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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Serie: Productivity Ninja
- Sprache: Englisch
In the world of smartphones, instant internet access and on-demand documentaries, studying should be easier than ever. Yet all this background noise can make us unfocused and inefficient learners. So how can you cut through the distractions and get back to productive, rewarding learning? Four little words: Think like a Ninja. Paralysed by procrastination? Harness some Ninja Focus to get things started. Overwhelmed by exam nerves? You need some Zen-like Calm to turn those butterflies into steely focus. Surrounded by too many scrappy notes and unfinished to-do lists? Get Weapon-savvy with the latest organizational technology. With nine Ninja techniques to learn, there is a solution here for everyone who wants to learn better – and they don't involve giving up the rest of your life. Written by one of the world's foremost productivity experts, How to be a Study Ninja is a fun, accessible and practical guide on how to get the most out of your studying and love the quest for knowledge again.
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Seitenzahl: 385
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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To Roscoe. This one’s for you, chief
CONTENTS
1. THE WAY OF THE STUDY NINJA
The alarm goes off. Your brain slowly remembers that it’s not the first time you’ve heard that alarm this morning. You look at the time. ‘I can’t have snoozed for that long, surely?!’ It’s Wednesday. You have an assignment due tomorrow. Time is running out and this morning’s planned extra hour of reading just became an extra hour in bed, which isn’t an ideal start. Oh, and you’re probably going to miss the bus now and be late for the start of the class.
You shouldn’t have gone out last night. Your friend just said to come round for dinner, but then dinner turned into the whole night. You feel tired and foggy and not quite ready to face the world. As you look at the texts on your phone you remember that you said yes to an extra shift at work tomorrow night (well, you do need the money), but with another deadline looming on Monday, it’s going to be a busy few days ahead. A crazy few days. In fact, you already know that these next few days will look nothing like the peaceful and serene plan you created for tackling this term, just a few short weeks ago.
‘Why don’t things work out like I planned?’
‘Why do I always find myself in a mess?’
‘Juggling all these things is so damn hard.’
These issues are what this book is all about. It’s about helping you move from muddling through to becoming a Study Ninja – slaying the enemies of stress, chaos, procrastination and feeling overwhelmed, and creating a sense of playful control and momentum in all that you do.
It’s easy to feel like everyone else has cracked it and that you’re the only one in a mess. So I’ll let you into a little secret – everyone feels like this. From the most powerful business leaders and politicians to the coolest people on TV to your friends, family and role models – they’re ultimately all human beings with their struggles and faults. As human beings we’re more prone to mistakes than we like to think: we plan badly, we’re not realistic, we’re not organized enough to have a good enough view of what’s ahead, we struggle with prioritization, we get scared and nervous and oh, how we wish there was an exam for procrastination, because we’d be guaranteed an ‘A’ for that one (although we’d probably put off that exam until tomorrow, come to think of it!).
That’s part of the problem with creating study plans or reading study guides – life isn’t perfect and we forget that we’re not perfect either. We keep finding ourselves in a mess because life is … messy. Yet study books and our own grandiose plans sell us the dream of perfection and we fall for it every time. We dream about this perfect life we can lead and convince ourselves that buying a smart new notebook and some highlighter pens is but the first step on our inevitable journey to awesomeness. Three weeks into the term, those dreams have faded again and we’re back to feeling disappointed, flustered, daunted and messy again.
How do I know this? Well, I’ve spent the last six years coaching and training senior business leaders in how to be productive and successful, and I wrote a bestseller that helps people do that in their work and life, called How to be a Productivity Ninja.
And how did that become my job? Because I was spectacularly bad at productivity. Because I tried to live the perfection myth too. Because I’m naturally flaky, lazy and disorganized. Because I’d struggled so hard at making myself productive that I found it easy to relate to other people struggling and could help them find solutions.
