Skills for life: a summary by Susi Castle

Table of Contents

Skills for life: a summary by Susi Castle…………………………………………………….. 1

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

Your health ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2

Sleep……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 2

Exercise………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2

Diet……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3

Your thinking……………………………………………………………………………………………… 4

·    Focused mode…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4

·    Diffuse mode……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4

Your method………………………………………………………………………………………………. 5

Planning………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 5

Chunking…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5

Interleaving………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6

Testing………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6

Your drive………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7

Procrastination……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7

1.    Focus on the process not the product………………………………………………………………………………….. 7

2.    Break down your task…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7

3.    Eat frogs!……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 8

Further insight………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………… 10

Introduction

In this summary I would like to share the takeaways that I have found most helpful and relevant to my own situation in a way that I hope will make them easy to follow and apply to others with a similar lifestyle.

Having started Coursera’s Learning How to Learn course (run by Dr Barbara Oakley and Dr Terrence Sejnowski) with long-term aims in mind, rather than to improve a current course of study, I have absorbed a lot of the points that relate to me as a full-time Marketing Manager – applying skills and knowledge across a number of disciplines in the media company I work for.

I firmly believe in lifelong learning and have taken this course now in order to lay the foundations for a Marketing Diploma I hope to begin in the summer of 2019. I aim to make that the most effective study period of my life to date – which is especially important to me as I will be undertaking this challenging qualification alongside my full-time role.

In this summary I’ll be focusing on the foundations of effective study, understanding thinking, the best ways to learn and beating procrastination.

Your health 

First things first: none of the effort you put in will be as effective as it could be if you don’t put time into looking after your body. That’s not wishy-washy, new age thinking – the research backs it up. 

I’d like to focus on three key components; sleep, exercise and diet lie at the heart of successful efforts in learning. And please remember: even the slightest improvements in these areas will pay off.

Sleep

During sleep your body recuperates, washing away toxins that have built up over the day. But what you might not be aware of is that this is also an important time for your brain to work on the new connections it’s made and let the foundations of learning settle. That’s why a problem that was impossible the night before, and left you completely stumped, is suddenly the easiest thing in the world to solve. 

For me, I know eight hours of sleep are key to good health and a clear mind. That might be different for you – pay attention to what your body needs and don’t skimp on sleep; missing sleep is very far from the shortcut you might think it is and will actually be an obstacle to your learning, rather than giving you more time to study. 

Sleep is the topic du jour and you’ll find no end of resources in trying to figure out what works for you. Some of the basics are to avoid caffeine in the run-up to bedtime (if possible don’t drink after midday), stay away from screens for at least 45 minutes before bed and get plenty of daylight and exercise throughout the day.

I would recommend a recent podcast episode from Dr Rangan Chatterjee to really drive home why sleep is important for us Why We Sleep with Matthew Walker.

Takeaway: get regular, high quality sleep and try to be consistent in when you go to bed and get up.

Exercise

Most of us are well aware of the benefits of exercise (it can reduce your risk of major illnesses, such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and cancer by up to 50% and lower your risk of early death by up to 30%) and plenty of us know it as a great cure for stress and a vital aid in maintaining good mental health. Exercise is also key to learning, as it helps new neurons survive.

We once thought that the brain degenerated over time and that no new cells could be formed, but recent research proves that’s not the case. If you want to make the most of your learning then you can help retain those new connections in the brain with physical activity.

In my own life, plenty of walking, visiting the gym at least two-three times a week, and going to kung fu once or twice a week are at the heart of my success in learning. I also make a point of leaving the office (and most importantly my desk) at lunchtime every day so that I know I’ll get a break. As winter sets in this is increasingly difficult (especially in the UK!) but I make it a priority as it always pays off.

If you’re unsure of where to begin, then start small and perhaps keep a diary (nothing longwinded, just a couple of sentences) on how you feel on days when you exercise versus days when you don’t. Even getting some fresh air to pop to the shops, or taking the stairs at university (rather than the lift) can be a great start.

Takeaway: exercise helps with brain health and solidifying learnings.

Diet

Put crap in and you’ll get crap out.

