the habits you make now will dictate how you work in the future.  If you spend four years getting used to procrastinating and scraping by then those will be hard habits to break.

If you want some more concrete tips, here are two excellent articles I found (that pretty much say the same things but differently).  The first states things more generally (take short breaks, limit inputs, start the day off right, etc. etc. etc.) while the second has some great tips with a more specific “business feel” to them.  I recommend them both.

To close, I’d like to bring up an idea that I first learned from a high-school history professor.  He was diagnosed with ADHD as a child but his parents didn’t believe in medicating him for this.  So instead, they taught him to meditate.  He learned a number of quick meditation techniques that he would use before (and during, if necessary) every test he took to help him stay focused.

So arm yourself against distractions with some of these basic tips while finding what works for you alone.  Then you’ll be ready the next time they strike.

Last week, I mentioned that my study system in college involved not studying in advance for tests and quizzes to see how much of the class material I had actually internalized.  That’s not the whole story, though, and since I don’t want to mislead anyone (this is, after all, a site devoted to helping you study more effectively) I thought it might be a good idea to note a few of my study tips.

While it may be true that I tried to avoid cramming for every quiz or test that came along, it wouldn’t be the whole truth to say that I “didn’t study.”  Of course I studied.  Studying is part of college life.  I did, however, study differently than everyone else I knew.  Here are a few of my rules:

1) Read your textbooks, go to class, and take notes.  It may not be required but it is important nonetheless.  You need to keep up with reading, pay attention, and have meaningful notes to look back on when it comes time for the final.  Of course, it helps to have interesting classes that won’t put you to sleep when you show up or sit down to read the text book.  Thankfully, many colleges give you a lot of latitude when it comes to selecting classes, so do your research beforehand.

2) Review your notes regularly and randomly.  There’s a lot of down time in college between classes — so use it!  A few minutes here and there add up, and will do wonders for reinforcing the core concepts in your brain (in fact, that’s the basic idea behind TestSoup, except they’ve made the notes and quizzes for you).

3) Ignore the quizzes beforehand but spend as much time as you need on them after they’ve been graded.  This one may seem counterintuitive, but in most cases quizzes don’t even count for a very large percentage of your final grade so it’s no biggee to sacrifice a few points here.  I did this to test how well I was keeping track of the course material.  Once I got the quizzes back I would review them to make sure I now understood everything I missed.

4) Use your quizzes to study for tests.  In most cases, quizzes are a good indicator of what material is most important to the class.  So I would use them, along with my notes, to study for tests.  Since I had already marked up my quizzes with extra notes explaining what I had previously gotten wrong, these were very helpful study guides.  I would then do pretty much the same thing with my tests once I got them back to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks.

5) Make a detailed study guide for the final.  Professors will usually distribute a list of stuff you should know for the final.  These are massively helpful, but even without one you can usually use your syllabus to list all the important topics.  Once you know what to look into, use your notes, quizzes, tests, and textbook to write yourself a “mini-textbook” of several pages explaining all the core concepts in your own words.  This active studying will reinforce everything you’ve been learning about.

6) Start studying in advance.  Like I said before, I would look over my notes regularly so that I didn’t need to cram for quizzes.  For tests, I would review my notes and old quizzes briefly the afternoon or evening before.  For exams, I would make my study guide two or three days in advance and then review it the day before like I would prepare for a test.

So the truth comes out.  It’s not that I never studied — it’s that I would spread out my studying throughout the semester so that I never had a crunch time.  When other students would discuss how long they had studied for their final exams, I was inevitably on the lowest end of those who actually had taken the time to study, and yet I would generally hold my own when the grades came.

Why?  Because I had been paying attention, reviewing, and studying throughout the course of the semester instead of slacking off.  This prolonged repetition allowed my brain to truly process and comprehend the information it took in and turn it into a long-term memory rather than a short-term fact that would disappear soon after the course ended — and all without sacrificing my social life.

I’m always amazed at how excited people get when their classes get cancelled.  Here you are at an expensive university, paying good money to get a quality education, and yet you get excited when you miss out on a chance to learn something?  Something’s not right here.

College is not supposed to be a mere extension of high-school, where you pretty much are rewarded for how well you can regurgitate information in a form that matches your textbook or your teacher’s PowerPoints.  That’s basic education, where you learn the building blocks necessary for participation in a world that revolves around knowledge.  But college is higher education, where you learn to think critically in a way that can actually advance the knowledge that’s already out there.