I was far from a grade ‘A’ student. You should see my school reports. Oh wait, my mum still has them in her loft. And now I’m reading them again after all these years, they’re even less pretty than I remember them. And I have even less of an idea about why she might choose to keep them …
‘Graham’s mark here is about average but does not reveal the number of reminders that have been necessary before work appeared’ —Mr Abyss, Chemistry
‘Graham is still satisfied with inaccurate work in his writing. He continues to rush his homework’ —Mrs Bettany, French
‘It’s the same old story – Graham can work well in class, but not out of school’ —Mr Cartwright, History
‘Incapable of simply arriving on time in the morning, I am not surprised at his present problems with coursework’ —Mr Goodes, form tutor
‘The progress he has made has been pulled out of him, and most credit for it goes to others, not himself. He sees it as a little local difficulty, but his attitude to organized study is in fact a major future problem’ —Dr Rex Pogson, Headteacher
What those reports don’t tell you is that I was learning loads in those school years, but very little of it was in school. I was editing a music magazine, singing in a band, campaigning for political change, putting on music events, writing a music column for my local newspaper, DJing on a local radio station, as well as delivering newspapers six days a week and working in a bank three evenings a week. But I still look back on some of those school years as a wasted opportunity. If I’d have known what I know now about topics like productivity, attention, psychology, self-control and motivation, my school days – and my qualifications – would have been very different.
Since those days, I’ve learned something really important about learning itself, too. Knowledge is power – it’s a cliché because it’s true. But we’ve come to see education as a passport to a better pay packet, and as a ‘chore’ that’s necessary for us to reach the next level in life, when really we should see it as a path to a richer life experience. Yes, there’s a destination to reach, but why not make the journey richer, more fulfilling and more interesting, too?
This mindset shift happened for me when I was studying for my degree, at the University of Birmingham’s famous and pioneering Centre for Cultural Studies and Sociology, set on a beautiful campus in a fascinating multi-cultural city – home of course to the Balti curry, Tolkien, Cadbury’s chocolate and, of course, Aston Villa Football Club.
At the end of those three years, I was given a degree and I was happy that within weeks of graduating, I got a job doing something that I cared deeply about. Conventional wisdom is often for people to abandon the thought of education or personal development at this point. Why would you need to keep learning when you’ve reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? But the thing that university gave me – that was much more important than the piece of paper I could use to inflate my salary expectations – was a deep sense of curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and understanding about how the world works, and excitement at finding out what makes people tick, what principles or politics are worth fighting for, how the world and society should develop. I’d finally learned that there is nothing as exciting as asking big questions, knowing full well that you’re unlikely to get a simple answer.
So, dear reader, whether you’re studying for your GCSEs or A-levels, your degree, or your French class after work, my hope is that this book ignites within you a passion for learning as well as giving you skills, techniques, tips and tricks from the world of business and productivity that mean you can take your learning to a new level. If there’s a destination you have in mind – a qualification, a life stage, an achievement – then I would be delighted to be your guide on that journey, and I promise we’ll get you there in good shape.
But my aim will be to go further: my real aim will be to give you the gift of playful curiosity that my three years studying at the University of Birmingham gave me. Whether you’re learning for school, for college or university or just for the fun of learning, my intention here is to show you the way.
You have a reason for wanting to learn. Perhaps it’s to make your parents happy, perhaps it’s to advance a career or perhaps it’s for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of learning new things. It could be a combination of all of the above, or something else entirely. But let’s be honest, there’s also plenty of reasons not to learn, too. It could be that amazing new series on Netflix, it could be the distraction of the football scores or the Xbox, it could be your family or a great book. All of these are enemies of progress, because you’re human. As much as we all like to feel we’re above such distraction, and as much as we beat ourselves up at our regular lapses into spectacular bouts of procrastination, it happens. We’re human. We know it’s not good for us. We do it anyway.
For the past decade or so, I’ve been obsessed with productivity. I became obsessed with it because I was fed up of watching myself fall for bad habits, struggling to find ways of being organized and in control and realizing the sheer inefficiency of so many of my approaches to work and life. Ever since I started my company, Think Productive, and started teaching productivity at some of the best-known companies in the world, one of the most common things people have said to me is: ‘I wish they taught these kinds of skills in schools.’
I quite agree: I was lousy in school. I had no awareness of how to study well, I struggled to hold my attention on things for long enough to do great work (by the way, this never changed, I just developed better ways around this!) and I never really felt I hit a groove until well into my degree – and only then because I felt so totally engaged and inspired by the subject matter, which I’m realistic enough to know is a luxury in itself.
What wins on a rainy Tuesday? Is it the passion to study hard and get ready for those exams or assignments that we know have gloriously far-away deadlines that feel like some kind of distant island on the horizon? Or is it laziness, distractions and socializing?
