Circles and Colored Pencils

When I was in law school and had a big project that seemed both impossibly demanding (like learn a semester's worth of a subject in two days) and also unbearably boring or difficult to focus on, I would trick myself into studying for it by asking myself what the bare minimum amount of sufficient study time might be. Either the lowest number required to get a basic grasp of the material or a number that it was reasonably likely I would be able to do, when push came to shove. That might be something like 12 hours, real hours, of studying for a class.

I would then draw 12 circles on a piece of paper on which I would start some kind of rudimentary outline -- a breakdown of the general topic areas covered on the syllabus, for example.

When I studied for an uninterrupted period of time, I got to color in the appropriate fraction of a circle with a colored pencil. Sometimes I got fancy and color coded the colored-pencils with the subject areas -- a yellow circle meant I had studied an hour on one part of the syllabus, a red circle was an hour for something different. I made up a rule: if I studied a solid 50 minutes without interruption, I got to color in a whole circle. Two 25 minute chunks, though, were only worth 50 minutes. This technique was refined and employed with great effect for the bar exam.

It's a technique I still use to keep myself on task without beating myself up for taking breaks. I am working on a brief right now, and I have six circles on my pad of paper. Two and three quarters of them are colored in. It's possible that as I progress I will add another circle -- I would do that on occasion in law school. But wierdly I discovered that my instincts were pretty good -- that "bare minimum" number often turned out to be just right. Some exams I even went into with several circles un-colored in, and did fine. What the circles did, though, was take away the guilt and despair of the looming "I should be studying right now" ness. All I had to do was fill in those circles. And with the 50-minute hour rule, I was incented to go for longer stretches without checking email, or getting distracted, or otherwise wasting time.

Comments

[Terrance]

Hey! That sounds like an interesting way to stay focused on an uninteresting task. I may have to try that sometime.

[UCL]

What a great idea!

Another great idea to help me stay focused would be software that blocks me from blogging and reading blogs from 8 am to 5 pm.

[Debbie Eberts]

Oooh, neat idea. I use a timer and set if for 15 minutes at a time to get through unpleasant projects. I know I can do anything for 15 minutes and usually by the time the 1st 15 minutes are up, I can continue. We moved several years ago to a different state. Even though I'm wasn't working, I took the bar. I had two kids, we were in temporary housing with most of our stuff in storage getting ready to move into a new house and I managed to study for and pass a bar exam with my 15 minute rule. Thanks for an interesting twist on breaking up projects into manageable chunks.