My Way of Learning: Plan and Set Goals But......

"Failing to plan is planning to fail"

We were repeatedly told this phrase since young. We have seen this phrase many times. So what is planning? How to plan so that we can effectively work our way through? Personally, I keep two sets of plans. I call them the big plan and the small plan. I write them in an organiser which is always in my bag.


The Big Plan

The big plan is something more general. I will plan how much time to spend on one activity per week. The image above shows the big plan I made for myself during my final semester in NUS. The stated time was the amount of time I planned to spend on the corresponding activity per week. This plan may not seem like a plan, but it serves as an important guideline for me. In case I feel lost during the week, I refer back to this plan and see what I can/should do.

The Small Plan

Looking at the second image, it shows how I spend each day. Every night, I will write down what I plan to do the next day. I will try my very best to make sure I follow my small plan. As you can see, the way I plan is very simple. I want to finish EE4001 report by the next day. I want to do EE4502 tutorial 2 the next day. As simple as that, no need to be very specific.

Do Not Follow Your Plan Blindly
Plan never really works well, at least not for me. I am not contradicting myself. There are many times which we are "forced" by circumstances to change plan. My rule of thumb:

Failing to change plan is planning to die

Looking at my big plan above, do I really have the textbooks for the modules? Do I have so many questions for practicing? Actually no. In fact I did not purchase any book. In fact, I spent all 5 weekdays (from 830am to 9pm, minus off meal and lecture time) in the lab working on my Final Year Project, so much so that I did not even bother to write it down in my small plan. And I like to shift the things that I want to do from one day to another. As long as I get all my TODO's done by the deadline, I am free to do anything I want to my plan.

Summary
So the main idea here is to plan well, write down what is needed to be worked on, don't do last minute work, spread out the workload so that you won't feel burdened. And of course, celebrate whenever you cross out a task from the task list. Give yourself a break, buy yourself a curry puff (yes, the curry puff from the snack store in NUS Engineering was my reward for myself).

Guide to Learning 1: Focus

I'm sure all of us know that focus is the key element to complete any task effectively and efficiently. But why is it that we know but we never really practise it? There are many reasons and personally I feel that the main reason is noise.

Focus in achieving an objective

Noise, or the alternative voice in our lives, is the culprit of pulling us back from advancing towards our goals. One example would be me writing the blog. As mentioned in the introduction to this series, Guide to Learning, I started this blog in 2007. However, I did not follow through my dream. This was due to the noise inside me. The "devil" in me told me that this is redundant, this is a waste of my time, etc etc... I procrastinated and although I kept looking back into this blog, I was just lazy to pick it up and do what I wanted.

So, I would urge everyone who has an objective to just work towards it. To quote the famous Nike slogan, "Just Do It!". What can be the worst outcome? Fail? People laughing at your failure? At least you have tried and have no regret. Imagine you looking back in life when you are old and realise that you have not tried to work towards one of your little dreams. If the reason for not trying was because of the noise inside you, I'm sure you would have regretted big time.

In my case, I would have failed if no one reads my blog, but if at least one other person reads it, I see myself as a success. And now you are reading this post, thank you so much! :)

Focus in achieving a small task

Another reason why we fail to focus would be our physical surrounding. We may be distracted by people walking past, by the (real) noise from footsteps and conversations nearby, and even by the hot weather, especially in Singapore.

My friends always comment that I look very scary when I am doing my work, especially when I am thinking. They don't dare to interrupt me, even if they just wanted to ask me for lunch, because I look like I can devour anyone anytime. Now, how do I overcome these real noises?

My only reply, even if you ask me now, is to train in harsh conditions. There is no air-con at home. I stay less than 10 metres from the ground floor. I stay at a busy location where there are thousands of people walking past each day. I stay near the train station. There used to have a garbage collection point just outside the window in my room.  I'm sure you would have guessed what is it like to do work in my room. Noise, smell, non-stop moving elements. To round it off, I love doing work in my room, facing the moving train.

This "training" has made me used to the harsh conditions which we could face anywhere, anytime. When my house was under renovation with all the drillings and hammering, I was inside my room, with door opened, continuing to do my work as if it was just another normal day.

For students, if you are able to focus in harsh conditions, I'm sure that you will have no problem during examination, in a quiet environment. If this is not enough, one more plus point is that it will definitely serve you well if by any chance, your examination hall is not as quiet as it should be. This happened to me a few times before and I'm sure you have experienced it.

To end off, I feel that everyone is equal and no one is smarter than another. It's the ability to focus that makes the difference, that determines how much time is needed to understand a concept, that makes a person "seemingly smarter" than another.