inspiration

Over the next three months, you’re going to be using your brain very much to learn stuff. So it would be a good idea to know how your brain really works.

(And to be clear, the goal of all this is NOT so that you can spend more time at your desk. It’s so that you can get your work finished quickly and then go do something truly important.

Anyway, the thing about your brain is that it’s a little bit like that jar of lightning bugs. It was built by evolution, so it has all these twitchy, surprising features that helped your ancestors not get stepped on by mastodons and avoid falling into quicksand or getting lost in the woods. It was built for survival, not algebra.

So here are five quick hacks for your brain that will help you study better. They’re drawn from a variety of scientific sources, including a terrifically useful and insightful new book called How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why it Happens, by Benedict Carey.

Hack #1: Space out your study time.

Let’s say that have a Spanish test on Friday, for which you need to spend about an hour preparing. Should you:

A) study Thursday night for one hour; or

B) study 20 minutes a day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday?

The answer is: B). And it’s not even close. In fact, studies show you could probably get away with studying only about 10 or 15 minutes a day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, because spacing out your study time is nearly twice as effective as cramming. It also helps you retain it a lot longer — which comes in handy for that Spanish test next month, and the one after that.

The reasons for this have to do with your brain’s tendency to get way less interested in stuff that gets repeated a lot over a short amount of time (i.e., cramming) and to get way more interested in stuff that it faintly remembers and can connect in different contexts. So, study the same way you snack: frequently, in small portions.

Hack #2: Switch up your study locations.

 We’re often told that we should stay in one place to learn, but that’s not true. Your brain likes to use settings like a Hollywood director; it uses them in the movies that make up your memory. So if you study and test yourself lots of places, play different kinds of music, wear different clothes, even chew different-flavored gum, your memory will improve.

Hack #3: Mix it up.

School is orderly, so we instinctively think our studying schedule should also be orderly — you know, study math for an hour, then English for an hour. This is called “blocked practice,” and it makes perfect sense, except for one small fact: your brain doesn’t like blocked practice. What your brain likes instead is “interleaved practice,” where you study something for 10 minutes, then switch to something else, then come back.

The reasons for this are complicated, but they’re based on the fact that your brain works better when it’s being surprised. When you mix it up, you’re forcing your brain to work harder, and be more efficient.

(This also works in sports and music, by the way. If you want to get better at volleyball serves, mix up the type of serve you practice. And if you want to get better at playing classical music and rock, you should switch between the two all the time. Which could sound kind of awesome.)

Hack #4: Get outside.

 Your brain was built in the outdoors, so you need to let it get back there regularly. Nobody knows why being outside and walking around helps you get smarter, but it does. Check out this study of third-graders that shows how a 20-minute walk can light up the areas of the brain that filter out distraction and guide focused attention (talk about lightning bugs!)

Hack #5: Throw away your highlighters– instead, make a habit of testing yourself.

We all know that school involves some memorization. The usual technique is to read a chapter over and over, highlight important passages, and maybe write notecards — you know the drill. Besides, it’s kind of fun to highlight (and yes, that yellow ink does smell fantastic).

But it turns out that those techniques are not nearly as effective as testing yourself. Here’s how: read a passage once, close the book, and then try to write the main points on a blank piece of paper. Then check yourself and see how many you got right.

In other words, don’t lean back in your chair. Instead, lean forward, and generate ideas. Shake the jar, and make the lightning bugs glow. Make your brain work the way it was designed to work — by reaching, struggling, and reaching again.

Article written by Daniel Coyle Author of wonderful books like Talent Code and Little Book of Talent in which he explains scientifically how brain works and how you can maximize your potential, its not self help its science.

Do you frequently tell yourself that you’ll do better “next time” and then don’t change when the time comes? Do you often decide to do something “later” only to find that it never gets done?

If you answered “yes” to either one of these questions, you’re probably ignoring the fact that your behavior today is a strong indicator of your behavior tomorrow.

This is an article by Elizabeth Grace Saunders for HBR, I thought this is extremely relevant for all  UPSC aspirants as most of us tend to procrastinate,read this article in upsc perspective like where ever you see job,office and presentation replace it with reading and completing syllabus this article makes mores sense .

You’re not alone. In The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal shares how, in a research study, participants were much less likely to exert willpower in making healthy choices when they thought they would have another opportunity the following week. Given the option of a fat-free yogurt versus a Mrs. Field’s cookie, 83% of those who thought they’d have another opportunity the following week chose the cookie. In addition, 67% thought they would pick yogurt the next time, but only 36% made a different choice. Meanwhile, only 57% of the people who saw this as their only chance indulged.

The same pattern of overoptimism about the future held true in a study about people predicting how much they would exercise in the future. When asked to predict their exercise realistically — and even faced with cold, hard data about their previous exercise patterns — individuals were still overly optimistic that “tomorrow would be different.”

Eating and exercise habits are all well and good, but as an expert in effective time investment, I’ve seen too many individuals procrastinate at work because they think, “I’ll get a lot done later.” Unfortunately, banking on future time rarely aligns with productive results. This mindset leads to unconscious self-sabotage because individuals are not taking advantage of the opportunity to get tasks done right now, and when later comes, they find themselves feeling guilty, burned out, and frustrated. They fall back on their habits to put work off, and it doesn’t get accomplished.

This pattern of behavior appears on the job when the only thing you accomplish during the day is answering email because you assume you’ll work better later when no one else is the office. But after everyone’s left at the end of the day, you’re too tired to think straight and just go home without getting anything done. Or it shows up when you choose to not make any progress on a project in small windows of time available because you’re waiting for an open day to knock it out all at once. That day never comes, leaving you scrambling at the last minute. Or it can spring up when you say “yes” to every meeting invite and leave no time to do actual work. Then you wonder why you feel like you’re always frantically working and never have time to relax.

Unless you make a conscious effort to change your behavior, poor time management today will only lead to poor time management tomorrow. Consider these two approaches to dramatically increase your productivity.

Eliminate future options. If you have a tendency, like many overwhelmed individuals, to tell yourself that that you’ll get your important work done later — maybe at night or on the weekend — you increase your chance of procrastination during the day. In truth, you can find it difficult to efficiently get things done later because you feel tired and resentful of the fact that you never have any guilt-free downtime. To overcome this psychological loophole, you need to eliminate the option to do something later.

First, challenge yourself to find specified times during your workday to complete your commitments. Look at your project list and estimate approximately how long it will take you to get certain items done. For example, if you have a presentation at the end of the month, determine how long it will take you to gather the information, put together the presentation, review it with your team, and run through it. Then assign specific times in your schedule between now and the presentation for you to complete each piece. This approach of fusing your to-do list with your calendar will help you realize that if you don’t move ahead on key projects, you will run out of time. There’s no option to simply do the work tomorrow because tomorrow has a new set of tasks assigned to it.

In addition, eliminate free time after hours. If you see an open window on your calendar, you’ll be tempted to put off work, knowing there’s an opportunity later — even if that cuts into personal time. Instead, fill that time with personal commitments. This could mean going out to dinner with a friend, spending the evening at your kids’ soccer game, going to the gym, or moving ahead a side project. By determining what you want to do outside of the office, you motivate yourself to make the best use of your time during the day so that you don’t need to cancel your evening commitments.

Reduce variability in your schedule. If you justify surfing the Internet most of the day because you tell yourself that you’ll work nonstop later, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. When you do attempt to tackle that work, you’ll either feel so guilty about your lack of productivity that it will distract you from the task at hand, or you’ll push yourself so hard that you’ll burn out.

Fortunately, there’s a way to outsmart your mental tricks. Studies done by behavioral economist Howard Rachlin show that smokers told to reduce variability in their smoking behavior — to smoke the same amount of cigarettes each day — gradually decreased their overall smoking, even though they were not told to smoke less. By focusing on the fact that if they smoked a pack of cigarettes today, they would need to smoke a pack the next day and the next, they found smoking that pack less appealing.

You can apply the same principle to motivate effective time management. Instead of telling yourself, “It’s OK if I surf the Internet for half the day because I’ll get so much done later this week,” ask yourself this question: “Do I want to surf the Internet for half the day for the rest of my life?” Your answer will probably be, “Of course not. That would be a waste of time.” You can then decide to dedicate that chunk of time to something more productive on a regular basis. Choosing to work the same amount each day with little variation on your schedule takes away the mental loophole that allows you to escape from getting things done now.

Using the present moment wisely instead of banking on time in the future can help you stay committed to your goals. If you have a project at work you’ve avoided for months or some languishing expense reports to file, think about how you can apply these strategies to move forward on those items today.