7 ms·

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

61 points by ahalan 14y ago

kiba 14y ago
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_wozniak?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
- superuser2 14y ago
  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.
  - kiba 14y ago
    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.
- _color 14y ago
  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.
  - drieddust 14y ago
    I will be very much interested.
zipdog 14y ago
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.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  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.
- aplusbi 14y ago
  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".
- jzone3 14y ago
  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).
- superphil0 14y ago
  If you only need one hour a day to get good grades take more courses, that's how I do it :)
jhspaybar 14y ago
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.
- epicureanideal 14y ago
  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.
  - ElliotMingee 14y ago
    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.
  - jhspaybar 14y ago
    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.
steve-howard 14y ago
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.
- pohl 14y ago
  I figured any piece of advice comes with an unspoken disclaimer: "those not willing to make changes in their life need not apply".
  - rprospero 14y ago
    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.
    - pohl 14y ago
      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.
tibbon 14y ago
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.
- joshma 14y ago
  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.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  Cal (the author) got his PhD at MIT.
  - cynest 14y ago
    Which is not undergrad and has a significantly smaller emphasis on grades.
jmduke 14y ago
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.
lumberjack 14y ago
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.
Unknown5123 14y ago
Cal Newport: I implore you to earn a 4.0 in CMU's 15-251 ... I dare you ...
- pitt1980 14y ago
  you aware that he's a PhD grad from MIT? http://calnewport.com/info/ http://calnewport.com/info/ no need to take it personal
  - DugFin 14y ago
    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
    - pitt1980 14y ago
      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
  - pyoung 14y ago
    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.
  - yukoncornelius 14y ago
    He is also a Professor at Georgetown and teaching graduate level theory of computation and distributed computing: http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/index.html http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/index.html So the opportunity is there to take his course and practice his message.
  - cynest 14y ago
    > no need to take it personal This sort of passive-aggression has no place in polite discourse.
bking 14y ago
So all the prep work involved with getting this "study sheet" done doesn't actually contribute to you learning? I call shenanigans!
- PebblesRox 14y ago
  I think you're supposed to do the study sheet in class so that it doesn't use up any extra time.
  - bking 14y ago
    Isn't that what "taking notes" is?
Scramblejams 14y ago
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.
Ineffable 14y ago
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.

61 points by ahalan 14y ago

kiba 14y ago

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_wozniak?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

superuser2 14y ago
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.
- kiba 14y ago
  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.
_color 14y ago
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.
- drieddust 14y ago
  I will be very much interested.

zipdog 14y ago

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.

citricsquid 14y ago
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.
aplusbi 14y ago
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".
jzone3 14y ago
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).
superphil0 14y ago
If you only need one hour a day to get good grades take more courses, that's how I do it :)

jhspaybar 14y ago

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.

epicureanideal 14y ago
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.
- ElliotMingee 14y ago
  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.
- jhspaybar 14y ago
  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.

steve-howard 14y ago

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.

pohl 14y ago
I figured any piece of advice comes with an unspoken disclaimer: "those not willing to make changes in their life need not apply".
- rprospero 14y ago
  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.
  - pohl 14y ago
    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.

tibbon 14y ago

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.

joshma 14y ago
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.
SatvikBeri 14y ago
Cal (the author) got his PhD at MIT.
- cynest 14y ago
  Which is not undergrad and has a significantly smaller emphasis on grades.

jmduke 14y ago

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.

lumberjack 14y ago

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.

Unknown5123 14y ago

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

pitt1980 14y ago
you aware that he's a PhD grad from MIT? http://calnewport.com/info/ http://calnewport.com/info/ no need to take it personal
- DugFin 14y ago
  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
  - pitt1980 14y ago
    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
- pyoung 14y ago
  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.
- yukoncornelius 14y ago
  He is also a Professor at Georgetown and teaching graduate level theory of computation and distributed computing: http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/index.html http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/index.html So the opportunity is there to take his course and practice his message.
- cynest 14y ago
  > no need to take it personal This sort of passive-aggression has no place in polite discourse.

bking 14y ago

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

PebblesRox 14y ago
I think you're supposed to do the study sheet in class so that it doesn't use up any extra time.
- bking 14y ago
  Isn't that what "taking notes" is?

Scramblejams 14y ago

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.

Ineffable 14y ago

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.