Learning Techniques for Life

December 2023 marked the end of my Executive MBA studies at Imperial College London Business School. It was an incredibly rewarding two-and-a-half-year experience that changed me in ways beyond my imagination, and I am grateful to myself for putting me through it.

It was hard work.

Early mornings and late evenings walking through the online materials, reading academic tomes and papers, preparing for exams, drafting reports, attending Zoom meetings after Zoom meetings to discuss group projects, attending weekend lectures at the college, dialling in for evening Q&As while having dinner - the list went on and on. I had to learn how to survive and give myself a chance to excel.

Formal education aside, learning new skills in adulthood has become essential in today's knowledge and tech-driven world. Many now sought-after industries, such as Web3, IoC devices and Generative AI, did not exist a few years ago at all. I took on a role in innovation just before ChatGPT was announced, and I had to learn about Gen AI like everyone else. The famous paper Attention Is All You Need was not an easy read for me as the first paper on AI.

The good news is that it is a well-known fact that our brains have enormous capacities, and most people only use about 10% of that in their lifetime, or even less. Why? Many people stop learning new things in adulthood. Learning complex subjects is often an immense commitment that requires juggling between family, work, health, and everything else. When one spends all their free time trying to chip away at something but not seeing much progress, it could quickly lead to anxiety, disappointment or burnout.

To make things easier for ourselves, we need to work smarter.

Over the past two and a half years, I have reevaluated how I learn both at and outside of work. I have tried many learning techniques from popular books and YouTube videos. Here are the ones that worked for me.

1. Good night's sleep

Burning the candle at both ends is counter-productive. The only thing it achieves is harming your mental and physical health.

When we sleep, our brains synthesise the knowledge and experiences we acquired during the day, connecting dots, creating new neural network nodes and storing the knowledge permanently. In that sense, sleeping is learning.

Research has long revealed that human brains condition and clean themselves when we sleep. Without a good night's sleep, our brains cannot make learning as effective as it could be the next day, affecting our mood, productivity, and health.

Tips to ensure a good night's sleep:

• Don't take caffeine after midday. Caffeine can affect some people for up to 12 hours. Some people are less affected due to different caffeine tolerance levels.
• Don't take your smartphone to your bedroom.
• Go to bed and get up at the same time every day.

2. Manage your energy, not time

Like the health bars in video games, your learning stamina depletes as you take on more activities throughout the day. That's right. It is in limited supply. That means quitting scrolling social media feeds on your phone and forgoing Netflix-binging because all your friends are talking about them. Prioritising the most important tasks for when your energy level is at its highest will ensure as much energy as possible is allocated to meaningful activities.

If an activity reinvigorates you, invest time in it. Treat it like running a business. For example, go out for a walk, cut down on sugary snacks, meditate, or even take a bath. If an activity can recharge your battery, do it. Have you ever had evenings when all you could master energy for was sitting on the sofa and doing nothing? It's a sign of improvement opportunities in energy management.

3. Incorporate change

Prolonged, monotonous studying can be boring, especially for topics you are not naturally interested in. It requires extra effort to maintain concentration and, therefore, costs more mental energy. A change could be an effective way to combat burnout and recharge.

It could be a change of scenery. Working in a different environment - a coffee shop or the local library, travelling to different cities or countries, take the opportunity if you can travel with work. Another way to introduce change is to change the time you work. Try to experience different energy levels for different tasks. For example, schedule some fun tasks that require low energy for the early afternoon.

Shifting focus is another way to reinvigorate, e.g., varying the tasks that serve different purposes throughout the day: going to the gym with a friend (health), learning a new language through a skill-swap app (fun) or listening to podcasts (exploring) on the way to the supermarket.

4. Minimise task-switching costs

Task-switching cost is a well-known problem for complex work requiring much mental energy. Clustering similar tasks into large chunks can help minimise the cost. For example, Mondays are for research tasks, Tuesdays are for meetings, and Wednesdays are for deep work.

5. Stoicism and discipline

Many popular productivity books suggest you can be productive by making things fun and easy. That is true to a certain extent. But more often, achieving anything extraordinary in life requires hard work and discipline. Not everything is fun and easy for everybody. I loved Corporate Finance and found different types of derivatives fascinating, but I had a hard time trying to apply game theory to real-world problems. The challenge is that in order to be good at Strategy, I needed both.

Some believe motivation is much more effective than willpower. That is true. However, motivation comes and goes. It is not always readily available, and you need to recharge it constantly. On the other hand, scheduling is a more controllable way to introduce discipline - time is a reliable resource you can plan and allocate. Often, getting started is the hardest thing, and the rest is easy.

6. Try out different productivity techniques

Not every widely touted productivity technique from the New York Times best-seller list will work for everyone. Try different things out, find which ones work for you, and incorporate them into your daily routine.

The techniques that worked best for me are listed below.

The Pomodoro technique 🍅

Using a Pomodoro Timer helped me take regular breaks and be more mindful of the task at hand. It also helps regulate energy consumption so you don't drain all your energy in one session.

With that mindfulness and the ticking timer, I find it is much easier to master the willpower to say no to distractions.

Eat the frog 🐸

Mark Twain's famous quote, 'If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.' says it all.

