I zipped a five-year undergrad program into three while maintaining a better-than-perfect GPA, while still balancing extracurriculars and a decent social life.

I zipped a five-year undergrad program into three while maintaining a better-than-perfect GPA, while still balancing extracurriculars and a decent social life. I don't think I ever nailed down a particular study habit, and did many things this article says not to do. I was/am a night owl and often stayed in the engineering buildings late enough to greet the night-shift janitors. I could cruise through weeks on 4.5 hours of sleep/night and kept tabs on which gas stations had the best energy drink promos. The handful of times I started homework or projects or exam review early ended up backfiring, so I stuck to cramming and my tests would still turn into the answer key. I did follow some of the advice here, particularly between different but related topics (e.g. heat transfer and fluids, Java and data structures), but even there, I found looking for the relationship between two seemingly disparate topics to still be useful (e.g. electronic circuits as thermal circuits in heat transfer). I think what I'd like to emphasize is that everyone just needs to find whatever works for them, which may or may not be what works for a majority of others. I fortunately went through undergrad right before the deluge of productivity porn, and could definitely have fallen into the trap of worrying too much about how to study instead of just studying.