You might have read the first two sections thinking ‘ok, so I’ve got to find another hour for sleep, another hour or two for exercise, and now you’re asking me to eat more healthily too?!’ because changing your lifestyle can be hard work. But as with the other two sections you can make this manageable if you plan ahead and try your best. You might not slip into an organic, vegan way of living overnight (I’m also not saying you should have to), but if you think a little more carefully about the choices you make you’ll see it pay off.

Though Learning How to Learn has only really focused on sleep and exercise I would highly recommend looking at your diet too if you want to make the most of your brain and studying. I’ve experimented with changing the times I eat and cutting out sugar and seen huge improvements in my levels of concentration and reducing dramatic drops in energy and concentration.

I recommend beginning with a number of Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s podcasts (I promise I’m not getting any commission for this!) to give you an idea of why this is important and what you can do about it:

·      Dale Pinnock Eat Your Way to Better Health

Some of the science behind better diets.

·      Dr Lisa Mosconi, The Best Foods to Nourish Your Brain with Neuroscientist

Our nutrition has a huge impact on brain health and our abilities and just starting with a focus on the top 5 most brain-boosting foods (water, fish eggs and fatty fish, berries, dark green leafy vegetables, extra virgin olive oil) is a great first step.

·      Satchin Panda Why When You Eat Matters

Interestingly, our ‘Circadian Rhythms’ aren’t just important when considering sleep, but rather for our diet too.

Takeaway: do your research, try to include more variation in your diet and start with just upping your intake of water, fish eggs and fatty fish, berries, dark green leafy vegetables and extra virgin olive oil.

Your thinking

So, you’re sleeping well, exercising plenty and filling yourself with fresh vegetables… ‘when does the learning begin?’ I hear you cry. This next section should bring home the value of sleep, exercise and diet. The brain has two modes of learning and learning to slip between them, often through exercise and sleep will help you make the most of your time studying:

·      Focused mode

·      Diffuse mode

Before we get into diffuse mode and focused mode I’d like to take you through what are probably my favourite anecdotes from the entire Learning How to Learn course.

Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison had two different but related ways of slipping into their free-thinking mode to find inspiration.

Dali would ‘relax in a chair and let his mind go free, often still vaguely thinking about what he had been previously focusing on. He'd have a key in his hand, dangling it just above the floor. And as he would slip into his dreams, falling asleep, the key would fall from his hand and the clatter would wake him up, just in time so he could gather up those […] connections and ideas in his mind.’

Edison would ‘sit and relax in his chair, holding ball bearings in his hand. He'd relax away letting his mind run free, although it would often noodle back in a much more relaxed way to what he'd been focusing on previously. When Edison would fall asleep, the ball bearings would drop and clatter to the ground.’

These colourful stories illustrate the diffuse mode of thinking.

When you’re learning something new you need to be able to switch between the focused and diffuse modes of thinking. The focused mode allows you to concentrate on one thing clearly and is responsible for following patterns you’ve followed before, such as adding numbers or even something complex such as analysing scientific results; for example, you’re familiar with multiplication and you’re trying to solve a complicated multiplication question. The diffuse mode, on the other hand, is for new thought, for when you’re working on new ideas and trying to see how they might all fit together.

At work I’ll be in focused mode when I’m writing tweets or LinkedIn posts as I’m following a well-established structure I’m familiar with – but if I need to come up with entirely new ideas on what to write then I’m likely to need to use diffuse mode instead, to dream up something different.

With exercise (or taking a shower, or washing the dishes) you can find your diffuse mode and let the things you’ve learned in focused mode come together in a new way that helps you reinforce the learnings and find connections you hadn’t previously spotted.

Takeaway: you need both your focused mode and diffuse mode to learn effectively and your environment and current activities shape which one you’ll find yourself in.

Your method

In this section I’d like to discuss four topics: planning, chunking, interleaving and testing which I believe will leave you with the best base for improving your learning – before hopefully looking into these topics in more detail yourself.

Planning

Most of what I do as a Marketing Manager isn’t test-related, but it does have deadlines. I know from bad previous experience that leaving everything to the last-minute is not a recipe for success. Not only will my work be less effective but it’s also likely that something else will get in the way and force me to work up until the last minute to meet my deadline.

Whether your goals here are work-related or study-related, the only way what you’re learning will stay in your head is through careful, measured, long-term progress.

