Top 5 Unique Tips for Time Management while Studying

Feb 16, 2023

Hi all! How often does it happen to you that you buy a course and after a week or even less leave it with thoughts - it seems that this is not mine. I would venture to guess that quite often. You are not alone in this. Most people, starting to learn something new for themselves, give it up very soon. The point, in my opinion, is not in motivation or desire, but rather in the atmosphere that we build around self-education.

I consider self-education to be a very important aspect in obtaining new skills. After all, we ourselves are the initiators of this education, which means we have motivation and desire. So why do so many give it up after a week. Today we will deal with this.

Time Limit

My real journey of self-education began 4 years ago when I first bought a course on Udemy on business analytics. The course was relatively small, only 30 hours, and I was sure that I would complete it in two weeks, that is, I study a little more than 2 hours every day. I managed to meet my deadlines, but after 4 days I lost interest in this. The point here is not motivation and desire, but the fact that I devoted so much of my free time to this that I simply burned out for this. In fact, this is a very big and serious problem - to burn out to something.

Doing something every day, everything new turns into a routine and is subsequently ignored. How many books have you started halfway through in an evening and left before finishing? How many episodes of the series you watched in a row, but in the end you didn’t watch the series to the end, not because it’s bad, but because you got bored and tired. I'm willing to bet a lot.

Education is no exception here. It is important to properly distribute your loads. For example, I consider the ideal mode when you study 2 hours a day three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So between days there is time to do something else, the courses are not included in the routine, which means that the desire to do it does not disappear. At the same time, two hours is the ideal duration of classes. It will take you about 15 minutes to gather your thoughts, remember where you left off last time, and a full hour and a half to study hard. Well, it is fashionable to devote the last 15 minutes to repeating something old, already covered material.

Only Study

Also, very often we are distracted by something about learning. A simple message from the parents is enough to get distracted from the course, on the phone. I believe that it's not that the phone distracts you, but that being distracted by the phone in the middle of the lesson, you lose the pace of learning.

Self-education Meme (Me be like)

It happens to me all the time. I'm taking another python bootcamp, solving a course assignment, writing code, and at this time someone calls me or distracts me, offering to drink tea before bed. Don't fall for this clever trick. Seriously, if you are not available for only 2 hours, nothing terrible will happen, the world will not collapse. But this way your learning will keep pace.

Imagine that in the middle of your 1.5 hours you got a call and were distracted for 20 minutes. In order to return to the learning process, you will need even more time to remember where you left off and restore in memory the algorithm that you came up with before the call (going back to my example with the code). Do not be distracted. After training, go back to your business. Nothing bad will happen.

Process

I believe that for productive learning, it is also important to properly conduct the process itself. I'll explain now. Many educational courses have practical tasks. Almost all of them. You are shown something, and you repeat to better remember. I do not advise doing this, I have a more complex, but productive method. If you have ever taken courses, for example, on Udemy, then you know that the lessons there are collected in sections for better organization of the course.

I advise you to complete verification tasks or repeat after the curator only after you have completed the entire section. For example, let's say you're learning about loops in python. There are several varieties of these loops, and accordingly, after each lesson, you get tasks - write a while loop, write a for loop, or something similar. I advise you to return to them after you have completed the entire section.

This is how you train long-term memory and increase the likelihood that you will remember what you just learned in a few hours. Give your head time to fit everything in it, and only then start the practical tasks. It will be more difficult, but more effective.

Additional Practice

Many believe that one course is enough to fully master the skills and knowledge to start a new career path, their business or change their lives. Unfortunately, it is not. Any course is just a base, a foundation for your future skills, knowledge and experience. In my articles on this site, I always analyze educational platforms in a group, that is, those where you can get a theoretical base and those where you can practice, test yourself in real cases and business problems.

Perhaps, I think that practice is much more important than theory, especially when it comes to IT. You can know everything about mathematical statistics and solve any problems, but you cannot make a prediction on real data on Kaggle. Any course is a theory, it is a book that is told to you, it is an experience that is passed on to you, it is a skill that demonstrates you, but this will not bring you closer to solving a real problem and a business solution. You need to do this yourself.

I would advise you to train in some kind of sandbox or online simulator at the same time as any course. Now there are a lot of them and you will find something for every taste. More practice. By the way, this practice can even be added to the resume. More about this, I wrote here.

Don't be Lazy

Strange advice, I agree. If you have taken a new course for yourself and are learning something new, then you are unlikely to be a lazy person. However, my advice is rather directed to those who, for example, like me, are too lazy to return to previous lessons. How it happens for me - I understand that in order to complete a task or test, I'm tedious to go back a few lessons to listen to the lecture again and repeat some theory, but I don't do it. Even knowing the lesson where this material was analyzed, even knowing exactly where to look it up, I still google my question. It's most likely laziness.

Dog Doing My Hobby

I realized this mistake of mine quite recently, and I am sharing it with you now. Do not be lazy to return to the material already covered, return to your notes if you are leading them. Of course - why memorize when you can google. This is a very common thought on our site.

However, I believe that returning to the material covered is what brings us painstaking and confidence. These are, by the way, very important qualities for learning. Perhaps this is the only way to cultivate diligence and attention to detail.

Conclusion

I picked up probably the most important of my observations, which came to my entire long process of self-education. I sincerely believe that if they helped a lazy person like me, they will help anyone. The right approach to training is not only guaranteed success, but also the education of the character of a person attentive to details and diligence.