The Art of Stealth Studying: How To Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Stealth Studying: How To Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work

calnewport.com

61 pointsahalan40 comments

The problem I've always had with Cal Newport's advice is that it generally boils down to "if you're having problems in school, first get extremely organized and then it's a piece of cake!" Organization is something that is built up with a ton of practice and patience, and requires substantial motivation to set in place. For someone who's having trouble finding the motivation to keep going, that kind of advice is like saying "if you're so fat, just eat less and exercise more!"

If I had the capacity to actively pay attention at all times in every class and put in 1 hour of studying every day without fail, I'd have a 4.0 too. This is not a remarkable fact to me.

I figured any piece of advice comes with an unspoken disclaimer: "those not willing to make changes in their life need not apply".

True. However, the problem is that that disclaimer is often a used as a loophole for not giving useful advice.

For instance, here's a foolproof plan to ensure that every piece of software that you write is 100% bug free. If you follow these two, simple steps, every piece of software you ever write will be perfect on the day it's delivered.

All you need to do is:

1. Write a program that looks through your source code and finds all the bugs in it.

2. Fix all those bugs.

I keep telling this to people, but they're so stubborn that they won't make these two changes in their build process. So, if you ever find a bug in someone's software, know that it's not because coding bug free programs is hard. It's because they don't have the self-discipline to follow through on my simple prescription.

On the one hand, I see what you mean and have some empathy for this position. On the other hand, it's very telling that you used a Herculean feat in your analogy: it suggests to me that you perceive the act of adopting some new habits as also being a Herculean feat.

I don't see it this way. Of course, I spent over a decade in my youth studying a musical instrument, and I think that experience taught me how easy it is to program new habits into the human mind. It all boils down to a little repetition, but also entails making sure that you're not repeating bad habits. ("Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.")

Sometimes it takes a little faith, but things do become automatic if you repeat them for surprisingly little amount of time, and this ends up reducing your cognitive load so that you can move on to focusing on new aspects.

I've lost a significant amount of weight twice (> 80lbs) and, externally, I seem to have also changed my behavior in a substantial way. I am a much better student than I was before in part because of my own motivation and determination. As determined as I am though, I still run into academic problems. Is it because of my own work ethic? I don't think so.

I don't perceive losing weight to be a herculean feat, but that's because I have shown myself that it's something I can overcome. Changing how my mind works? Is that a herculean feat? I don't know, but I seem to have difficulties with it which I cannot immediately work around with a "little repetition."

Please give me a time in your life when you've been able to make a significant intellectual change from just "a little repetition" and "making sure that you're not repeating bad habits."

I would entertain your challenge without preamble if it were not based on a premise that I do not accept: specifically, that any of this has to do with changing how your mind works. I understand that many perceive it that way, but I do not.

Rather, I see it as leveraging how my mind works. Note how this is almost exactly the opposite world view. I accept that my mind includes within it a mechanism for habit automation. Of course that is only one of many tools in the metacognitive toolbox. Another powerful tool is the ability to be brutally honest with yourself about what your priorities are in practice, what you think they should be, and recognizing when your actions are working against the priorities you would like to have. There are more. Metacognition is a bottomless pit of bootstrapping power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition

A year ago, after coming to grips with the fact that having a toddler and a relationship meant that I was no longer getting time for myself, I made myself a morning person. I went from a life-long habit of dragging myself out of bed just in time to rush to work to someone who routinely gets out of bed at 5am and does something productive for myself before my son wakes up. Brutal honesty about my priorities and about a month of consistent practice.

I'm not familiar with the author, but this reads like a 'how to lose twenty pounds with only an hour of exercise a week!' blurb.

I don't care if the advice itself is sound; without data and actual proof, its not worth much to me.

Advice like this (which itself is good) makes me wonder how much higher education is missing. If a 4.0 is possible with 1.0 hours of work, then surely the expectations of the students are far too low. Its great that its possible for a focused student to achieve a 4.0 with so little work, but doesn't that just mean that all the students should be achieving so much more?

Perhaps there should be a compulsory 101 course that just teaches studying skills (some places may do this already). It seems like that would boost the overall gain from the education experience.

This assumes your goal is to pass exams and not learn. It seems a lot of people still mistakenly believe their goal in formal education is to learn and so instead of focusing on passing their exams (which is all that matters) they focus on learning.

The title is a bit misleading and I'm not entirely sure what the "1 hour" actually refers to. The author suggests studying 10 minutes at a time, preferable twice a day most days of the week (so that's 1-2 hour a week). He also suggests going to every office hour (so that's at least another hour per week). That's in addition to treating class like you are studying (2-4 hours per week).

In reality, this is "how to get a 4.0 without cramming".

I think you misread the article. It is not only 1 hour of work, it is 1 hour of continuous work/studying. In the article it states that one should "stealth study," or study in 5-10 minute increments multiple times (in addition to the 1 hour).

If you only need one hour a day to get good grades take more courses, that's how I do it :)

The reality is work is quite easy at college if you have the maturity to handle your independence. I'm at a UC school double majoring in CS and Econ and I probably do less than an hour of studying to prepare for midterms and finals. I don't have a 4.0(although I am close), but I instead manage to put 6 or 7 courses into a quarter schedule. I think it really just comes down to doing the learning NOW. Don't understand it? Interrupt the teacher in a 100 person lecture hall. You're here for yourself, and the closer you can put your understanding of the material to when it is being taught, the better off you are.

I went to Berkeley with EECS major and from what I could see 1 hour per week would be impossible unless you manage to somehow avoid taking any of the difficult classes, which would need to be done very strategically. Maybe you spent time in office hours instead, or having friends explain stuff to you, but I would include those in "studying time". If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how you completed major programming assignments in say compilers or operating systems, or prepared for your algorithms exams with just 1 hour per week. Sometimes it took me a couple hours just to fully understand what the professor had assigned due to language barrier (theirs), grammar (theirs), and other issues.