Think of higher learning like the Beatles thought of love: where in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.  Sure, you can still scrape by doing the minimum: signing up for the easy classes, registering for the easy major, and choosing the most lenient professors.  But in the end all you will have is a diploma and not much else to show for your four years in college besides a lot of goofy pictures of you and your friends holding solo cups and cigarettes.

My dad, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, always said that what you’re paying for in college is not the classes but the opportunity to be around a lot of smart, motivated students and professors.  Your course work and textbooks are important, to be sure, but less so than all the chances you have to engage others in intelligent conversation and to find something that you’re passionate enough about to devote the bulk of your life working on it.

The habits and relationships you make there will set the tone for the rest of your life.  Are you going to be content doing the bare minimum to get a decent grade and collect a pay check or are you going to want more?  If the never-satisfied culture of America has anything to say about the matter, you’re going to want more.  How do you get it?  By working hard to discover and self-actualize.

My system for studying was a little different than most of my friends.  Instead of cramming for tests I would take careful notes during class and while I read my textbooks.  Then I wouldn’t look at them until after the test was over.[1] That way my grade was an accurate reflection of how much of the material I actually understood.  It felt weird to study for a test that I had already taken in the beginning, but it eventually gave me a much better grasp of the material that stayed with me long after the course was over.

I’m not sure I would recommend a strict adherence to my unique policies to everyone — my GPA (a cumulative 3.5) lagged behind the 4.0s that many of the others in my advanced business program.  But I would recommend working hard to really get involved in your education so you get the most you can out of it.

There are thousands of over-qualified candidates to jobs these days with excellent GPAs.  These days, the way to get ahead is through a voracious appetite for education and self-improvement that will be evident long after your formal studies have concluded.  But you have to start cultivating that as early as possible, or overcoming your own inertia will be a difficult task indeed.  So stop celebrating class cancellations and start working on finding which parts of your schooling get your excited.  Challenge yourself and you will be rewarded, if not with a perfect grade then with a life you enjoy.

Going to school and running a small business have a lot in common.  You’re always supposed to be doing at least ten different things, talking to ten different people, and making time to do even more later on.  There’s never really a moment when you can say, “Alright, everything is done.  Let’s take a nap.”  It’s a busy, hectic life.

On the other hand, both attending school and running a business can be very rewarding.  We are often asked to do things quite outside of our range of experience, and in rising to the occasion we find that we are actually more capable than we may have previously thought.  There is a great sense of achievement in growth and accomplishment.

So how do you manage both?  You could put things on hold, but if you’re the entrepreneurial type (or the type who reads up on study tips online) it’s safe to say you’re not the type of cook who likes to keep things slowly bubbling on the back burner.  You have to find a way to do both and, as we find when we attempt to most things in life, almost nothing is impossible.

I stumbled across an interesting (although simplistic) article on running a business while studying on Twitter today.  It’s amazing what you can find just by searching for a word like “studying” on that site — the sheer quantity of new information and different perspectives boggle the mind.  Anyway, following a rule I read somewhere on the internet that says that 80% of everything (including this) is crap, the article basically can be boiled down to the following.

Studying is hard.  Running a business is hard.  But you can do both!  How?  By following these three hints:

1)  Make time for both — this means actually make a schedule and adhere to it.  “Catching as catch can” may sound appealing but it results in too many missed opportunities, forgotten assignments, and rushed jobs.

2) Remove distractions — I know I just told you how much I love Twitter, but I must confess that I am much more productive when I don’t let myself surf the net between every item I check off my daily to-do list.

3) Stay organized — buy yourself a planner (or use an electronic one) and keep it up to date all the time.  Streamline the way you file important documents to avoid clutter or the loss of important data.  Make an effort to be like “that overly neat guy/girl” you know.

The article stops there, but I would add another item to the list: be adaptable.  In school, professors change their minds about assignments, classes fall behind (or move ahead), and group meetings require constant rescheduling.  Business is much the same.

Things rarely move at the same rate as you might expect.  That’s why you need to be ready to make use of each and every available moment.  A few spare minutes in a waiting room is a great time to answer work emails or study if you subscribe to a service like TestSoup.

Last but not least, set daily, weekly, and monthly goals for both your studies and your business so that you always have a clear picture of what you could be doing to achieve them when life throws you a curveball.  Then, when it inevitably does, you’ll be ready to take advantage.