Your first step should be to get out your diary/calendar/planner and an overview of what you’re working on and put them side-by-side. If that’s your textbook, look down the contents page and work backwards from the date of your test or assignment. If you’ve got 12 weeks before the test and 11 chapters to work on, that’s one chapter a week and a week of revision at the end.

Practice and repetition are important for retaining what you’ve studied. Plan ahead so that what you’re learning goes into your long-term memory and becomes a safe foundation for everything you’re building onto.

Chunking

As Dr Oakley says in Learning How to Learn, ‘chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning.’

She follows this by saying ‘a chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively. Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks.’

Planning, as we’ve talked about already, and fighting procrastination as we’ll talk about further down this summary, are two of the keys to successful ‘chunking'. You need to build up your knowledge slowly so that the foundations of your chunks are well-enforced. Chunking is made up of three components:

·      Focus

·      Understanding

·      Practice

Remove any one of those parts and your chunks will not be retained. You need to focus on the subject at hand and remove distractions, understand the concept inside out and then practice it in a number of ways – for example, by trying to recall it on the bus or while chopping carrots, or by taking tests.

Chunking is important because it helps what you’re learning to become second nature. Think of a child learning to walk: they begin by learning to use their limbs, they move to crawling, they start to stand, they wobble with one leg forward, and so on. Imagine you were still walking that way, having to break down each individual part of the concept of ‘walking’. You’ve mastered each piece so that it now flows together effortlessly – that’s where you want your learning to get to so that you can build more and more complicated parts together over time without having to strain yourself in the recall. Once you have them mastered your diffuse mode will be able to find ever more creative ways of putting even seemingly unrelated chunks together in novel ways.

Interleaving

This follows nicely to the concept of interleaving.

According to Dr Oakley:

‘Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discovered that most paradigm shifts in science are brought about either young people or people who were originally trained in a different discipline.’

I have found this especially helpful in marketing, where I regularly listen to unrelated podcasts, read books on philosophy, or dip into fiction and poetry to broaden my understanding of the world.

Key to the success of your studies is being able to ‘interleave’ – ‘jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies.’ When you’re learning something new make sure to move around inside the subject or even into a totally unrelated topic. And interleave by listening, doing, reading and writing so that you’re adding even more diversity to your learning.

Interleaving helps you to apply a whole new way of thinking and view what you’ve learnt from a different perspective.

Testing

There’s no better way of proving that you’ve truly learnt something correctly than testing yourself. Interestingly, it’s also a great way of learning too.

Beginning with simple recall (just shutting your text book or turning away from your screen and trying to remember what you’ve just learnt) you can help reinforce the neural pathways of your studies.

Using mini tests – whether given to you in your textbook or by your teacher in class or by fellow classmates during a study session – will help reinforce your learning too, but also show you where you have gaps in your knowledge.

Takeaway: plan ahead, space out your learning, move between different types of knowledge and test yourself regularly.

Your drive

Procrastination

There are plenty of tasks within my current role that I neither relish nor look forward to. Unfortunately as I’m sure the reader can relate to, avoiding them doesn’t make them go away. What’s more, the awareness that these tasks are looming and will need to be completed takes up constant mental energy – managing my to-do list mentally and putting effort into avoiding them. These tasks – completing our purchase order sheet; liaising with a colleague to chase incomplete work; researching the cheapest supplier – niggle away in my brain, always unfinished.

As there are only four slots in working memory I know that the energy I put into procrastinating (but knowing that those tasks are still looming over me) would be far better spent on getting things done.

So, how to combat procrastination?

The first thing to remember is that you don’t want to be making fighting procrastination about willpower – you want it to be almost unavoidable that you’re going to do what you need to do.

Here are three tips I’ve found most helpful from this course:

1.     Focus on the process not the product

One of the most broadly applicable insights from Learning How to Learn is this way to combat procrastination. What good is improving your health and your understanding of learning methods if you then just can’t manage to get started?

As soon as you read this you’ll know it makes sense based on your own experience. In the course Dr Oakley says:

“When you look at something that you really rather not do, it seems that you activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. […] But here's the trick. Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn't like, that neuro-discomfort disappeared.”

So the key here is, you focus on just starting off, just beginning; putting pen to paper, typing the subject line in an email or opening the text book. Rather than thinking to myself ‘ugh, it’s going to take so much work to write this article’ I just need to think ‘I’ll start writing something and see where it takes me.’

