It’s pretty simple:

• Reserve study blocks beginning about a week before the exam.
• Plan for multiple, short study times rather than longer blocks. Four blocks of 20 minutes each will probably make for better retention than a single two-hour marathon review.
• Reserve this time now, and plan around it.

If you have multiple exams in a single week, like around mid-terms or finals:

• Start a bit earlier.
• Schedule breaks in your study time. You can schedule shorter blocks of study time around other activities, or simply build a ten minute break into each hour of studying.

The point? Be proactive. (This is Habit #1 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.) If you anticipate your needs ahead of time and provide for them, you won’t have to be reactive and frustrated at exam time.

Also consider these study ideas:

• Swap class notes with someone and read over your friend’s notes. This will help refresh your memory of lectures and pick up things you might have missed.
• If you’ve underlined and/or highlighted your class reading well, it should be relatively easy to review what you’ve read.
• Get a friend to quiz you on points you’ll be tested on. Iron sharpens iron, and it’s a good excuse to get coffee.

There may be some classes you can read ahead in more easily.

Look over your assigned reading, and decide which reading will be more challenging and which is more accessible. You may want to wade through the difficult stuff early, or breeze through the easy stuff first. Either way. Just get a jump on it.

Use this reading method for faster comprehension, if you’re not asked to account for your eyes touching every word of your reading.

Even if you can only get an extra six hours or so of reading in during the first few weeks, that will give you six hours you can use later when it’s crunch time.

Extra:

Have trouble with procrastination? Try this.

This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you take a few moments to plan well, it can make the semester much easier for you. Carpe Diem!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your calendar. You should have only one calendar, because you have only one life. (Be sure you coordinate well with your spouse and kids.)

2. Note all the dates of your papers and exams.

3. To the best of your ability keep your schedule clear in the week before each exam, and two weeks before each paper due date

4. Schedule recovery time. Be sure to schedule some down time right after mid-terms, and after big assignments are due. Plan to relax a bit. If you schedule a day trip, a date, or some fun activity just after the crunch, it will give you something to look forward to after the big project.

5. Make a note of when the worst crunch times are. Then, if your job allows for any scheduling leeway, let your boss know early. If you’re a valuable employee, she just might work with you.

Following these suggestions should only take an hour or two, and should save you time and frustration all semester long.

One key concept I believe it’s critical for Christian leaders to master is triage: knowing how to sort through a welter of urgent demands and determine what is truly important.

Triage means “to sort.” It is a practice used in emergency medicine to determine which cases will receive immediate treatment. In a battlefield hospital overwhelmed with casualties, hard decisions have to be made. Some soldiers will get medical treatment immediately, and their lives will be saved. Some have less severe injuries that can wait, and others who are terribly wounded and cannot be saved, are made comfortable and left to die.

Triage is about making hard choices about how you use your limited time and resources. See its application to ministry and seminary here

And of late, since issues have been pressing at my primary job, so I have put Seminary Survival Guide in the “wait” column. I expect this won’t be the last time.

I expect that you will do the same. I don’t expect you to read SSG when you have exams to study for and haven’t spent any time with your spouse. You can always come back and catch up. All posts are archived by category, with the most recent ones at the top. We’ll be here when you get back.

This site, both for me and for you, is meant to be a servant, not a master. It’s up to us both to see that doesn’t happen.

Having said that, look for two upcoming posts:
“Live Off Campus” will provide an argument for why living at seminary is bad for you.
And “Master Your Seminary’s Required Reading in Half the Time (or Less)” will show you a simple technique used at Oxford University and other graduate programs for fast mastery of reading material.

More:
Seminary Does Not Prepare You for Ministry
Seminary DOES Prepare You for Ministry

We’re nice people. We like to say yes. Jesus knew this. He advised us, “Ask and it shall be given to you.” (This verse is not primarily about prayer; it is about human interaction.) He knew that people’s default response to any request is yes.

If you say yes to everything, you’re in for it. Refusing to say no means that you cede to others the right to manage your time. Unchecked, people will suck your time and your life away. It is imperative that you learn to say no.

Here’s an exercise, recommended by Tim Ferris: for two days, make your default request to everything asked of you “no.” (Ok, exceptions granted for God, your spouse, your boss…although even the boss needs to be told no occasionally.)

It’s a good habit to develop, because it requires guts. If you’re gutless, start telling people no. Remember: this is responsible time management. You’re not saying no to be a jerk, you’re saying no so you can say yes to the most important things.

In the category of “things to say no to”, let’s start with this list from Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle (p. 161). These are his top ten low-value uses of time.