‘Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life’ —Henry. L. Doherty
Do you want to change this so you can be more disciplined, memorize facts better, develop critical thinking skills and write better essays? Of course you do. So how do you change all this and more? You learn to think like a Ninja, harnessing nine key characteristics that will focus your mind and revolutionize your learning.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book is split into three main sections. First, we will focus on creating the mindset and habits that are conducive to studying: the way of the Study Ninja, mental approaches to your studies that will have you seeking out the shortcuts, maximizing your learning time and feeling more in control and less chaotic. We’ll look at what it means to be a learner and discover the style of learning that suits you. Essentially, the aim of this section is to prime your brain to receive and retain knowledge in the most efficient way possible, and remove some of the obstacles to doing so.
Then in the middle chapters, we’ll use this newfound Study Ninja mindset to approach the key tenets of learning, playing to your particular learning styles and strengths: general study, note-taking, group work, writing, revision and exams.
Finally, we’ll look at a subject that is close to many a student heart – reducing procrastination. But I want to also focus on what we can replace procrastination with: increased momentum, overcoming your fears and developing a childish curiosity that will make learning fun and help you learn for the rest of your life.
It’s a book that I hope you will choose to read cover to cover, but I know that you may not have time for that! So before we get started, if you’ve picked up this book in a panic, over on the next page there’s a map so that you can cut straight to the chase, whatever today’s chase may be.
‘I AM SO STUPID!’
We’ve all uttered those words as we look back with regret on the times we wasted and look forward at the deadline hurtling towards us at startling velocity, ready to smack us in the face. We wasted time and now we’re rushing. How stupid of us. Do you ever wish you could just turn back the clock, rewind all those hours of TV and movies and games that in hindsight were pretty pointless (though fun!)? The temptations we face are what make us human. We can’t simply decide one day to become a superhero, immune to such distractions and such sloppy and lazy working practices. But we can learn to think like a Ninja. Ninjas are human beings with a great mindset, good tools and the ability to overachieve. And let’s face it, everyone loves a Ninja.
So here are the nine characteristics of the Study Ninja. All of these things can be learned with a little practice. They are ways to approach your learning, ways to think about the world around you, ways to promote your own self-discipline and banish some of the negative habits that keep you feeling down. So, my Ninja apprentice, let’s dive right in.
THE NINE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STUDY NINJA
1. BALANCE
A Ninja needs balance in their life. Learning is just one of many priorities. It might not be your top priority and striking the balance is about fitting in the learning so that you have time for the things that truly matter. Alternatively learning might be the thing you most want to do, but life is getting in the way.
JUGGLING
The older you get, or the deeper you get into your studies, the more potential there is for ‘everyday life’ to get in the way. It can be overwhelming. Making space for studying or writing is half the battle. Feeling good about it is the other half! There are several ways in which approaches to productivity and learning are similar, not least in terms of building structures and ‘scaffolding’ that enable you to juggle everything going on in your life without getting overwhelmed or forgetful.
‘Scaffolding’ consists of the structures and systems that you need to have in place to engender good habits and to feel in control of your decision-making. Developing a great to-do list so that you know what your options are and don’t feel stressed by all of those nagging things to do is one of the most important things you can do to alleviate stress. A great to-do list becomes like a second brain: a brain that’s actually better than your real brain, because once things are written down, it doesn’t forget them.
Getting into great routines requires more than just having the thought that it would be good to have a routine! To change your habits and develop great routines that stick, you need to think about the scaffolding again. Do you keep meaning to check your email or get round to that big chunk of reading, but it never happens? Do you keep telling yourself you need to be making progress on that essay, yet you’re watching Netflix instead? Those are not just problems of willpower or decisions, those are problems of scaffolding! So later in this book we’ll be focussing on self-management techniques that will leave you procrastinating less and doing more.
RELATIONSHIPS
‘I can’t break up with her this week, she’s got her A-level exam on Thursday.’ We’ve all heard sentences like that uttered by friends, or even said them ourselves! Relationships take time to nurture and offer another powerful pull away from study. Whether it’s the early days of lust and love, the relationship with a parent or sibling or a strong friendship, these things really matter. There is also a lot made of the concept of ‘work/life balance’, and if you’re studying for a qualification, it can often feel like you have no study/life balance. And if, like I did all the way from the age of fourteen to the end of my degree, you’re studying alongside trying to have a life AND holding down a part-time paid job, it can often be a big challenge. Work/life balance implies two things, when in reality we’re all juggling three, four, five or more major areas of commitment in our lives.
