How to Study

Make Your First Appointment…
with Yourself
For any time-management system to work, it has to be used contin-
ually. Before you go on, make an appointment with yourself for the
end of the week—Sunday night is perfect—to sit down and plan for
the following week. You don’t have to spend a lot of time—half an
hour is probably all it will take to review your commitments for the
week and schedule the necessary study time.
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Despite its brevity, this may just be the best time you spend all week,
because you will reap the benefits of it throughout the week and
beyond!
First, identify anything you need to do this week that is not yet 
written in on your daily calendar. Look at your long-term calendar 
to determine what tasks need to be completed this week for all of
your major school projects. Add any additional tasks that must be
done—from sending a birthday present to your sister to attending
your monthly volunteer meeting to completing homework that may
have just been assigned.
Remember to break any long-term or difficult projects into small,
“bite-size” tasks that can be included on your schedule. As Henry
Ford said, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”
Hence, the assembly line.
Once you have created your list, you can move on to the next step—
putting your tasks in order of importance.
Prioritize Your Tasks
When you sit down to study without a plan, you just dive into the
first project that comes to mind. The problem with this approach 
has been discussed earlier: There is little guarantee that the first thing
that comes to mind is the most important.
If you find yourself forgetting to transfer data back and forth from
your long-term calendar to your daily calendar (or vice versa), or you
simply need even more help keeping the most important tasks in mind,
a Priority Task Sheet is another tool you can use. Its sole purpose is
to help you arrange your tasks in order of importance (not to record
them—that’s the job of your calendar). That way, even if you find
yourself without enough time for everything, you can at least finish
the most important assignments. You can’t effectively deal with
today’s priorities if you still have to contend with yesterday’s…or last
week’s!
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First, ask yourself this question: “If I only got a few things done this
week, what would I want them to be?” Mark these high-priority tasks
with an “H” or an “A.” After you have identified the “urgent” items,
consider those tasks that are least important—items that could wait
until the following week to be done, if necessary. (This may include
tasks you consider very important but that don’t have to be completed
this week.) These are low-priority items, at least for this week—mark
them with an “L” or a “C.”
All the other items fit somewhere between the critical tasks and the
low-priority ones. Review the remaining items. If you’re sure none 
of them are particularly low or high priority, mark them with an 
“M,” for middle priority, or a “B.”
Strategy tip: If you push aside the same low-priority item day after
day, week after week, at some point you should just stop and decide
whether it’s something you need to do at all! This is a strategic way
to make a task or problem “disappear.” In the business world, some
managers purposefully avoid confronting a number of problems, wait-
ing to see if they will simply solve themselves through benign neglect.
If it works in business, it can work in school. (But if you find yourself
consistently moving “B” or even “A” priorities from day to day, reassess
your system. Something’s broken.)
A completed Priority Task Sheet is on page 95. A blank Priority Task
Sheet you can photocopy is on page 98.
Have you been taking the time to estimate how long each task 
will take, and adjusting your projections when it’s clear certain tasks
invariably take longer than you think? Terrific! Here’s a way to use
such estimating as a great motivator: Instead of writing down how
long a task will take, write down the time you intend to finish it.
What’s the difference? It has now become a goal. It may put just the
slightest amount of pressure on you, making you try just a little harder
to finish on time.
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You can take this goal-setting technique further. Write down the
times you expect to finish each page of a 10-page reading assignment,
or each one of the 20 math problems you have to complete. Setting
such small time goals is a great motivator and a fantastic way to max-
imize your concentration and minimize daydreaming.