Studytime self-nudges

It’s crunch time for me and my classmates at SBS. Time to master finance, economics, marketing, strategy, decision science (aka statistics) and financial reporting in a week before exams start to hit one after the other. It makes for days of full, focused study, one after the other.

I know through this that I need to make progress through the material while maintaining my health (a huge thing in Oxford, where people come from around the world to engage in a particularly intense life), and not dropping the most important non-school stuff. I also know that I’m not naturally good at this, without a little help. So I help myself, with compensating nudges. Some examples:

- I’ve created a little colour-coded spreadsheet, so I get the satisfaction of changing tasks to green as they are done (ex: Finance, problem set 1, Marketing practice exam…). This almost makes finishing an accounting problem set fun. Almost.

- I keep healthy food within arm’s reach, so I can reach for the banana chips when hungry, instead of another avocado melt. Same thing with the multivitamins.

- I’ve been rotating through environments. My 600+ year old college library is a good one, with little but dusty books and the sound of oil trickling through the heaters. No internet either. It’s pretty hard to get distracted in there.

- Ive nailed the music soundtrack. Only 9 songs from Bonobo, Phoenix, Cinematic Orchestra and Zero 7. It plays in rotation for hours in the background. I suspect if these songs now came on in the car at home, I’ll start instinctively working through the capital asset pricing model on the window fog. If I’m too tired for this mix, I jack it up with Daft Punk or Alexisonfire. That gets things done. This has now approached Pavlovian response whenever one of the songs comes on.

- In order to keep growing the First Drop community as we move towards launch (one of the few things that can’t wait for exams), I’ve made sure the Facebook Group is number two on my firefox toolbar. Thus I instinctively click it when procrastinating, checking group progress and adding articles, where I once neglected it. By being the second toolbar link, it has become top of mind, where it needs to be.

My friend has gone a step further, locking up his laptop and installing himself on the other side of town. Good stuff.

None of this is new. We all set up little systems to help us subconsciously shift behaviour. What are your tricks?