SOCIALIZING
And of course alongside all the serious stuff that requires your commitment and focus, there’s the even more serious stuff like drinking, dancing and cavorting, especially if you’re at uni. Some schools or universities will try to set limits on how much their students should be socializing, but I don’t know that I’ve ever met a student of any age or institution that has been keen to obey such rules. In fact, it seems to me that this only encourages more socializing in order to achieve a requisite level of rebellion. And of course, if you’re a mature student, with a social life spent well-away from a campus, or prefer to spend your relaxation time doing other things, such guidelines seem even more alienating. There’s also peer pressure at play here – we want to feel accepted and avoid the ‘FOMO’ feeling (fear of missing out).
In addition to having a life outside of the campus and outside of your own four walls, we all have a life online. This is often more complicated and ‘bitty’ than the socialising we might do on a designated night out. In fact, it’s often so second nature these days that we even forget that it’s happening or that we can do something about it! But think about how much time you spend on your phone, or on the internet. Personally I know there are times when I need to make sure I’ve switched this stuff off and got it out of the way. But equally, there are times when a few minutes of social media diversion can be a healthy thing that leaves me feeling refreshed for a task – and other times when a full-on Facebook binge beats going out too!
To study successfully, you don’t need to abandon the idea of socializing. In fact, there are academic studies that suggest socializing actually helps with the retention of key information. But there are times to strike the balance, and in particular, we’ll look at the ‘cross-over’ between the two. For example, scheduling in revision study time the morning after a big night out when you’re tired and not at your best is very unlikely to lead to academic prizes, yet we kid ourselves that such behaviour strikes a good balance. But actually, being prepared to write off the whole of Sunday in advance is one of the most sure-fire ways to enjoy your Saturday night without guilt. So let’s be real about the best approaches to achieving balance, rather than falling for the pretences that make us feel virtuous, but that, if we’re honest, are very rarely effective.
BACKGROUNDS AND SPOTLIGHTS
How we deal with Balance has a lot to do with where we choose to put our attention and focus (more of which later!). One of the best ways to achieve a sense of Balance is ‘backgrounding’. Learning to push things into the background until we’re ready to shine the spotlight back on them is an important skill. So there are times when relationships take centre stage, and times when we should ‘maintain’ them with the least possible effort. There are times to hit the socializing hard and times to put it to the background. More subtle things, like the ‘life maintenance’ of bills, shopping or fixing things can easily feel like they need constant spotlight, yet they’re things that often need some ‘backgrounding’ if you’re going to really focus on what matters.
BALANCE COMES FROM PURPOSE
Finally, let’s start with the biggest question of all: why?
Why do you study? What are you learning for? What’s your intention? I often think that starting with the big, profound question of ‘why’ and really thinking about what’s motivating you is an inspiring and empowering thing to do. As a culture, we’re not encouraged to be curious or question things – in fact, I would even go so far as to argue that, wrapped up with all the learning, education in this country often deliberately attempts to brainwash us never to question our assumptions or intentions.
We’re taught to go to school, get good grades, follow an academic path or get training, get a job, get a pay rise, buy a house, have children, retire and go on a cruise ship around the Caribbean … And perhaps achieving all of those things, in that order, is exactly why you’re learning. But it’s almost certainly not. You might just enjoy being clever and smart. If so, admit it! In my case, a big motivation behind wanting to go to university was because I would be the first person from my family to go, and having been to a ridiculously good school where it was an expectation, I felt confident about breaking the mould. And once I got to university, I was learning because I wanted to be like the academics in my department who had their words published in journals and even in the Guardian newspaper. And they liked drinking grown-up coffees and wore badly fitted cardigans and it all just seemed quite romantic. Yes, the motivation for many of the hours spent in the university library was dreaming that one day I too could wear ill-fitting knitwear.
I know this sounds like I’m asking you to think about the meaning of your life (and in a way I am), but I do think it’s important to know at least some of the reasons you feel that learning is important to you. After all, you do have choices. You could put this book down, quit your course and spend the rest of your life deliberately learning nothing.
I’d like you to think now about what it is that drives you. What’s it all for? Is it really about getting good grades, or do the grades matter because they make your mum smile, or contribute to a bigger life plan of yours? Take a few minutes to figure it out.
