During my undergraduate studies, I had the great fortune of befriending lots of interesting people. Intelligent people. People engaged with their studies, waiting for their turn to make a difference in this world. Lately, I have been reminiscing about the good times I had during my undergrad and the lessons I learned along the way.
One of those lessons is very near and dear to my heart. It is the notion that consistency is key. Although this is somewhat self-evident in retrospect, when a friend of mine told me that the reason he was able to stay ahead of the readings was due to his consistent bite-sized approach to learning, it was like a new door had opened for me.
It may be best to illustrate this notion with an example. Lets assume that I have three chapters to read for next week, across three subjects. One chapter of statistics, one chapter on the science of perception, and one chapter in personality psychology. For convenience (and to make the calculations simpler), lets assume each chapter is 10 pages and that all this reading is due in 10 days.
What I would normally do is that I’d timeblock reading sessions in my calendar for each of the three subjects and hope to get through the readings in that designated block of time. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. In fact, I often approach reading academic texts in this manner still to this day.
However, my friend — let’s call him Buzz — offered up a different way to tackle such readings. Instead of subject-driven timeblocks, Buzz would take the total number of pages that needed to be read and divide them by the number of days available to finish reading them. So in this example, the total number of pages to read in the next 10 days were equal to 30, and thus the number of pages to read per day to stay on track was equal to 3.
And so, Buzz would timeblock a daily reading session focused on getting through at least 3 pages per day. They could all be from the same subject or one page from each subject… it didn’t matter, as long as he got his 3 pages done for the day, then the day was a success.
Regardless of the academic reading load, Buzz always managed to stay ahead of the readings. And although I initially found this approach to be somewhat faulty, I couldn’t argue with the results!
The reason for why I had a bone to pick with this approach initially was simple: Wouldn’t it be counterproductive to spread the readings out so thin cause me to lose the grand perspective of the subject material?
The short and obvious answer is of course yes.
But here’s the thing: Being adequately prepped for class through reading before class is a binary variable. You either read or you didn’t read.
For example, if I miscalculate the time it’s going to take me to read for one of the three scheduled reading timeboxes on my calendar and that miscalculation leads to me not reading before class, then all discussion about a grand perspective for the reading material goes out the window.
A huge caveat to this approach to reading is in order though. Although I did present the “being prepared for class by having read the study materials beforehand” as a binary variable, this is an example of a false dichotomy. Put differently, it is more appropriate and adaptive to conceptualize pre-class reading and prestudying as being on a continuum. As a gradient that ranges from fully prepared to not prepared at all.
By adopting a gradient point of view, we can leverage tried and tested study methods and prestudy effectively (e.g., by drawing up a mindmap that captures the backbone of the topic that depicts its most important conceptial relationships). See for instance Justin Sung’s approach to learning science.
However, Buzz’s sentiment still approaches something quintessential. His notion of consistent progress outweighing bursts of motivated efforts has shaped my way of tackling demotivating tasks. Doing just a little bit, but doing a little bit every day, can be applied in a myriad of circumstances. And doing just a little bit every day will get you past the finish line!
For example, imagine Woody wants to become the type of person who reads lots of books but isn’t reading anything at the moment. If Woody would invest 10 minutes each day reading, he would end up reading more than 60 hours each year. To put that in perspective, 60 hours is roughly equivalent to 1.5 months of a full-time job; reading from 9 to 5 every weekday for six weeks.
While 10 minutes don’t seem like much, they quickly add up. Consistency is key!