I also took an upper division economics class at Berkeley and that took far more than an hour of studying. Even at community college I studied my econ classes for more than an hour per week. Unless you have a photographic memory I'm not sure how you can avoid it and still get good grades. Please explain your technique.

I absolutely agree. I did CS and EE at Cornell for my undergrad and there's simply no way to complete the weekly or bi-weekly projects on an hour of work alone. I could believe that someone with a strong memory and solid work ethic could make it by with an hour of studying a day/week but that's only because their knowledge was supplemented through the hands-on work.

I am considering my "study time" only that which is done outside of assigned projects. My algorithms class assigns homework and lab projects which I take seriously and approach with the idea that I don't want to have to look at this material again before an exam. So, in this sense, I'm always studying, it's just that almost none of it is actual traditional study time. I don't do office hours(with as many courses as I take, they always conflict). I think maybe it's just that our definition of studying is different, I consider studying to be the period of time above and beyond lectures, homework, and projects. It is this piece of time that I can take almost to zero as long as I approach the lectures, homework, and projects properly.

By that extremely liberal definition of studying, I "studied" no more than an hour or two in 7 years of undergrad + law school...

Studying is studying. It doesn't matter if it's assigned studying or not.

I've found that even for the more difficult classes (does 172 count as difficult?) you can get away without studying much if you go to lecture, do the homework and do at least some of the reading. I guess you could include doing the reading as part of the "studying", but even that doesn't take too long.

Also, a bunch of the project-oriented classes simply assign enough work that you don't need to study much beyond it. If you're spending something like 10 hours a week on programming projects, you tend to pick the material up fairly quickly.

So I guess it depends on how you define studying: if you include doing assignments and reading then I do a fair bit. If you only include anything beyond that (e.g. reviewing lecture notes or something like that) I do relatively little, and only before harder exams.

I usually assume that studying refers to anything not directly assigned, which is why you can get away without too much of it assuming you go to lecture and discussion and that you do all the assigned work.

He should add a spaced repetition system to his study plan. That way, you'll only need to study the material as needed as time goes by.

Wired have a good article on how spaced repetition work, the history of it, and so on: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

This works when a class is about acquiring knowledge/learning material. As a high school student, I've never understood the purpose of these classes except as a vehicle for skill development; the skills-based classes have always been more enjoyable.

I sincerely hope I'm not going to pay $35,000/year to learn facts I could just as easily look up.

I sincerely hope I'm not going to pay $35,000/year to learn facts I could just as easily look up.

Instant access from memory versus from anywhere from several seconds to several minute latency. Clearly, memorization is useful, especially for certain classes of fact that you need to use on a daily basis.

I recently wrote a py script that turns markdown notes into Anki flashcard decks. If there is any interest, I could make it publicly available.

I still never feel like studying.

I will be very much interested.

I guess it works some places and not others.

Good luck at MIT getting through your PSETs in an hour a week- I don't care how smart you are.

Yet, I didn't go to MIT and I was definitely able to get by in some classes with good grades putting in significantly less effort that is generally said is needed in college.

I'm sure this is true of other schools too, but I can confirm that some psets at MIT can take upwards of 12 hours. It's not even a matter of organization at that point - the amount of thinking and planning to just come up with the idea can take a long time.

But of course, there are also classes in which I spend way more time than I should, simply from procrastinating or not paying attention in class. So I guess the original advice is sound ("be organized", "study early") but the reality is much more difficult than the article makes it out to be.

Cal (the author) got his PhD at MIT.

Which is not undergrad and has a significantly smaller emphasis on grades.

I think this sort of approach depends heavily on how good your attention span is -- that is, can you focus deeply at will for a certain period of time, even if it's only ten minutes -- and how good your memory is.

I've spent two hours getting twenty minutes of work done because my mind wouldn't stop wandering, and my memory isn't so hot so I often need to review things. If I could focus like a laser and I had near-photographic memory, my life would be very different and this would sound possible to me. As it is, it doesn't.

I was sceptical as I read the title but it turns out I'm already practically doing the same thing. Only instead of using printed out study guides, I load them up on my smartphone. This way I never waste any time waiting for anyone or anything. I'm always learning something.

However, this doesn't work for every kind of material. It works fine for classes like History and Law but it doesn't work quite as well for Pure Mathematics. That all from self experience, though.

Cal Newport: I implore you to earn a 4.0 in CMU's 15-251 ... I dare you ...

you aware that he's a PhD grad from MIT?

http://calnewport.com/info/

no need to take it personal

Citation of a CS PhD from MIT does not constitute proof that he could earn a 4.0 in Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science at CMU studying only an hour a week.

no need to take it personally

seems like he's done ok grade wise in life, whether he could or couldn't get an A in some supertough class at CMU,

don't like his methods, don't use them

give him a little credit for accumlating and sharing alot of different strategies to do well in some pretty tough academic settings

In that case, perhaps there is an intelligence bias that he is not acknowledging. Seems to me that if someone is naturally intelligent (re: genetics), they would be much more successful with this strategy than someone who isn't.

He is also a Professor at Georgetown and teaching graduate level theory of computation and distributed computing:

http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/index.html

So the opportunity is there to take his course and practice his message.

> no need to take it personal

This sort of passive-aggression has no place in polite discourse.

I don't agree that this is some sort of foolproof way of getting out of doing any work studying, but I definitely think this method could be really useful.

So all the prep work involved with getting this "study sheet" done doesn't actually contribute to you learning? I call shenanigans!

I think you're supposed to do the study sheet in class so that it doesn't use up any extra time.

Isn't that what "taking notes" is?

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