Blessay: My Life of Study — Planning, Tips and Thoughts

I was asked how I organ­ise myself to study, and how do I make time. It not really easy to write it out because I make choices that suit my life, but if someone wants my recom­mend­a­tions or sug­ges­tions, here they are.

Your Own Study Style

I’m no study or learn­ing expert, these are just my ideas and what works for me. Possibly, I will do things dif­fer­ently in the future. But take time to think what might work for you and find you r own study style.

Exercise

Sitting still causes health prob­lems, the human body evolved to use move­ment and needs to keep mov­ing. Even simple things in your body like bowels and blood flow needs exer­cise to work cor­rectly. Sick people get sicker partly because they are unable to move around.

Therefore some type of exer­cise keeps you brain in good work­ing order. From my read­ing it needs to be aer­obic exer­cise like rid­ing a bike, or run­ning — some­thing that get the heart rate above 100 beats per minute for thirty minutes and you should plan to do that three times a week. More is bet­ter. I’m not an exer­cise junkie, I’m middle aged, tubby and ten kilos over­weight, but I still exer­cise to be improve stam­ina and sleep bet­ter. No more than that really.

Also, treat your exer­cise as a break. Ask your­self: Can you make two hours of study fol­lowed by a fit­ness ses­sion of an hour or so, fol­lowed by two hours of study ? Good use of time.

Relearn Concentration

I am pretty sure that I have ADD((attention defi­cit dis­order)) beha­viour caused by the Internet. I find it hard to con­cen­trate on a single issue for exten­ded peri­ods of time. Think about turn­ing off or block­ing your Internet when you start study­ing until you learn or relearn to concentrate.

To help me with this, I use a timer on my com­puter that is set for 20 minutes of read­ing, 20 minutes of Flash card review and 10 minutes of break. A break is a drink, or some music or a walk around. It took me some time to be able to get to a twenty minute con­cen­tra­tion span and I am work­ing hard to keep it.

This also means clos­ing your email cli­ent, twit­ter, face­book etc etc, since they will inter­rupt your concentration.

It’s not easy.

Don’t watch TV

First, Evidence shows that more than two hours of tele­vi­sion per day causes dys­func­tion of the brain, caus­ing demo­tiv­a­tion and loss of cog­nis­ance func­tions in the brain. Specifically, the research sug­gests that it causes the learn­ing and pro­cessing part of your brain to be sup­pressed. The effect lasts while you watch tele­vi­sion regularly.

Second, TV is a HUGE time suck. 2 hours watch­ing crap, means two of your life lost. And noth­ing worth­while achieved.

That’s pretty grim

So that sounds bad to a lot of people. For me, not watch­ing tele­vi­sion has been a great, bril­liant, awe­some decision. Firstly, I have a bet­ter sleep­ing pat­tern since I go to bed about the same time dur­ing the week. I don’t “stay up for the wot­sit show”. I go to bed when I am tired and/​or can’t get any more use­ful stuff done.

Second, I have much more time for fam­ily and our fam­ily out­ing and friends are not organ­ised around TV schedul­ing. We sched­ule our lives, not the television.

Thirdly, I find that tele­vi­sion is bor­ing. If I do watch some­thing, I get bor­der after ten or fif­teen minutes because it isn’t very stim­u­lat­ing. I have lost the habit of sit­ting there wait­ing for some­thing else to watch. This star­ted to hap­pen after a year or so. Now I just don’t bother.

Sport. Frankly, who cares about a bunch of jocks/​beefheads chas­ing a piece of pig­skin. It’s the low­est form of enter­tain­ment on TV. I love going in per­son to exper­i­ence the whole atmo­sphere but oth­er­wise, … meh. I would rather par­ti­cip­ate in geek sports and then the jocks can find new ways to move up the food chain.

That said, its good fun watch­ing the final of whatever sport (soc­cer, rugby, etc) with a bunch of friends. Reminder: It’s the bunch of friends that makes it fun, not the sport itself.

Movies

I like watch­ing movies, and this gives me com­mon ground with other people. So, yes I think a movie now and then is OK. But not one every night instead of TV.

Learn Focus, Train to Focus — use Earplugs

OK, so no TV and no music. Now buy some earplugs (I use Moldex and buy them from eBay) and put them in your ears to block out all noise. Weird at first, but soon you will teach your body and mind that when the earplugs are in, you are in ‘con­cen­tra­tion mode’. I use them at all times, even when there is no noise around me. I have earplugs at work and will use them to learn some­thing new, or imple­ment some­thing difficult.

