Arman A. is a new author at Gearfire, and he is currently completing his dissertation in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Western Sydney.

I am close to finishing my dissertation. While going through the challenges it has thrown at me and getting stuck with writing from time to time, I have discovered a technique that helped me to get unstuck.

This technique can be applied to get past difficulties while writing a paragraph, section, or a whole document. If it worked for a dissertation, there is a good chance that it will work for essays, reports, journal articles, and blog posts.

When writing my dissertation I will end up reading from variety of sources, highlighting, and taking notes. After some while I would get frustrated with the amount of information and get to the point when it was difficult to choose what is important to make my point.

One day, out of frustration, I lay down, closed my eyes, relaxed, and asked myself, “What is really important for this section that I want to write about?” Suddenly, I found myself knowing exactly which points were important. I grabbed my clipboard and wrote them down.

Wow, I thought, this was easy! After that, I was able to replicate the same success many times and bettered the technique as time went by. I thought to share with others - so here it goes:

1. Prepare a pen and a clipboard. Load the clipboard with a sheet of paper.

2. Lie down comfortably, place the pen and clipboard next to you, and be aware of their location in order to grab them when ideas start flowing.

3. Close your eyes. Place the tip of your right thumb at the base of your nose, close to the socket of the right eye; place the middle finger at the point between your eyebrows, and the ring finger at the base of the nose, close to the socket of the left eye. This technique activates acupuncture points to make you relaxed and focused. Take three deep breaths and mentally repeat, “I am feeling calm, centred, and present”. Take another five deep breaths.

4. Mentally ask yourself, “What are the important things that I want to write in this paragraph/section/essay/paper?”. Note that you can ask another question, if your situation is different.

5. Wait for answers. In this relaxed and centred state, your mind is usually clear and you will be able to identify what is important to you. I had many Aha! moments in this state. If it doesn’t work, relax a bit more by taking a few more breaths and asking the question again.

6. Write them down. Once you have answers in your head, take the clipboard and pen and write them down. If you feel there is more that you want to explore, close your eyes and repeat steps 4 and 5 until you are satisfied.

When you are satisfied with the answers, tenderly move your joints, open your eyes, and slowly sit up. I found that it is efficient to structure and expand on jotted ideas right after sitting up, when I am still in that thought space.

I would love to hear about tips or techniques that you are using to overcome writer’s block.

Acknowledgements: Acupuncture technique described in Step 3 is a simplified version of Tapas Acupressure Technique.

Reading is critical to success in school, whatever point in your education you are at.  But there are better and worse ways to do it. Here are a few tips on how to read better, retain more and save yourself study time later.

1. Read with a purpose: Beyond “the teacher said so” there is always a reason why you are reading something.  Are you reading it to understand an argument?  Learn facts?  Background material?  Whatever the reason you were assigned that piece of reading, focus on it as you read.  If you aren’t clear on what you are trying to get out of the material, ask the teacher before you read.  Write the purpose at the top of a piece of paper and have it right there.
2. Read with paper and pen: As you read, take notes.  Keep looking at your purpose and write to answer the question or support what you are doing.  If done well you will be able to get everything you need to study for an exam from your notes.  (I do advise doing this by hand, since the act of writing often helps people remember things while the act of typing isn’t wired in the same way.  However if you prefer to do this electronically, go ahead. )
3. Notes should be brief: You are not rewriting the piece.  Think in terms of bullet points or outlines.  Short sentences, indentations, and lists will help you remember what you read AND make sense of it later.
4. Leave white space around your notes:  When you go to class you are going to take these notes with you and use the discussion in class to fill in any blanks.  Because of that you want to have space to add things, draw connections that you may not have made before, and clarify things.  Remember, the goal is to not have to go back to the base reading later, so these notes should be good.

Beyond this, reading more productively depends on what you are reading.  Here are a few examples of common things you might be reading and how to handle them.

