How I study ... even when I'd rather be doing anything and everything else but
Study and sleep. Everything else is negotiable.
Today is the first day in 5 that I took a break to write.
Am currently studying for exams. Which means that most days I am doing nothing but studying. That's also how I design or write or research or run a creative project or spend time with people including corporate meetings - I shut down all else.
I do take breaks to cook, eat, read comics, play chess … but generally my day is study and sleep.
The study part is more or less how I have studied since childhood - reading and referring to multiple resources, writing and drawing or creating diagrams, maps, and solving questions or scenarios. I spend as much as 60% of my study time in solving questions. On an average, I study 10 hours, sleep 8 hours, with the remaining 6 hours distributed in random stuff.
There is a strong - strong - pull to do other things. Like write or watch TV or call people or check in on Substack or LinkedIn or Instagram or do anything but study. The urge surfaces every now and then, which is sometimes every five minutes, sometimes once in 15. I always have a good reason to be doing something else but from long experience I know they are excuses to not be studying. In my experience, doing anything with complete concentration is excruciatingly taxing to the brain, painful even, akin to running at full speed beyond 200 meters when my trained capability is to run the 100. But it is also true that when I transitioned from the sprints to running the 400m (on my school coach's recommendation), I did so by training to run the 800 for 3 months straight.
At the moment, I have my sight set on an accreditation that requires theoretical rigour and tests my practitioner experience in a new area of professional work. I am not sure how many attempts I may require to achieve it, and am not thinking about the rigour of the exam, or the domains of knowledge I have to acquire. I am simply studying like I have always done - from first principles, applying, consolidating, then taking the formal knowledge material, identifying gaps, filling them, testing what I have learned in new scenarios, finding the structural issues with my knowledge and addressing them … again and again so that I have a thorough understanding of how to apply the integrated knowledge system.
My biggest failures in study have come with pure academics or pure cognitive content - stuff that did not provide credible opportunity to apply or lacked enough real-world examples for me to see relevance. I don't do well in such exams because my mind gets stuck on: what is the purpose of this?
My target is to take the exam in two weeks time. Let's see where I get.