61–70 of 224 posts
Even if you follow this or another strategy to cut down your options, you'll need to build the discipline to stop second-guessing yourself while you work on your chosen plan.
"It's not what you read, it's what you ignore"
I think everyone suffers from this to a certain extent. There is an overwhelming amount of info out there waiting to be consumed. We just need to get smarter about how to consume it
That's not an indictment of you. Contrary to popular belief, motivation doesn't much come from within. For almost everybody, long-term motivation is about other people: your friends, your community, and the world at large. You'll be motivated to do something when these groups of people push you to.
And the mechanism for that push is almost always the same: status. In the long term, human beings find it very easy to do things that increase their status, and very difficult to do anything else (except for things that are inherently more pleasurable than difficult — but that generally doesn't include studying CS theory).
This is really hard on college students, because even though good grades will increase your status after college, they rarely do much for your status in college. If you're good, professors might care, but the collective student body won't.
The solution is to find people who really care about your performance in your field of study — maybe a professor's lab, maybe a group of high achievers, maybe (ideally) a club with an external goal (e.g. autonomous vehicle club) — and make those people central to your life by spending a lot of time with them. If you do, it'll become natural for you to work hard at your field. Although still, you'll only be driven to do things that directly increase your status in your group.
And of course, this solution can be hard to implement; spending lots of time with a new group of people takes its own motivation. It gets a lot easier after college, though. After college you get a job, and wherever you work, everybody will care about how you perform.
Make a list of everything you want to do. List everything. Then, sort it by priority. Cross off everything but #1.
1. Make lists.
2. Make checklists.
PS: These two are different, and you need both. The first to bring clarity, and the second to make plans actionable by breaking down a goal into tasks.
One need to read this. Helped me a lot during my 6th semester and I scored an almost perfect gpa that semester.
The author is one of the Top Writer on Quora and writes on productivity.
Hi, Michael) "information paralysis" Is that a problem? So, may be it is not? May be it's an opportunity) Let's solve it) Imagine very-very big mindMap (like that, but much bigger http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QCtHZYRX_0w/UcbhaceT4MI/AAAAAAAAAW... ). Imagine, each word in there is a single knowledge. All this knowledges are ether unbounded from each other or bounded in small groups and all placed chaotically. This is how…
Needs some work, but you're basically proposing an Edx/Udemy/(etc)/Wikipedia/PersonalBrain mashup? Sounds interesting...
I think about another structure
Been there, done that (over and over again). You don't have time for everything. Therefore, you must choose what to do, but also you must choose what not to do. That is the hard part - choosing what to let go. Once you did that, the rest is (comparatively) easy. Ideally, devote yourself to one subject and immerse yourself in it. Stay focused, refuse to do anything else. You'll have distractions, you'll doubt your cho…
you can queue up lots of tasks to be done in the future. when you go to start a new task, you can compare it against everything else in the list to ensure its truly the top priority.
Does that make sense? if not, watch this 5 minute youtube video:
1. Make a dependency chart for all your things, showing which ones depend on which other ones. 2. Mark each node with some notion of what you're getting out of it in the first place. This could range from "for the lulz" to "world domination". 3. Pick the earliest, easiest, most useful/fun thing and do it, as soon as you have the time. Do not do anything else, except possibly the next easiest, most useful/fun thing if…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding the switching between different subjects or projects, what helped me was to quickly write down TODO notes of actions I should immediately take when picking up the subject again. For example "Finish exercise X", "Watch lecture Y" or "Run unit tests of project Z". I found my self dive in to the subject much faster when there was no need to think about where to start.
I've found this helps as well. Often at the end of the day I'll do a mental stack dump of where I am in various projects, including the immediate next steps, in an email and send to myself to easily jump right in the next morning.
With the list you sent yourself the night before you can dive straight in and avoid getting distracted before you've even started!
I, too, flopped around from technology to technology during college and after, and I'll tell you now, it only hurt me. Knowing a little about everything, or even a lot about a few things, made me cool at parties (that's a joke). But ten years later, when I looked back, I desperately wished I'd focused on an actual end goal instead of just consuming content that I thought all "smart" people needed to have read.