• History - Generally you are trying to understand what happened and why it happened.  Therefore you should start by building a timeline of the reading (either across the top of the page or down one side if you need more space).  Then make notes on WHY things happened; what were the goals that one group/person was trying to achieve that caused the next major action to take place.
• Literature - Generally you will be trying to understand both the story itself (who/what/when/where) and the themes that the author is talking about.  For this I suggest dividing your notes into two parts: One that deals with the story itself, the characters (who they were and just a brief sentence about their primary motivations), the time and place of the story and perhaps a bit of information about the author.  The second part should deal with themes and techniques: is this a love story?  War story? Is there a theme of family?  Responsibility?  Greed?  These are the things you will end up writing about on a test, with the items in part one supporting your analysis.  Thinking about it as you read will help later.
• Philosophy - What is the argument that the author is trying to make?  What are their main points?  How do they structure their argument?  Do they address all the questions you had as you read the article?  What other questions would you ask?
• Math - Here you want to focus on pulling out vocabulary and key formula’s that will be used.  Annotating an example (by writing the example down and then making your own arrows and notes to explain each part of the process) can help you study later.
• Science -Background information, key new terms and items, and the properties of different things being studied should be captured.  If there is a life cycle being presented then create a time line that shows all of the stages.

There are lots of other types of reading, but this should give you a good idea of how to start.

Shannon posted last week about highlighting your reading.  I tend to use highlighters primarily for key sentences that either illuminate an important point or that may be useful to quote in a paper later.  If you do, make sure you make a note for yourself that you’ve highlighted the passage so that when you review or write later, you can easily find it again.

The goal here is to make your notes complete, legible and brief enough that when it comes time to study you can do so quickly and easily.  Taking good notes on your reading is the first step to better grades and more productive use of your time.

Remember the Milk, a great to web-based to-do list application, has released an excellent plug-in for the Firefox.  It works with gmail, creating a panel on the right side of your screen with your to-do list in it.  It’s now right there and you can add, remove, change and see all of your tasks in one place.

The feature that really won me over, however, was the ability to set up either a tag or use the star in gmail to create a new task. You can create a tag (for example to-do) and whenever you apply it to a message an item will be added to your Remember the Milk task list automatically.  If you get to-do items in email, this feature saves time and keystrokes!

This plug-in has quickly become something I can’t live without!

It’s almost a guarantee, no matter what your major, that your classes will eventually begin to overlap and build on each other. That is why it is so important to take full advantage of the work you’ve already put into past classes.

REUSING PAST PROJECTS

An important aspect of this system is the direct reuse of past projects. For example I remember taking an English class in which I needed to write a persuasive essay, in writing this essay I spent hours and hours researching a specific topic (in my case Nuclear Energy) and ended up doing very well on the paper. As a naive first year college student I discarded the paper once I received it back from the teacher. The next semester I needed to make a persuasive speech on a topic of my choice, and it hit me: I had already researched a topic (Nuclear Energy) the past semester and that there was no need to do it all over again. Fortunately, even though I had thrown away the paper, I had not deleted the file from my computer and was able to find it. Reusing the information I had previously found saved me hours of research and increased my confidence in the project because the original grade ensured the quality of my research.

REUSING PAST CLASSES AS A WHOLE

A chilling realization is taking a sequential class, such as calculus II, and discovering that you’ve forgotten most of calculus I. Fortunately, there is a very simple and effective way to avoid this problem and it consists of three steps:

1. Make sure you keep all of the tests/classwork/homework throughout a semester.
2. As you have each test in class, keep the relevant classwork/homework with that test and file it away.
3. At the end of the semester take each test and it’s appropriate classwork/homework and put it in a manila folder labeled for that class.

If you follow these three easy steps it saves an incredible amount of time backtracking in future classes, and makes reviewing entire classes worth of work organized and simple.

REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF WORK YOU SAVE

In the above step 2. I make it a point to keep the relevant work only. This is where the reducing part of this system comes into play. If you end up with a huge unordered pile of paper and just file it all away, you’ll likely waste a substantial amount of time sorting through to find what you want in the future. Reducing the clutter to only what is absolutely necessary for understanding is crucial in streamlining the entire process so that you can spend the most time concentrating on the class you’re actually taking.

To read my complete journey to GTD Mastery see the main post.

Step 18 to GTD Mastery is: I maintain a “Someday/Maybe list,” and regularly review and update this list during daily and weekly reviews.