EXERCISE: PURPOSE
Write down the reasons you really want to study, and why you want to get better at it below:
I am learning because I want to …
I want to be a Study Ninja because …
2. ZEN-LIKE CALM
A Ninja is calm, present and ‘in the moment’. OK, a quick warning. Things are about to get a little bit ‘hippy’. But stay with me here, because the first secret of success is coming your way here.
You will often hear people say they work at their best when they’re on a tight deadline. They feel like the deadline makes them more productive. This is a half-truth. The deadline forces you to get going and make progress. And in those final hours before the deadline, as you struggle to get everything finished, you have no decisions to make about what you should be spending your time on. You stop thinking about Facebook updates or gossip websites or football scores as you work away, blissfully in the moment. In the middle of the panic of that deadline is a calmness, because all choice has been removed. There isn’t the time anymore to procrastinate or even work on something else: meeting the deadline and working like a Trojan to get there requires all of your attention.
It’s not the deadline itself that makes you productive, it’s that feeling of being totally focussed on that moment. Time stands still. You forget the worries of your life; you might forget to eat; you might even struggle to remember what day of the week it is. This is a version of what Buddhists call ‘Zen’.
We spend so much of our lives living in anything but the present moment. We plan our futures, we strive for pots of gold at the end of the rainbow instead of marvelling at the rainbow itself, we agonize over bad choices we might have made, or mourn things that we’ve lost. And with our work, we spend so much time in the planning that we let our imaginations run wild thinking about the negative impact of bad work, bad grades or bad decisions. Such worry gets us nowhere. In fact, it causes paralysis.
So our aim as a Study Ninja is Zen-like Calm – to reach a state where we’re interacting only with our intention, in the present moment. Having strived for and practised this for a number of years now, I can tell you it’s very possible to have the Zen-like Calm bit, without the stress and worry of the deadline.
GETTING INTO THE ZONE, GETTING INTO THE ZEN
Getting into the ‘work zone’ doesn’t happen by accident. TV on in the background? Turn it off. Music on in the background? Only if it’s something that you know you don’t have to think about (personally, jazz and electronic music work for me whereas any music with a strong chorus or a lot of words like rap doesn’t, because it tempts me to think about the words or sing along). Are you surrounded by piles of unrelated books? Move them. Make your desk or workspace a sanctuary. And yes, you know that connection you have to all the information in the world, ever? The internet connection on your computer or phone? You might even want to spend some time closing all those windows and apps – these are all enemies of the present moment, enemies of Zen-like Calm.
THE BRAIN AND THE BODY
The second issue to consider on your quest for Zen-like Calm is your physical well-being. Is your body rising and falling with fixes of coffee or caffeine-heavy energy drinks? Are you eating brain foods like fish and nutritious fresh vegetables, or are you gorging on fast food? And are you getting some level of exercise? Unfortunately, this does actually matter! All of these things affect how the brain works. In fact, look at heat map studies of brain activity after just fifteen minutes of exercise versus those of people who stumble like zombies to their desks in the morning, and it’s really no wonder that Richard Branson starts every day in the gym (and has even said that his morning workouts are the secret to his business success). So getting the physical right gets the mental right. It makes it easier for the brain to think clearly, it gives you a better quality of attention and it aids learning.
STRESSING ABOUT YOUR STRESS
We all face stress. Stress is a natural physiological response to something that threatens or challenges us. To some extent stress can actually be a good thing, in that it can provide motivation or a sense of urgency. But it’s also the enemy of Zen-like Calm: stress can motivate you to get started, but too much stress will leave you stuttering, distracted and unable to learn effectively. So being mindful of stress – and more specifically what kind of stress has your attention – will allow you to overcome it and develop that Zen-like Calm. We will talk later in the book about attention management techniques (because it is attention management, not ‘time management’, that we need to worry about) and we’ll talk procrastination, fear and how to leave them far behind you when you sit down at your desk. The Study Ninja knows that battling stress is one of the hardest yet most profound things you can learn to do – and something that affects not just your ability to learn, but your ability to live, too.