1. Things other people want you to do
2. Things that have always been done this way
3. Things you’re not unusually good at doing.
4. Things you don’t enjoy doing
5. Things that are always interrupted
6. Things few others people are interested in
7. Things that have already taken twice as long as you originally expected
8. Things where you collaborators are unreliable or poor quality
9. Things that have a predictable cycle
10. Answering the telephone

Great ideas. I would add a few:

• Recreational opportunities that will not give you rest or energy. For instance, an all-night video game marathon is lots of fun, but it’ll also disturb your sleep cycle and make you worthless the next day.
• Social invites from people who drain you more than strengthen you. Decline politely.
• Random ministry opportunities that need a body to fill. Seminary students are ripe for churches to exploit. Choose your ministries wisely, and stick to them. I’m not saying that you can’t meet a need in a pinch or be a servant. You can. But if you do so all the time, you cannot be the leader you need to be. Real leaders know how to say no.

A few questions to provoke discussion:

• What do you find it easy to say no to?
• What do you find it hard to say no to?
• What do you want to say no to, but can’t?

By contrast, in high-interruption environments, you can’t get anything done, because you can’t get gain any momentum. It’s like a runner being stopped every 100 yards to have a conversation. In corporate America, a staggering 25% of all work time is spent on handling interruptions and switching from one task to another, and with all of the mental and physical re-arranging necessary. After 40% of these interruptions, people don’t go back to what they were doing. (Source: The Four Hour Work Week)

The worst interrupter of all time: the cell phone.
The cell phone is an evil invention that—unless you manage it wisely—allows anyone in the world to interrupt you at any time. Availability is one thing, slavery is another.

Set times when you are unavailable. When you are studying, praying, and with your family, your cell phone should be off or ignorable.

I found that every time I tried to watch a movie, the phones, both home and cell, would ring off the hook. I used to feel obligated to answer them and could never get through a movie. Ridiculous. Now I ignore them. One strategy I like: leave the cell phone on vibrate in another room. I can’t hear it ring, but when I pause the movie for snacks or a bathroom break, I can check for missed calls or messages—if I want—and return them—if I want.

Spouses and availability
Communicate with your spouse about your need to avoid interruptions when studying. If you prioritize her needs in the ways that you should, then she’ll most likely protect you as much as she can. She can call if it’s really urgent.

Try this: when you go to the library to study, call her: “Hey hon, I’m going to be working on my paper for the next two hours. Need anything? Doing ok? How’s the baby? Love you.” Then silence the phone and go to work.

Use your free secretary
I love this idea: Let your voice mail be your virtual assistant. Didn’t know that a FREE secretary came with that cell phone, did you? It’s all a matter of perspective. Check messages when you want to. Return only messages that really need a return call. Try to train people who communicate with you to leave the information you need on the voice mail. “Hey, call me back” is not an acceptable message. Let them know.

You might try a voicemail greeting like this: “This is Mark. I’m not available now. If you have information for me, please leave it after the beep, or send an email to mark@hotmail.com. If you’d like a call back, please leave your name, number and the purpose of your call. I generally return calls in the early afternoon. Due to family time, I do not return voice mails on Saturdays. Thanks for calling.”

You get the idea. You need boundaries, so set them and enforce them. Other people will not respect your boundaries unless you do.

When you leave messages for others, give them a specific time to call you back. This avoids phone tag. “This is Mark, returning your call. My number is 555-5555. The best time to reach me is between 3 and 5.”

Batching
Finally, let messages pile up and then return them all at a set time. This is known in the time management world as “batching.” The idea is to let simple, repetitive activities to pile up, and then to tackle them all at once. This minimizes time lost from task switching. Returning phone calls, for instance. If people leave messages for you while you’re in class or studying, don’t reply immediately to them; let them stack up and then do them all at once. Email replies can be batched this way. Paying bills, filing, reading/sorting, dealing with snail mail… any simple repetitive tasks.

Other quick ideas that have helped me:

• All new email notifications are off: no icon, no ding, no nothing. I check when I want, period.
• My home phone ringer is now permanently off. If it’s not important enough to leave a message, it’s not important enough to waste my time. If it’s urgent enough, they know where I live and can track down my cell number.
• All email notifications from social networking sites are off. Facebook when you want to.
• When I really need to be uninterrupted, I go where people can’t find me. Usually the library. I get drop-in interruptions way too much at my office at church.
• At seminary, you should beware of the “social corners” of the library. You know, where the gabby extroverts like to hang out and not work. Don’t go there. Socialize when it’s time to socialize; work when it’s time to work.

Be Unavailable. Like Jesus.
You may think I’m just a cold-hearted jerk who hates talking to people. Remember that all my suggestions here are not meant for you to slavishly copy. I want you to think about your life and how you can best obey the command to “make the most of your time.” (Ephesians 5:16)

Other people will not understand or respect your very great need for sustained theological reflection or uninterrupted time in prayer.