Last week we talked about the weekly review in Step 17. One of the items on my weekly review checklist is to review my Someday/Maybe list. This involves two steps:

1) Transferring active projects to your project list. Did you find some time over the holidays to start brainstorming for your Great American Novel? If so, you should have a new item on your projects list. The same can be said for any project you’ve set in motion.

2) Deleting unwanted items. Has someone already written and published what you thought was the next Great American Novel? If so, it’s time to delete it from your Someday/Maybe list and go back to the drawing, or writing board, as the case may be.

When I started practising GTD, I would usually just skim over my Someday/Maybe list without any deep thought about the items stored there. This lead to the graveyard that is my first blog, ttGTD.

Today, writing for GearFire is proof of a fresh and inspiring Someday/Maybe list.

The first full week of school has come and almost gone, and if your schedule is anything like mine, you already have a long list of reading assignments to complete. One thing that can be discouraging about actually doing all of the coursework on schedule is that when you sit down to study for exams, you have nothing but a blank book staring back at you. This is where strategic color-coded highlighting comes in.

By highlighting key points in the material, you will have visual clues guiding your revision come exam time. And even if you like to take notes or make summaries of reading assignments, I find going through an entire chapter or article first, highlighting along the way, helps point out what is worth putting in your notebook, and what is not. A page marked entirely in yellow, of course, is no more helpful than the blank one when it comes to revision. What you need are immediate visual clues and that’s why I have devised this color-coded system.

Yellow → Highlight in yellow important points, facts, examples etc.

Pink → Use pink (or orange) to denote material that is even more important than what’s in yellow. For example, sentences that summarize sections, that explain the significance of the section, or provide definitions. (You may be really thankful for the two-level highlighting if you only have time for a bare bones revision.)

Blue → Reserve blue for words that will subsequently be defined (and then put their definitions in pink), titles or special terms.

Green → Mark in green dates, names or places that you will need to remember. Green can also be used for formulas.

Purple → If the material contains any rules, use the boldness of purple to set them apart.

That’s it. The two-levels of pink and yellow are not meant to cover everything on the page. Remember that this system is not meant to allow you to highlight more, but just with greater specificity. Adapt the color code to suit your needs or the highlighters you have in stock. This may add a few minutes to your reading schedule, but once you get the hang of your system, you may find it a worthwhile investment!

Full credit to Pascal Venier who posted a review of his Easy-read.

So what is it? According to their web-site,

Easy-read is an ergonomic book holder that allows its user to read in real comfort without the aching hands and discomforts we usually experience holding our book open.

As Pascal said, “I do not know how I managed before without it.” The Easy-read works flawlessly as described. They provide a set of easy, understandable picture instructions with how to setup the Easy-read (it’s actually easy). It has made reading and taking notes from textbooks much more efficient and less painful. It also makes practising speed-reading a lot easier because you don’t have to hold the book with one hand while using your other hand as the pointer.

It also serves as a copy holder when working at the computer. This comes in really handy when you’re writing a paper from an outline.

I can’t think of anything bad to say of the Easy-read because it just works. You can buy one from their site for only $19.95 + $2.95 shipping (USD). It also makes a great gift for anyone (especially fellow students).

To read my complete journey to GTD Mastery see the main post.

Step 17 to GTD Mastery is: I have a weekly review scheduled for each week.

I have a reminder set up on my cell phone for 7:00 AM on Sundays. My family is still sleeping so I’m able to perform the weekly review free of distractions.

Ricky Spears posted a must-read article on “Why We Resist the Weekly Review and Plan (and What You Can Do About It)”. At the top of the list: it’s not on our calendar. When I first started GTD, I brushed aside my weekly review almost every week because I didn’t actually set an appointment with myself.

The next step was actually creating a list of what I wanted to do in my weekly review (next actions). gtdfrk’s weekly review checklist provided an excellent starting block. I customized it to fit my system and life.

You can read my favourite posts on weekly reviews at my del.icio.us page. It covers posts on personal development-oriented weekly reviews as well as the literal GTD weekly review.

For anyone still feeling intimidated by the weekly review, I’m going to finish off with a quote from Ricky,

The only wrong weekly review is no weekly review at all.