You might want to think about the movie Karate Kid, who spent weeks learn­ing how to con­cen­trate before he learned any Martial Art. Its not a bad paradigm.

Yeah, that’s a bit weird too but people respect an engin­eer who is work­ing. It has been good for my career because I get things done, and because I look like I’m get­ting it done. Never under­es­tim­ate both items.

No music

Part of learn­ing to con­cen­trate means con­cen­trat­ing. I use music breaks in my study time to rest my mind, but not when study­ing. Music breaks the focus you need to achieve cog­ni­tion and learning.

Session Length

Studying is both a mara­thon and a sprint. The net­work­ing industry will require you to spend the rest of your life study­ing — its a mara­thon. But make your study ses­sions short, say no longer than two hours in the early days. Walk away after the two hours and treat your mind to the rest. Soon, your sub­con­scious will know that two hours of work will get a reward.

Does this sound like a train­ing pro­gram ? Well, yes, that’s how it turned out.

Extreme tips

-
Just like an ath­lete who is approach­ing race day you should con­sider your final pre­par­a­tion for an exam or test.

• Don’t read the news or catch up on events.
• Don’t read your RSS feed, or Twitter. Most of it is use­less data, fun but pointless.
• Use blog­ging to focus your plan­ning and what you have achieved, but don’t read the com­ments or get involved in a discussion.
• Consider shut­ting down your social and per­sonal life — ath­letes do this when pre­par­ing for the race for the same reason.
• Don’t let your­self lose focus
• Don’t stay up all night, go to bed, get some sleep and you will learn bet­ter. Staying up all night makes it worse not better.

Use Flashcards

Flashcards are tedi­ous and hard to get used to. But that exam your are study­ing for will need to be done again in two or three years, then the flash­cards are the per­fect place to start revi­sion. Refresh is easier than load­ing it again.

When I first tried flash cards, I didn’t like them. Couldn’t get to grips with it at all. But all the evid­ence shows that they work.

Use Spaced Learning

This is a newer concept. The idea is that you need to review a piece of data about eight times to mem­or­ise or absorb a fact or datum. But you need to see it four or five times in quick suc­c­ces­sion with a longer and longer break between sub­sequent revi­sion before it remain with you for life.

I use a soft­ware pack­age Mental Case which is a flash­card cre­ation pack­age (includ­ing graph­ics), plus a schedul­ing sys­tem that will pre­pare “les­sons” of cards on the schedule.

Read wiki­pe­dia for more inform­a­tion on Spaced Learning.

Start easy, don’t block your early suc­cesses, hard stuff in the middle

Start with some­thing you know best. I have man­aged to block myself by start­ing with my least favour­ite or hard­est sub­ject and then hav­ing con­fid­ence prob­lems and not being able to study. And don’t leave the toughest sec­tions until last, save some easier or strong areas to keep your con­fid­ence up just before your go for your test.

Plan for the harder mater­ial, if you know it, in the middle of your pro­gram so that you have enough time to over­come it and adapt your sched­ule of you need to.

Make a Plan, Make a Deadline

So many people say, “I’m work­ing towards that this year”, and at the end of the year have done noth­ing. A good thing about study­ing CCxP, is that you can book the exam 12 weeks ahead. That gives you a dead­line and a goal. Sure, if you get sick or fam­ily pres­sures change, you can move that date, but don’t let that happen.

I have let myself do this too many times, and then never achieved what I wanted. I get lost, move onto some­thing else, or let work tasks con­sume my per­sonal study time.

Wrap up

Well, this is what works for me. It might work for you, choose the bits that suit your style. I have been study­ing net­work­ing for about thir­teen years now. There are new areas con­stantly com­ing through, and I need to keep work­ing on them. I am work­ing on Enterprise Security this year, but I still need to be review­ing my MPLS and IPv6 know­ledge. And a some research into applic­a­tions has been use­ful in work­ing on WAN Acceleration, Proxy /​ Caching and Load Balancing.

Remember, learn­ing in net­work­ing will always be a require­ment. I know now that I have to have a plan or method to keep that learn­ing going. After nearly twenty years of University, job learn­ing, Cisco and other vendor edu­ca­tion and self pre­pared learn­ing, I need to remind myself that there is another ten years before I retire to a man­age­ment role, and there is much tech­nical learn­ing to hap­pen before then.

PS : Lucky ?

Learning isn’t about luck, it’s about being pre­pared, mem­or­ised and com­pre­hend­ing the top­ics. Don’t plan on being lucky, plan on know­ing it.

Please rate this post:

(6 votes, average: 9.17 out of 10)

 Loading ...