3. RUTHLESSNESS
As well as fostering Zen-like Calm, a Ninja is Ruthless. Ruthlessness doesn’t mean cheating or being unethical, but we do need to be much bolder in how we deal with ourselves and with others. In particular, we need to be ruthless with how we protect the most precious resource that we have: our attention. Attention is a variable resource, which is a fancy way of saying that there are times in the day when you’re on top of your game and other times when you feel tired, sluggish or unable to think clearly. Scheduling your work for the times of day where you know your attention is strong is not something that we’re ever taught, or something that comes naturally to most of us. We’ll talk more about this later on and focus on self-control, too. But for now, a few key elements to think through:
THE ART OF SAYING NO TO YOURSELF
It’s often said that ‘sorry’ is the hardest word. But really ‘no’ is harder still. Ever heard the phrase, ‘It’s easier to apologize than to ask permission’? It’s saying that sometimes you just need to ruthlessly crack on with something that furthers your cause, even if you know it might annoy people. ‘Sorry’ is easy to say if you’ve ended up getting what you want! But how about saying ‘no’ to yourself? Your favourite team are playing this evening and it’s live on TV. Yet you have an important assignment you need to complete this evening, too, and if you don’t start it until after the game finishes, you’ll be tired and flagging before you get anywhere near the end. Sometimes we just need to say no to ourselves.
We’re living in a world in which delayed gratification is becoming as alien as sending paper letters. We have the tools at our fingertips to buy anything we want, watch anything we want, speak to anyone at any time (no matter where they might be in the world), learn anything we want, go anywhere we want … So why wait? Well, because delayed gratification and the art of saying no to ourselves is one of the secrets of successful people: entrepreneurs start and run businesses knowing that it takes an average of three years for a business to become successful enough to make them any real money (I can attest to this personally!), and in that time a lot of people abandon their businesses because they run out of patience. Develop the ability to delay your gratification and keep going – knowing that good things come to those who wait.
SAYING NO TO DISTRACTIONS
So you just need to be ruthless with yourself, right? Wrong! Some of the biggest distractions don’t come from us but from other people. If you’re studying alongside having any kind of a life (and let’s face it, that means pretty much everyone), then being ruthless in managing what else you allow to have your attention means occasionally saying no to some really flattering or exciting things. Do you need to be on that committee? Do you need to go to that big party? Do you need to take on more hours with your job? It’s important to create some space in your life to truly commit to your learning. If you don’t do this, and just pretend you can fit it in, you’ll end up spreading yourself too thinly and not making anyone happy.
How do I know this? You want to know my guilty secret? I do this. All the time. At school doing my A-level exams, I was on the school council, lead singer of a band, learning guitar, working three nights a week in a bank, involved in political campaigns, a DJ on the local radio station, writing and editing a music fanzine and holding down a relationship. These days I’m exhausted even reading that list out. And while I loved almost every minute of every one of those things, in hindsight they damaged my learning and it’s no wonder I had to take a year out and resit one of my subjects to get into the university I wanted. Am I better at this now? A little. But my optimism and passion to make things happen often blinds me to this particular weakness. I’ve started businesses I had no time to run, committed time to charity projects when I’ve had important work deadlines and for many years the result was working weekends and evenings. These days I work a strict four-day week and employ an assistant to help me as a bit of a ‘gate-keeper’. I’m a lot more ruthless with what gets my attention. But could I be even more so? Yes, of course. Being a Ninja is always a work in progress.
PLUG IN, UNPLUG, TUNE OUT
The Study Ninja needs to protect their attention from distractions. There are all kinds of ways to do this, but one of the best is being mindful of your relationship with the internet. Did you know that your computer and even your home internet connection has an ‘off’ switch?! Well, use it. Take some time to turn your phone onto silent, put it in a drawer and relinquish your connectedness, just briefly. An hour of Zen-like focus, away from distractions, is a truly powerful thing.
Perfection is the enemy of done. The last moments you spend on something are rarely the best ones. Being Ruthless means learning to ‘ship’ – to release what you’ve created out into the world before you’re comfortable doing so. Software makers know this all too well. They don’t wait for something to be perfect, they just wait until it’s good enough. The near-perfect software that the developer is still working on isn’t a product at all, it’s an idea in someone’s head and on a screen. Perfectionism is a disease because it tells us to hold onto whatever it is we’re doing until it’s perfect, and that until something is perfect, it’s unfinished. Yet in order to balance and juggle our studies with our lives, in order to make space for everything that truly matters, we need to learn to be comfortable with ‘good enough’. Of course, if your life consisted of simply one study assignment, you’d probably keep working on that one thing for ever and ever until it was utterly perfect, until the person marking it could give it no less than 100%. But the problem with this thinking is that in reality you have another three assignments to prepare for, more reading to do, a whole world of ideas to explore, a job, a family and a life.
There’s a principle we’ll look at later called the Pareto principle, which says that you get 80% of your results from 20% of the effort and time. That doesn’t mean only spending 20% of the time you thought you might on particular tasks, but it’s worth using that principle to focus not on the ‘time in’ but on the ‘impact out’. Focussing on what you want to achieve and working backwards is a great way to reduce inefficiency and get more Ruthless with your attention.
4. WEAPON-SAVVY
A Ninja needs to be Weapon-savvy. There are a wealth of tools and resources at our disposal as we seek to be organized, use our attention productively and learn effectively. These break down into a few different types:
Thinking tools. These are general rules and principles to follow, and ways to arrange our thoughts. Mind-mapping is a good example of a thinking tool; once you learn how to do this, it can really help you to speed up the learning process. We’ll look at many more as we go through the next few chapters.
Organizing tools. There’s such a wealth of apps, stationery, planners and things available to make life easier. We’ll focus on some of the best, as well as how to make the right choices about what to actually use.
Learning Resources. Aside from the kind of tools that you can find in shops or online, it’s worth also remembering that your tutors often provide hints about tools and resources you should be using. Remember that although when they’re marking or analysing your work their job is to look for the ‘holes’ or imperfections to mark you down as well as the good stuff, it’s usually in their best interests that you obtain good results in the end. Sometimes their job even depends on it! So we’ll look at learning resources like reading lists and how to use what’s in front of you as effectively as possible.
You’ll notice that a Study Ninja doesn’t just use weapons – we’ve called this characteristic Weapon-savvy. The ‘savvy’ part is very important. Tools are only as useful as the use you make of them. Using all the latest apps or gadgets really badly isn’t Weapon-savvy at all, it’s a waste of time. So a Ninja knows there’s only value in using tools if you’re going to use them to save time, make the learning stick and generally get more out of the tool than the effort you put into using it. There’s also a temptation to use tools as a distraction technique – after all, who needs to be revising if you’re spending all day developing the most elaborate and beautiful revision timetable the world has ever seen? Or who needs to tick things off their to-do list if you can spend all day moving all the items on the list from one prehistoric app that’s all of six months old, to the newest, latest, shiniest, all-singing all-dancing new app. We’re like magpies, tempted by the shiny and new, especially if it means we don’t have to do the difficult stuff for a little while longer. It’s important to recognize this tendency. Spending months learning to touch-type on a new keyboard in order to save twenty minutes typing one essay? Not so good. But spending six hours doing a touch-typing class that saves you 40 hours’ essay-writing time over the next two years of study? Now that’s Weapon-savvy.
5. STEALTH AND CAMOUFLAGE
As a Study Ninja, you need to practise the art of Stealth and Camouflage. Getting out of the limelight, getting your head down and finding your focus mojo are important skills. I am writing these words from a beach hut in Sri Lanka. Why? Because I needed several weeks of meticulous Zen-like Calm and Ninja Focus. For that, I needed solitude: away from colleagues who were demanding I stop writing to attend tedious meetings, and away from the temptations and distractions of friends, family, TV, socializing and the day-to-day routines. (And I’ll be honest, it’s quite good to exchange a few weeks of the English winter for warm sunshine and the sea. Don’t hate me.)
GOING DARK
OK, so you might not be able to escape to Sri Lanka every time you have to write an essay, but don’t be afraid to spend time ‘off the grid’. Doing this deliberately will mark you out as someone with drive and focus, ‘Going dark’ and making yourself deliberately less available is a tactic adopted by successful business people all the time – they work from home, or they take their teams on ‘away days’ so that they can think outside of the confines and distractions of the office environment. Likewise, if your usual place to study feels distracting or you need a change of scene, why not leave your phone at home, retreat to a coffee shop nearby, and do a bit of ‘tactical hiding’.
CHOOSE YOUR MOMENTS TO STAND OUT
Being too visible at the moment work gets delegated, for instance, is a bad move. It is possible to reduce the proportion of the task done by you and increase what’s done by others, just by recognizing where you are in the cycle of things and predicting when the call for action comes. If your friends are discussing the fact that you want to arrange a big weekend away together, there’s always one person who gets put in charge of looking into dates or taking on co-ordinating responsibility. I’m not saying your aim should be to avoid all of it but be careful about becoming the go-to person for these kinds of things. Washing up and other household chores are also good examples: again, your aim shouldn’t be complete avoidance, but a bit of stealth-mode in relation to these things when you’re on a deadline is no bad thing. And sometimes it’s good to get a task out of the way. For instance, in a new class, when there was an assignment that I knew would get around to everyone eventually, I’d often make the bold move of going first or close to first, so that I could get mine out of the way. Far better to have the extra thing to do early in the term when there are fewer other commitments, than when the proverbial may be hitting the fan in a few weeks. On a slightly separate note, this is also a great strategy for class discussions or group meetings: say something really insightful early on in the class, get noticed, and then the pressure’s off you for the entire rest of the session.