2.     Break down your task

The pomodoro technique splits your tasks into 25-minute sections, making everything you need to accomplish far more manageable – both in delivery and imagination. After all, anyone can do any boring/annoying/scary task for just 25 minutes, right?

Continuing with the previous example, if I need to ‘write an article’ as part of my job, that can feel quite daunting, especially if it’s on a topic I’m not as familiar with. How long is the article? Who else has written on the subject? When’s it due? Am I ghost writing – and therefore need to be doubly sure that I’m writing something of quality?  All of those thoughts might go through my head and put me off doing such a big task.

By concentrating on the process – and then using a tool to help you do so – you’ll find yourself slipping into a focus on the task before you know it! And once you’ve overcome the pain of starting you’ll most likely soon find yourself enjoying it.

I’ve been using a ‘pomodoro timer’ for quite some time now and have experimented with a number of different ones. My current favourite is an app called ‘Forest’ which shows a tree growing while timing you and discouraging you from distracting yourself by playing with your phone. The neat part is that the company will actually plant a real tree [look at you, combatting climate change while learning!] once you hit a number of trees planted in your app.

And, I’m practicing what I preach here: I’ve been writing this entire summary using a Forest and the pomodoro technique, and using the five minute breaks in between to dust and vacuum my room, grab a coffee or hang up laundry – helping me to slip into diffuse mode and take the pressure off from staying focused.

3.     Eat frogs!

This is actually untrue. This quote has been misattributed to Mark Twain when it in fact came from a famously witty French writer named Nicolas Chamfort.

Now, whether it was Twain or Chamfort is largely irrelevant; the main thing I want you to focus on is that you should build confronting challenges into your day in a way that makes it the default action.

Don’t want to prepare slides for the next group presentation? Avoiding updating a status report? Not keen to email back on that invoice enquiry? None of those matter. Review your to-do list every morning as a matter of course and find that one task that you absolutely, totally and utterly don’t want to do… And then do it.

Just as focusing on the process and using a pomodoro timer (just a regular timer on your phone is fine too!) are great ways to get around procrastination, frog eating is another way to trick yourself into getting things done.

One further tip from me is to use an app like Todoist which can help you break down your tasks into the smallest components on your to-do list. It’ll help you track your productivity and also help ensure that you go through the thorough planning and chunking (and later: testing) stages that your brain needs in order for it to retain what you’ve learnt.

Further insight

If you’re finding that procrastination is a huge problem for you and that even these tips aren’t bringing the breakthroughs you’re really looking for I’d recommend doing some deeper learning and reading around the subject.

It might be that you’re finding procrastination especially hard to combat because there’s a little more going on beneath the surface for someone like you – though don’t forget, even the most successful amongst us procrastinate too! – and that might be issues around perfectionism, for example.

Two podcast episodes I’ve found especially useful are:

·      HBR Women at Work: Perfect is the Enemy

You might find that your issues around procrastination are actually a way of putting off doing the work out of fear – fear that it needs to be perfect in order to be a success, and that only perfect is good enough. And therefore as perfect isn’t achievable it’s best to not start in the first place.

·      Freakonomics: When Willpower Isn’t Enough

I’ve found the concept of ‘temptation bundling’ helpful, as it speaks to what Dr Oakley talks about in this course – giving yourself rewards for your work. If you struggle to do some part of your studies (or in my case, work) then bundling it up with a reward, such as an episode of your favourite TV show might be the way to go.

Takeaway: focus on the process not the product, break your task into manageable chunks and get that thing you’re dreading out of the way first thing to set you up for the day.

Conclusion

When I first started planning this summary it wasn’t clear to me what I would want to share from Learning How to Learn; in just three short weeks we’ve gained so much insight into the best, most efficient and effective ways to learn something new and I’ve found myself wanting to help everyone else improve too. I hope that you’ve learnt plenty and that this has piqued your interest in understanding more.

In this summary I’ve discussed the need for a strong focus on health to underpin all of your learning efforts, introduced the diffuse and focused modes and how to tap into them, explained how planning, chunking, interleaving and testing form the core of solid learning and how to make sure you follow this advice by kicking procrastination’s butt.

If you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into the world of Learning How to Learn I’d urge you to try the course for yourself to make your next challenge an even greater success: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn.