
The Stealth Studying method - gasull
http://calnewport.com/blog/?p=130
======
dissenter
Any material that requires only 5-10 minutes of unbroken concentration is too
superficial to be worth your time.

If you can, take something else, if you can't, consider taking a bad grade and
focusing on something else anyway.

The suggestion in the article is awful. It is far more important to work hard
at concentrating for long periods of time. All this method is doing is
conditioning you to be scatterbrained. We get enough of that already.

~~~
ibsulon
This technique is about rote memorization. While your engineering and science
classes require less of this, subjects such as history require significant
memorization not only for tests, but also for holding connections in the mind.
Short, focused study for recall sessions can help in these cases, as
memorization is difficult in longer sessions.

------
brianlash
It's good advice, but I don't like the way this article rests on the
assumption that studying before an exam is this dreaded beast in the academic
experience. Cramming's one thing... no one likes to sweat through those final
precious hours leading up to a test.

But spending a few hours/day in the library the week leading up to an exam
never killed anyone. I kind of enjoyed my time alone to pore over my
semester's notes. It was meditative.

The advice in this article (take notes like study guides, study them over 2
10-minute intervals each day) is harmless enough. I just don't like the
presentation.

------
dangrover
Good stuff!

I always kicked ass in courses where I immediately scoped stuff out and
divided it into the smallest possible chunks.

The trouble with a lot of todo programs is that they make doing this with your
tasks kind of a pain -- so you just end up with a single task "Do
$massive_project" with a due date. I'm hoping to solve this with a side
project.

------
jgamman
i'm so in-like with this approach, i remember when i was studying post-
graduate heterogeneous catalysis and all i needed to do was focus for several
hours at a time, for days on end on concepts that were just really really hard
with an experimental data set that seemed infinite and then integrate that
knowledge base with my own experimental results and design the next set. oh
wait, i think i got the article wrong.

