How to be a Study Ninja

Study smarter. Focus better. Achieve more.

Graham Allcott

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785782374
• eBook ISBN: 9781785782527
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

In the world of smartphones, instant internet access and on-demand documentaries, studying should be easier than ever. Yet all this background noise can make us unfocused and inefficient learners. So how can you cut through the distractions and get back to productive, rewarding learning? Four little words: Think like a Ninja.Paralysed by procrastination? Harness some Ninja Focus to get things started. Overwhelmed by exam nerves? You need some Zen-like Calm to turn those butterflies into steely focus. Surrounded by too many scrappy notes and unfinished to-do lists? Get Weapon-savvy with the latest organizational technology.With nine Ninja techniques to learn, there is a solution here for everyone who wants to learn better – and they don't involve giving up the rest of your life.Written by one of the world's foremost productivity experts, How to be a Study Ninja is a fun, accessible and practical guide on how to get the most out of your studying and love the quest for knowledge again.

1. THE WAY OF THE STUDY NINJA

The alarm goes off. Your brain slowly remembers that it’s not the first time you’ve heard that alarm this morning. You look at the time. ‘I can’t have snoozed for that long, surely?!’ It’s Wednesday. You have an assignment due tomorrow. Time is running out and this morning’s planned extra hour of reading just became an extra hour in bed, which isn’t an ideal start. Oh, and you’re probably going to miss the bus now and be late for the start of the class.

You shouldn’t have gone out last night. Your friend just said to come round for dinner, but then dinner turned into the whole night. You feel tired and foggy and not quite ready to face the world. As you look at the texts on your phone you remember that you said yes to an extra shift at work tomorrow night (well, you do need the money), but with another deadline looming on Monday, it’s going to be a busy few days ahead. A crazy few days. In fact, you already know that these next few days will look nothing like the peaceful and serene plan you created for tackling this term, just a few short weeks ago.

‘Why don’t things work out like I planned?’

‘Why do I always find myself in a mess?’

‘Juggling all these things is so damn hard.’

These issues are what this book is all about. It’s about helping you move from muddling through to becoming a Study Ninja – slaying the enemies of stress, chaos, procrastination and feeling overwhelmed, and creating a sense of playful control and momentum in all that you do.

It’s easy to feel like everyone else has cracked it and that you’re the only one in a mess. So I’ll let you into a little secret – everyone feels like this. From the most powerful business leaders and politicians to the coolest people on TV to your friends, family and role models – they’re ultimately all human beings with their struggles and faults. As human beings we’re more prone to mistakes than we like to think: we plan badly, we’re not realistic, we’re not organized enough to have a good enough view of what’s ahead, we struggle with prioritization, we get scared and nervous and oh, how we wish there was an exam for procrastination, because we’d be guaranteed an ‘A’ for that one (although we’d probably put off that exam until tomorrow, come to think of it!).

That’s part of the problem with creating study plans or reading study guides – life isn’t perfect and we forget that we’re not perfect either. We keep finding ourselves in a mess because life is … messy. Yet study books and our own grandiose plans sell us the dream of perfection and we fall for it every time. We dream about this perfect life we can lead and convince ourselves that buying a smart new notebook and some highlighter pens is but the first step on our inevitable journey to awesomeness. Three weeks into the term, those dreams have faded again and we’re back to feeling disappointed, flustered, daunted and messy again.

How do I know this? Well, I’ve spent the last six years coaching and training senior business leaders in how to be productive and successful, and I wrote a bestseller that helps people do that in their work and life, called How to be a Productivity Ninja.

And how did that become my job? Because I was spectacularly bad at productivity. Because I tried to live the perfection myth too. Because I’m naturally flaky, lazy and disorganized. Because I’d struggled so hard at making myself productive that I found it easy to relate to other people struggling and could help them find solutions.

