The best tool I have found to improve my studying is journaling, as I discussed in a prior post. The practice remains central to my studying efforts, and my appreciation has only grown. At the time I last wrote about it, I had only been doing it for three months, so I wanted to revisit the topic a year on to update my thoughts. Additionally, I will be providing some insights gleaned from my study data. So many people talk in vague but impressive terms about their self studying habits. To people contemplating whether they should put effort towards self study, such vagueness can be either unhelpful or even discouraging. So, I’m doing my part and sharing an honest accounting of my hours. Hopefully, after reading this you will be inspired to start your own study journal and begin logging hours in it!
Overall, much of what I last wrote remains true. The central format of the entries has not changed. Entries are recorded in multiples of 15 minutes, noting the start time, stop time, resource name, topic studied, and any comments I have. I have not maintained a perfect streak of studying, but that’s okay. I did reach a streak of 241 days before missing a day. Every now and then I go a day without having any study time to log, but those days are rare. Ultimately, my overall goal is not a record streak but learning progress and it’s better to skip a day when I need to than to stress over streaks. The habit is embedded deep enough now that even missing a day or two will not derail me.
My criteria for what counts as study time has evolved, but the spirit is the same. My intention is to capture time spent expanding my skills and pursuing my goals while excluding things that are more entertainment than learning. This will always be a gray area. I still exclude most pop science and non-textbook reading time. I’ve toyed with including it but still feel that it shouldn’t count. As a compromise, I do note in the log when I finish a nonfiction book, even if I haven’t recorded any of the time spent reading it. I am more lenient with what gets in but I do make sure it is categorized under an appropriate general category so I can filter it out later if needed. For example, I now include time spent on bird photography since it is a skill I am learning, even though it is not something I am learning out of textbook (my bird biology textbooks go under a different category).
How I draw insight and inspiration has evolved as well. I’m over halfway through the physical notebook that I am using. Flipping through all those pages of records is a remainder of how far I have come. I remember when I first started out, the notebook seemed so large and the pages filled so slowly. I wondered if I would stick with it or if the first few pages would be my last. Insight comes both from direct reading of the logbook and from deeper analysis of the logbook data.
Every month, I enter the previous months data into a spreadsheet. I keep the subject categorizations as specific and granular as possible. I divide by subject, medium (book vs video) and level (intro vs intermediate vs advanced). From there, I can aggregate or filter as desired to get whatever categories I want. I am a curious person and easily interested, so I tend to sample many different subjects. This can be seen in the below chart with the many subjects that have very few hours. There are other subjects which I have devoted far more time to, such as physics. Four of the topic five subjects in the chart are physics topics.
An interesting metric I designed is one I call ‘focus’. Basically, I find what percent of each month’s hours were spent on the top subject of that month. For example, if I studied for 60 hours in a certain month and spent 45 of those hours on, say, classical mechanics. Then my focus for that month would be 75%. If, on the other hand, I studied 60 hours in a month but my most studied topic was only 12 hours then my focus would only be 20%, indicating a scattershot month jumping from topic to topic. A variant of the metric is to look at the top two subjects or the top three. Focus can be contrasted with my total hours for the month, which I think of as my ‘discipline’ for the month. Together, focus and discipline paint a picture of my studying habits.
Tracking my focus over time has given me another way to gain insight into my habits. I can see how I started out highly focused but drifted over time, becoming less focused before buckling down again. There are several points that stand out in the above chart and really highlight the value of looking at focus and total hours together. First of all, look at the big spike in focus in October of 2022 and the corresponding drop in hours for that month. Taken together, these describe a month that was (relatively) focused but undisciplined. There are life events I can connect to some of the peaks and valleys which explain the data to me.
Anyways, I hope you found this to be helpful and possibly inspiring! I’ll provide an update on this topic again in the future.