Efficient study routine system: the foundation

The easiest way to do something that is difficult is to build a system. The fast food industry uses culinary systems to ensure that the food they produce tastes the same all around the world.

Excellent systems make difficult tasks easy, but for a system to be effective it must have two key properties: 

1. Low start up energy

2. Low maintenance energy.

Our ability to do anything can be boiled down crudely to the availability of  energy to execute the particular task. If a system is cumbersome and requires a great amount of energy for it to be established and maintained, then it will eventually break down. A system with low start up energy is one that takes minimal effort to start. While on the other hand a system with low maintenance energy requires little effort to keep it going.

For the next couple of weeks I will be exploring how to establish what I have coined ‘the efficient study routine system’. The first set of blog posts will focus on how to build a daily system for completing homework. The second set of blog posts will focus on building a system for test preparation.

In order to stay on top of your school work you have to ensure that you keep abreast with what is covered in class on a daily basis. It is therefore very important that you build a system that allows you to keep up with new material covered daily while leaving enough time for you to complete assigned homework.

To prevent falling behind in your work, you must do some of it at home. If you have never been an academic person and are not accustomed to doing work at home on an ongoing basis, for now, just focus on two things: reading over your day’s notes and completing your assignment. As stated earlier its important to start slow (low start up energy) and build as you go along.

It is also important that you don’t spend the entire night working. For a high school student, the true sweet spot in terms of the time taken to complete work at home on a daily basis is two hours. Two hours gives you enough time to get home and relax a bit, get your school work done and also to get a good night’s rest. 

The first thing to work on therefore, is to determine how long it takes you to complete your work at home each night. In order to do this, note how long your nightly work takes you to complete. Do this for an entire week and then calculate your daily average. If you find that it is taking you longer than two hours, then changes have to be made. If this is your reality, you must make it your primary goal to get your homework time down to 2 hours per night at most.

In my next blog post I will offer possible reasons why your homework is taking you longer than two hours and interventions that could be taken to shorten the time.