Learn to set those boundaries now, and learn to make others adjust to them. Jesus did not ask permission to go away by himself and pray. He just did it. When people needed him, they just had to deal with it until he got back.

I think that’s a pretty good example.

It has also given us

• email in-boxes full of spam
• stupid forwards you’ve seen a thousand times already.
• access to millions of webstores where we can spend all the money we don’t have
• video games, the most fun way to waste your life
• other entertainments which are an outright danger to our souls.
• millions of blogs to read on every imaginable subject, written by fun and fascinating people.

For all its virtues, the Internet very rapidly goes from being our servant to being our master.

Go On a Low-Information Diet

Tim Ferriss is an author famous for his brutal elimination of electronic addictions and freeing himself from the immediacy demands of email and electronic communications.

He insists that we need not be slaves to these technologies, but that drastic steps are needed to prevent it.

Here are some suggestions, culled from multiple sources, about reducing technological time drain.

Check email at specifically designated times. Ferriss suggests as a starting point to check email no more than twice a day (11am and 4pm), and never first thing in the morning. If check your email first when you get to work or to the library to study, it will suck your energy and concentration away in nothing flat. Resist the temptation. Choose ahead of time when you’ll check it, and stick to it.

Set Time Limits. When checking email, reading blogs or web surfing, give yourself a time limit. Like watching television, hours can go by before you know it, while vital projects are patiently awaiting your attention.

I’ve gone so far as buying an egg timer for my office. When I sit down to clear my email and catch up on my RSS reader, I set the timer, usually for 15-30 minutes. When it goes off, I change over to something else. It may seem silly, but that little discipline has saved me lots of time.

Use a good spam filter. The money it may cost is worth every penny of recaptured time.

Forward the forwards. We all have friends who send us those crappy email forwards threatening you with horrible things if you don’t pray this prayer or forward this email…. blah blah. Add those friends to your blocked senders list in your email program. If anything really important happens, they’ll call.

Don’t worry about the news. No news is really new. It’s the same news as yesterday, only the names and dates have changed. Try quitting the news altogether. I bet you won’t miss it. If something really important happens, someone will tell you about it.

Stop trying to keep up with everything.

Technorati currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. (Source)

Point: there is way more out there than you can ever keep up with. Don’t try. It’s more important that you really focus on your studies, your time with God, and your family and friends. Real life, in other words.

If you are a blog reader, there are several things you should do.

First of all, use an RSS feed reader of some sort. (I use Bloglines: web-based, free, easy.) Lots of people use Google Reader. If you don’t you are wasting time checking for updates that can be found automatically for you.

This is a great video introduction to RSS.

Cap your number of feeds. Choose a number of feeds you will follow, and try to reduce it as you go. I peaked at 50 blogs I was tracking in Bloglines, and am trying to slim that down further. Current count is 44.

Only follow feeds that are genuinely helpful to you. Does this blog add real value to your life, or is it only a distraction? If there’s no value, eliminate it. I mean that for THIS blog, too. If SSG.com doesn’t add value to your life, then don’t waste your time here.

Subscribe to aggregator feeds rather than individual blogs. Want to keep track of the theological world? Justin Taylor does it for you. Want to keep track of blogs at Southern Seminary or Asbury? They each have aggregator blogs that do that for you.

Better: use a human aggregator: find some friend of yours that wastes all of HIS time following blogs, and occasionally ask him—if you can tear him away from his computer—what’s new or interesting on the blogosphere.

What has worked for you?

Here are a few practical tips on overcoming procrastination. Some of these tips will work well for you, others won’t. Pick and choose as you will.

Don’t think so much, act!
In his helpful article, “Do It Now!”, personal development coach Steve Pavlina cites W. Clement Stone, a giant in the insurance industry, who would lead his employees to chant together “Do it now, Do it now!” at the beginning of each day. When you’re tempted to put off a task because you don’t like it or it’s going to be hard, stop yourself, and say loudly three times, “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!”

“There is a tremendous cost in putting things off because you will mentally revisit them again and again, which can add up to an enormous amount of wasted time. Thinking and planning are important, but action is far more important. You don’t get paid for your thoughts and plans — you only get paid for your results. When in doubt, act boldly, as if it were impossible to fail. In essence, it is.”

- S. Pavlina

Give preference to action over thought. Start! If you don’t know how to clean up the room, just start cleaning. If you don’t know what to eat for dinner, just start grabbing whatever’s in the fridge and start eating. If you don’t know what to write the paper on, just start writing. Get yourself into a creative zone, and the ideas will emerge.

Break big projects down into smaller chunks
Sometimes having big, imposing tasks can overwhelm you—the kind of thing so big you don’t know where to begin. It can lead to paralysis. Really. