Maximizing Your Learning Time
It’s late. You’ve put in a long day, and can count the progress you’ve made on multiple issues since your morning began so seemingly long ago. Now, your mind needs double the amount of energy it did just a few short hours ago to make headway on the few simple matters left to address before your day is over.
Is that next cup of coffee going to help? Possibly, but each cup of coffee will provide benefit for a vanishingly short period of time, after which, will come the steadily deepening rebound where energy and focus drain further. What you really need is a more efficient working and learning strategy. We’ve been trained to cram. Flip the process. Instead of downing cups of coffee that provide decreasing benefit (not to mention jingling fingers and extra heartbeats), try consuming your information and doing your work in shorter, more widely dispersed chunks. If you find yourself having to cram, it’s more probably that there’s a probably with your work process than your workplace.
The Two Best Learning Strategies
In an often-cited study, Dunlosky et al. (2013) reviewed hard data about the effectiveness of ten strategies for learning. Two strategies revealed themselves as the best ways to learn and retain new information. Of the ten, two produced the best results. These strategies are distributed learning and self-quizzing.
Distributed Learning
Take your learning in small bites. Instead of spending an hour trying to learn your organization’s new database, take it in smaller chunks spread out over larger periods of time. Your brain continues to learn even when you are not actively cramming it with new information. New connections between the neurons in your brain are being made and strengthened. Have you ever gotten just a few notes or words of a song in mind, but you can’t remember anything else about it, including the title? After trying to force your brain to remember, you give up. Later, as if by magic, the entire song comes to you. It comes quickly, which seems odd because you couldn’t remember any of it previously. No magic. This is an example of your brain working without your conscious, deliberate, effort.
Break down large learning tasks into small, manageable, blocks of time, with time off in between for your brain to lock in what it has learned. You can either switch to another learning task, go for a short walk, or even stare out the window for a few minutes before moving on to something else. Most of us have been brought up to believe that hard work is the same thing as focusing deeply on something for long periods of time. This is the exact opposite of what seems to work best. Take a break! Learn more.
Self-Quizzing
The second learning strategy the researchers found effective was self-quizzing. A simple example might make the point. Most of us rely on GPS to drive from Point A to Point B. What would you do if you knew you had only two minutes to memorize a series of complex directions before your smartphone’s power went to zero? Would you look the steps over and over and over again during that time in the hopes you’d remember? Given that most of use learned to cram for exams, there’s a good chance you would use that strategy in this case, as well. Self-quizzing would be better. In your battery’s remaining two minutes, you could look over the map or the steps, then wait for a minute before developing self-quiz questions like “What are the first three turns I make after I turn right for the first time?” or “What do I do when I hit the crossroads in Scooterville?” This locks in learning in two ways: First, you have to recall the information you just memorized in order to formulate your quiz questions. Second, you recall the information again when you answer your own quiz questions. These breaks between memorizing, quizzing, and answering also act like short distributed learning sessions, doubling your learning power.
When to Learn?
You’re learning all the time, so the question is probably more accurately stated as “When does learning really matter?” When learning really matters–when you have to get it right and you don’t have the luxury of time or failure–distributed learning and self-quizzing can supercharge your effectiveness. There’s another benefit: It’s been proven that continuous learning helps maintain the health of our brain as we age. It’s also fun to learn, when we’re not over-caffeinating ourselves or losing sleep as we attempt to force new information into our brains. Happy learning!
Dunlosky, Dawson, Marsh, Nathan, and Willingham (2013). “Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1) 4-58.
Glenn Allen is Senior Executive Partner with Emberea Associates, LLC, an organization development consulting firm.