PLAYFUL CAMOUFLAGE
In a world where everyone is increasingly expected to be visible and in the loop at all times, the occasional piece of playful camouflage can be deliciously amusing. I have a friend who, from the age of fifteen right up to the present day, would never say goodbye at the end of the evening. He would quietly slip out, unnoticed, and it often seemed like he vanished into thin air. We might have been at a house party, or in the pub, or at a music gig, or on a day out and we’d suddenly turn around and look at each other and go: ‘Where’s Jim? Has he gone again?!’
Similarly, in a business context, I have clients who I’ve coached whose time is eaten up by back-to-back meetings booked into their electronic calendars by their colleagues, leaving them no time to get any of their actual work done, and I’ve had them come up with deliberately obtuse calendar entries called things like ‘project magenta’. If their colleagues see ‘project magenta’, they don’t know what it is (because we made it up), but of course they fear looking foolish so they leave that time alone in the diary. It’s sneaky and even a little devious, but it buys back crucial time and focus. Spending time out of the limelight is crucial and our brain and frazzled attention need all the help they can get.
6. MINDFULNESS
When you’re in the early years of school, your teachers are there to direct your learning: they tell you what to read, they tell you what to write about and, if one was being cynical, I’d say they tell you how to think. You have very little freedom to learn and express yourself in the way that you want to. But as you progress through your education, and certainly if you are returning to education on your own terms, then I have some great news: you are your own boss! Hooray, you can indulge in self-directed study, follow your own paths, make your own decisions and manage your own learning. Well, it’s great news, were it not for the fact that it’s also terrifying. The curse of being your own boss is that you have to manage yourself, warts and all.
We will look later in the book at procrastination, fear, laziness, chaotic-thinking and a whole raft of things that become issues once we’re managing ourselves.
DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING, SIT THERE
Mindfulness is the technique of noticing the present moment, and in itself is particularly helpful in quietening the chaos of the mind and helping to engender the Zen-like Calm we talked about earlier. Mindfulness meditation is no longer the preserve of hippies, radicals and Buddhists. Its techniques are easily accessible through smartphone apps and on YouTube.
A MINDFUL APPROACH TO THE MINDLESSNESS OF WORK
For me, mindfulness is a skill to be practised and improved upon. The more I develop and continue the habit of meditating, even for just ten minutes a day, the more I begin to notice other patterns in other moments throughout the day. I come to notice my own bad habits, or when my emotions get in the way of what I’m trying to do, or when my mind is in a loop of craving new data: a kind of hyped up curiosity, hallucinating from one weird YouTube video to another. You might have moments when you notice you’re wired and twisted, too?
THE INTENTION OF YOUR ATTENTION
Learning to be present, to make conscious decisions about where we put our attention, is something that mindfulness can really help us achieve. How do you know when this is starting to take effect? You’ll notice your own procrastination quicker than before, you’ll notice when your attention is ‘zoning out’ and you’re daydreaming rather than constructively reading and you’ll notice when you’re reacting from a place of high emotion rather than high logic. To be truly mindful is to notice as much about the process of your work and the process of decisions as the time spent thinking about that work and those decisions. In doing so, we listen to ourselves, and pay attention to others, too.
MINDFUL OF OTHERS
I’ve already hinted that you and I both have our flaws and foibles. We have bad habits, we get things wrong from time to time and we let situations get the better of us sometimes. That’s our little secret and I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. But here’s the bigger secret: we’re not alone! Everyone else has their struggles and stories, too. Their reactions to your requests when you work together, or to your ruthless but tactful request for a bit of time and space to focus might be because they’ve taken things the wrong way. Others may criticize you not from a logical place, but from an irrational one. So before we’re quick to judge, we should use mindfulness to show a bit of compassion and ‘emotional intelligence’ in the way we work with others. A little bit of generosity goes a long way – and of course you might need them to return the favour and be as equally understanding of your own needs from time to time!
