Project Baseline
Posted by Aragoen Celtdra on 18th November 2008
For the past few days, I have been on a little fact-finding mission to discover trends on my study strategy. This is in line with the experiment I wanted to do to challenge myself to re-invigorate my study mojo 
. What I’ve been doing is timing myself every day to determine the number of hours I can comfortably sit down to study (per day) and subtract from that the amount of time I “actually” do productive work. This is my way of baselining my performance.
The most effective way I found to measure my productive vs unproductive activitiy is by using a simple stopwatch. For this, I’ve been using the stopwatch function on my iTouch. This little application is very simple but I find it pretty effective. There is no scientific and formal method that I use. I simply start the timer whenever I’m reading, jotting down notes or working on labs (I usually don’t count setting the lab up in the amount of time studied).
Here’s an example: I had a few minutes of spare time at work and I took advantage by researching OSPF network types online. I had the clock running from the time I clicked the first link I found on google until I got interrupted by a support call or got distracted by an incoming email – at which point I would stopped the clock. When I resumed, the clock started running again. Any distraction away from studying or labbing stops the clock. The results were pretty dismal.
On Thursday I logged my most productive effort: 2hours and 6 minutes. That is maybe about 3 hours of sit down time. On Friday I logged 27 minutes and Saturday 25 minutes. Sunday was 48 minutes. And each day I average about 2 hours of sit down time. Based on these numbers you can see how much time I’m wasting on doing things other than studying (chatting online, checking email, and the big one: surfing the internet).
It wasn’t always like this. When I was more motivated, I can study a lot longer with more productive output. I know what I need to do in order to increase my productive time. I just now need to figure out how to boost my motivation again in order to implement that.
Posted in BSCI Exam Prep, Study Strategy | No Comments » | 