The Art of Improvement, Author at The Art of Improvement

How to Study for Exams: Evidence-Based tips

The Science Behind Why Your Study Methods Aren’t Working (and what to do instead!)

In the first semester of my freshman year of college, I had to take a math class to fulfill my major’s requirements. My advisor enrolled me in a 300 level statistics course, which ended up being much harder than I anticipated. It had been a few years since I had even taken a math class, and I hadn’t ever taken a stats class before.

That whole semester was a slog, and I got some of the worst grades on quizzes and homework I’d ever gotten. As the end of the semester loomed, I realized I would have to pull off a miracle in the final exam in order to pass and keep up my GPA.

Parkinson’s Law: How to Manage Your Time More Effectively

Have you ever been given an assignment for an essay that’s due in a month, but waited until the last few days to write it? Or maybe you’ve had to give a work presentation at the end of the week, but put everything together an hour before you had to give it? Or maybe you’ve set a big goal for yourself to get completed in five years, but don’t seem to be making any progress?

If you’ve ever experienced this kind of procrastination, you’ve experienced Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law is a theory developed by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in an essay published in The Economist in 1955. Cyril wrote his essay after spending a lot of time in the British Civil Service where he noticed tasks took up as much time as they were allotted.

How to Keep Going (Even When You Don’t See Any Results)

Have you ever had a goal that no matter how hard you worked or how many hours you dedicated or how many affirmations you chanted, just didn’t seem to make any progress? Despite all your best effort, it felt like you were running on a treadmill — working hard but not going anywhere.

When I decided to take my career to the next level and become a freelancer, I encountered this problem. Even though I was putting in countless hours every week, I just wasn’t getting any clients. At the time, I didn’t even know the first thing about business or marketing or how to sell my services. The only thing I actually knew how to do was the service I was trying to get clients for.

How to Make Yourself Study When You Don’t Have Any Motivation

There’s probably nothing more frustrating than knowing an exam is on the horizon, knowing you need to study for it, and completely lacking any motivation to actually sit down and get started.

Studying is one of those things that’s easy to lose motivation for. It can seem overwhelming, impossible, and never-ending. “Studying” as an idea is so amorphous it easily causes panic, fear, and even total shut down.

But regaining motivation for studying isn’t impossible. And there are several ways to make sure your studying is stress-free, structured, manageable, and even fun. Let’s break some of them down:

How to Build Self-Discipline

The other day, I struggled with self-discipline.

I warred with myself, negotiated, revisited arguments, made imaginary pro and con lists, and eventually realized that no, I could not get out of my daily workout.

This happens pretty much every day, actually.

5 o’clock rolls around — my designated time for exercise — and I start to wonder: do I really need to do my workout today? What if I only did half my workout? What if I went for a walk around the block instead? What if I did some light stretching instead? What if I just stayed on the couch eating potato chips instead?

10 Ways to Build and Develop Resilience

In life, everyone encounters hardships.

Some will be big, and others will be small. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, getting laid off, heartbreak, divorce, or even just putting orange juice in this morning’s cereal instead of milk, there will be tough times.

When these difficult times inevitably arrive, we can either choose to let them swallow us up, or we can choose to keep going and make the best of the cards life has dealt us. Yes, even when there’s orange juice in your cereal.

This is where a very important skill comes in: resilience.

Why You Can’t Focus – and How To Fix That

Do you struggle to maintain focus on important tasks? Does your mind wander as soon as you sit down to work? Do you turn to your phone, or Youtube (yes, WE SEE YOU), TikTok, or Twitter, to distract yourself from a project for your boss? What about watching too much TV or reading so much you never get your homework done? Does working on something for a whole hour sound like an impossible task? Utterly daunting? Totally unthinkable?

Well, you’re not alone. Focus is a difficult thing to master, and many people struggle with it. Even now as I write this, I find myself momentarily preoccupied with a spot of dirt on my laptop, flipping through the pages of a book nearby that I’ve never read, and crossing off the previous days on my wall calendar.

Why Fixing Your Sleep Schedule is one of the Greatest Advantages in Life

In a 2009 Harvard study, Christoph Randler discovered that people who woke up early in the morning were more proactive in solving problems than those who were late risers. He describes proactivity as “the willingness and ability to take action to change a situation to one’s advantage.” Sounds like a great thing to have, right?

Of course, we probably don’t need a Harvard study to tell us that. We all know that early risers seem to be more productive, more energetic, more quick to get things done. We hear time and time again how the most successful entrepreneurs wake up at 5 am. The list goes on…

The Power of Staying Committed to Your Goals

The power of staying committed to your goals is that you actually accomplish them.

Commitment is the key to seeing your dreams, hopes, and, yes, goals, come to fruition. Because goals are inherently difficult to achieve. They take a lot of effort and time. The tricky part is, of course, applying the same amount of effort over a long period of time. Once you are able to really commit in this way, you’ll see massive results.

But staying committed to a goal is tough. How many New Year’s Resolutions have been abandoned mid-February when we lose our motivation? How many half-completed workout programs are there? How many goals have we had that we now don’t even remember anymore because we abandoned them?

What You Need to Know to Conquer Information Overload

One of my first freelance clients was located on the East Coast in Boston, while I lived in Los Angeles. At first, I didn’t think it would be much of a problem. But eventually the time difference started to get pretty stressful.

It always seemed like I was playing catch up. Since my client was three hours ahead of me, I would sit down at my computer in the morning already feeling behind. I’d wake up at 7 am to a cascade of unread emails and notifications demanding my immediate attention. This made it pretty difficult to focus on my work without feeling like my attention was being pulled in a hundred different directions.

In the age of the internet, high-speed connections, email, and instant messaging that goes straight to the devices we keep on ourselves nearly 24/7, information overload is both real and a huge problem. With all the ads to click, blogs to read, and posts to like, it’s no wonder we often feel like the internet is drowning us instead of lifting us up.