Friday, September 2, 2011

Good Habits=College Salvation

Habits help us. Or they can hurt us.
Good habits help in everyday life, in the many day-to-day things we have to do. Being a student is really no different. When you develop good habits that help you accomplish your goals and tasks quickly and well, you will be more successful. It’s important, however, to get beyond the thinking that good habits are “hard” and bad habits are “easy”; sometimes that’s true, but often it is not. Many times, a good habit is simply doing things logically, proactively, and with care.
Well, okay…not “simply.”
It’s easy to say we’ll build good habits; the challenge is to actually do that.  A habit is something you do without needing to think. In college you will need to think—a lot—but you will also need to focus your energies on immediate tasks and goals, as well as on your future. Many times we’re not exactly sure what specific tasks we should focus on, or even what our goals (or future) should be, so it’s not surprising that our habits are not always good ones. Developing these good habits will help you as a student, allowing you to focus better on actual learning. Grades are a reflection of that. Success will come. 
Although the advice in this book will ultimately make your work as a student less difficult, the road is far from easy. You will still have to put in real hours, and you will have to work hard. The point is that by establishing these good habits you won’t have to work as hard. And when you do work, it won’t seem so much like “work.” And when you’re done, you can actually enjoy yourself!  More than that, you can enjoy yourself without guilt or that nagging sense when blowing off this class or that project that you’re getting further and further into trouble.
The focus of College Fast Track (and Law School Fast Track, in a law school context) is to develop one general habit that will not only help you be a stellar college student, but also help you throughout your working and personal life. This habit will put you a cut above most students and even most people you will ever encounter—and it seems like such a logical habit to develop. You’d think everyone would be focused on it, but for some reason we, maybe even as a species, just love to waste time. Students spend a lot of time doing things they think are important and still more time doing things—be honest—they know aren’t really all that important. Either way, this is simply wasting time. Much of this book is devoted to the number-one, most important overarching habit, which happens to include four parts:

1. Identifying things that waste time.
2. Refraining from doing things that waste time.
3. Identifying things that are both effective in learning and an efficient use of your time.
4. Doing more of those things in #3.

MAKE YOUR STUDY EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE

This means you do what you must do to be the best student possible… and nothing more. This means that when you sit down to study, even if for short periods of time, you are getting the most from your time studying. If you can master this one principle and make it habitual, you will be successful. It seems easy, but as we all know, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy.
We live in a time where it is possible to be extremely efficient. Possible. Not probable. We all have gadgets to keep us connected with the world around us, and these gadgets can be used to make learning easier. This may seem weird to those of you reading this, but I remember the advent of the computer and the internet—not all that long ago—and saw specifically how learning and access to information became easier and easier. I remember trying to do research projects in high school and not really knowing how to use the internet to study. I remember turning to the libraries and being bogged down with the amount of available information and no easy way to sift through the wealth of information in libraries. And then, as the internet became more accessible and easy to use, and as credible websites with the same vast wealth of information that existed in libraries started to pop up, the research and learning processes became easier and much, much more efficient. Along with the internet came more powerful computers and software that allowed the student to excel without wasting time. No longer do we have to sift through mountains of books at the library, nor are we restricted to taking hand-written notes. We can easily type papers and edit them with word processors—and the tools only seem to expand with each new device.
Here’s an amusing assignment: ask a parent about writing papers on an actual typewriter. Then ask a grandparent about writing papers on a manual typewriter. This might be an eye-opener, as you realize that something we take for granted now—something as simple as centering text—used to be an annoying and time-consuming task, requiring counting the number of characters in each line to be centered, setting the typewriter to the center, and then counting backwards, manually, for one-half of those characters. For each line! Any mistakes? The entire sheet had to be redone.
This is an incredible time to be a student; efficiency is within our grasp! All it takes is a habit—a way of doing things that is reinforced by practice every day—to actually be efficient. And keep in mind what this means: being efficient means having more time to do what you would like to do, aside from learning whatever subject you’re studying. College Fast Track is not about denial. It’s about the opposite: learning well and quickly, preserving other time to relax without regret.
Efficient, effective study is the end goal, the most important goal, the crucial goal, the goal that will carry you through undergraduate successes and into your future successes.

--Derrick Hibbard, author of College Fast Track, and Law School Fast Track