Getting the most challenging yet important task done first thing in the morning will set the tone and make the rest of the day more enjoyable.

The 10-minute rule ⏳

My procrastination often stems from not knowing where to start, it was never a lack of motivation. When that happens, I allow myself only to do 10 minutes and stop. I may do some light research, find the missing information, make a strawman plan, set mini-milestones on a napkin, or divide the task into small actionable steps. The mere action of getting started, even only for a few minutes, often quells the fear when facing seemingly daunting unknowns and gives me enough confidence to get started.

The rainbow calendar 🌈

Having a well-planned and well-prioritised to-do list does not always put me on auto-pilot to actually get them done, but the calendar does. I like to block time in my calendar for the most important things. For example, I have three frogs to eat every day: one for studying/work, one for relationships/well-being, and one for fun. I would allocate time for each in the calendar and colour-code them. It took me a while to feel comfortable treating the appointments with myself as important as someone else's meeting invites. It felt liberating the first time I prioritised my appointment with myself over a meeting that just slapped an entire distribution list on.

Because of the colour coding, my calendar looks like a rainbow - hence the name rainbow calendar. And there is a bonus: it gives me a good overview of whether I balanced my life as I intended to. If a particular colour is missing from my calendar for days, I know I must allocate time for it, or it will never happen.

Depending on how you work under stress, filling the calendar too full may not be a good idea. If you don't have any buffer and flexibility for ad-hoc tasks, any unexpected interruptions, such as an urgent email or a last-minute meeting, would derail the entire carefully drafted plan and make you feel that all the effort was wasted - even the things you've achieved that day feel worthless.

Pace your study 🐾

When I was younger, I preferred to work on one task for a very long time (often 8+ hours) until I finished it or I had to stop for external constraints, e.g., the school library closes at 11:59 pm. As I grow older, maintaining the energy required for long-period intense work becomes more challenging. I could still do it with the help of snacks and coffee, but I know I was borrowing energy from the next couple of days, which is not a wise strategy for the long game. It's not great for my health either.

Instead, pacing my study with short sprints made the knowledge stick better. It allows the brain to synthesise what I learned during the day, a.k.a. sleeping on it. Short sprints also require less mental energy to get started and drain less power in general, as they give me the opportunities to recharge often.

This is especially helpful when you have to learn many subjects simultaneously. With proper planning, such as incorporating Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve and ensuring the right amount of time for every subject, short sprints can extract the maximum value from the limited time available.

30% read, 70% review ⚖️

This split may come as a surprise to many. 70% for review... seems too high?

Here, the review does not narrowly refer to memorising the knowledge. It encapsulates memorisation, synthesisation, and application.

Finding the correct split is crucial for better estimates and planning. If I can read an academic paper at the speed of 4 minutes per page, I will need 400 minutes to finish the 100-page tome and another 400x7/3 = 933 minutes to truly master the content of the paper (assuming the subject is foreign to you).

People say I have a photographic memory and can grasp complicated concepts quickly. But few see how much time and effort I've put in behind the scenes synthesising the things I've read, heard, and watched. In other words, they only saw the 30% effort spent building the top of the iceberg - not the 70% of the base submerged under the surface.

I am a firm believer in "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well.". If something is important enough to claim my time in the first place, I want it to be part of my knowledge base and toolkits. Do less but better.

Zettelkasten method as a way of self-test 🧾

A large part of my 70% of study time for review is spent on taking Zettelkasten notes. The basic idea behind this method is that each note should contain a self-contained topic. You do not simply pile up notes - every time you write a new one, you must think hard to determine how this new note relates to all your existing notes. This deliberate effort of connecting the dots is where most of your effort should be spent, not the note-writing itself. It helps you integrate the new knowledge into the existing system, compounding the learning effort.

Being able to write a self-contained note is also a great test to tell if you truly understand the topic. If you can explain it to others in your own words, you have grasped the idea and probably have researched the topic beyond the original text. Simply copying the original text is a very shallow exercise of your brain, and you are more likely to forget about it quickly.

7. Exercise, meditate and have conversations

Self-care might feel like the first luxury to give up when we are knee-deep in millions of deadlines, but it is the single most critical one we should not forgo. Our body and mind are the power core for all our endeavours, and we must make sure they are conditioned to their best. If you are worried about the thousands of to-do items you must tackle and do not know how to deal with the situation, it's a sign of a lack of planning and prioritising, not a sign that you must pour every single available minute into them.

8. Take fun seriously

When times are tough, our brains tend to stay in the same mode at all times - the mode that enables us to fight, focus on difficult tasks and suppress boredom. It is okay for a few short sprints but not for a marathon that lasts a lifetime. Depriving our need for playing and fun will only decrease our productivity and render learning frustrating and unbearable.

Doing something we genuinely enjoy is another way of self-care. Many hobbies, such as playing an instrument, doing hands-on crafts, or working in the garden, activate another part of our brains and can inspire our study. Most importantly, it recharges our mental energy to go further.

References

Sprouts. (2017). 13 Study Tips: The Science of Better Learning. [online] Available at: https://youtu.be/eVlvxHJdql8 [Accessed 4 Mar. 2023].

Briggs J. (2023). How to Learn (a lot). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdbs2S2YHk [Accessed 19 Jun. 2023].