I was far from a grade ‘A’ student. You should see my school reports. Oh wait, my mum still has them in her loft. And now I’m reading them again after all these years, they’re even less pretty than I remember them. And I have even less of an idea about why she might choose to keep them …

‘Graham’s mark here is about average but does not reveal the number of reminders that have been necessary before work appeared’
—Mr Abyss, Chemistry

‘Graham is still satisfied with inaccurate work in his writing. He continues to rush his homework’
—Mrs Bettany, French

‘It’s the same old story – Graham can work well in class, but not out of school’
—Mr Cartwright, History

‘Incapable of simply arriving on time in the morning, I am not surprised at his present problems with coursework’
—Mr Goodes, form tutor

‘The progress he has made has been pulled out of him, and most credit for it goes to others, not himself. He sees it as a little local difficulty, but his attitude to organized study is in fact a major future problem’
—Dr Rex Pogson, Headteacher

What those reports don’t tell you is that I was learning loads in those school years, but very little of it was in school. I was editing a music magazine, singing in a band, campaigning for political change, putting on music events, writing a music column for my local newspaper, DJing on a local radio station, as well as delivering newspapers six days a week and working in a bank three evenings a week. But I still look back on some of those school years as a wasted opportunity. If I’d have known what I know now about topics like productivity, attention, psychology, self-control and motivation, my school days – and my qualifications – would have been very different.

Since those days, I’ve learned something really important about learning itself, too. Knowledge is power – it’s a cliché because it’s true. But we’ve come to see education as a passport to a better pay packet, and as a ‘chore’ that’s necessary for us to reach the next level in life, when really we should see it as a path to a richer life experience. Yes, there’s a destination to reach, but why not make the journey richer, more fulfilling and more interesting, too?

This mindset shift happened for me when I was studying for my degree, at the University of Birmingham’s famous and pioneering Centre for Cultural Studies and Sociology, set on a beautiful campus in a fascinating multi-cultural city – home of course to the Balti curry, Tolkien, Cadbury’s chocolate and, of course, Aston Villa Football Club.

At the end of those three years, I was given a degree and I was happy that within weeks of graduating, I got a job doing something that I cared deeply about. Conventional wisdom is often for people to abandon the thought of education or personal development at this point. Why would you need to keep learning when you’ve reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? But the thing that university gave me – that was much more important than the piece of paper I could use to inflate my salary expectations – was a deep sense of curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and understanding about how the world works, and excitement at finding out what makes people tick, what principles or politics are worth fighting for, how the world and society should develop. I’d finally learned that there is nothing as exciting as asking big questions, knowing full well that you’re unlikely to get a simple answer.

So, dear reader, whether you’re studying for your GCSEs or A-levels, your degree, or your French class after work, my hope is that this book ignites within you a passion for learning as well as giving you skills, techniques, tips and tricks from the world of business and productivity that mean you can take your learning to a new level. If there’s a destination you have in mind – a qualification, a life stage, an achievement – then I would be delighted to be your guide on that journey, and I promise we’ll get you there in good shape.

But my aim will be to go further: my real aim will be to give you the gift of playful curiosity that my three years studying at the University of Birmingham gave me. Whether you’re learning for school, for college or university or just for the fun of learning, my intention here is to show you the way.

You have a reason for wanting to learn. Perhaps it’s to make your parents happy, perhaps it’s to advance a career or perhaps it’s for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of learning new things. It could be a combination of all of the above, or something else entirely. But let’s be honest, there’s also plenty of reasons not to learn, too. It could be that amazing new series on Netflix, it could be the distraction of the football scores or the Xbox, it could be your family or a great book. All of these are enemies of progress, because you’re human. As much as we all like to feel we’re above such distraction, and as much as we beat ourselves up at our regular lapses into spectacular bouts of procrastination, it happens. We’re human. We know it’s not good for us. We do it anyway.

For the past decade or so, I’ve been obsessed with productivity. I became obsessed with it because I was fed up of watching myself fall for bad habits, struggling to find ways of being organized and in control and realizing the sheer inefficiency of so many of my approaches to work and life. Ever since I started my company, Think Productive, and started teaching productivity at some of the best-known companies in the world, one of the most common things people have said to me is: ‘I wish they taught these kinds of skills in schools.’

I quite agree: I was lousy in school. I had no awareness of how to study well, I struggled to hold my attention on things for long enough to do great work (by the way, this never changed, I just developed better ways around this!) and I never really felt I hit a groove until well into my degree – and only then because I felt so totally engaged and inspired by the subject matter, which I’m realistic enough to know is a luxury in itself.

What wins on a rainy Tuesda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• TITLE PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• 1. THE WAY OF THE STUDY NINJA
• 2. GETTING ORGANIZED
• 3. MASTERING NINJA BALANCE
• 4. HOW YOU LEARN
• 5. GENERAL STUDY
• 6. WRITING
• 7. MEMORY TECHNIQUES
• 8. EXAMS
• 9. PROCRASTINATION
• 10. CURIOSITY AND CHILDISHNESS
• THANK YOUS
• REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• BY THE SAME AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT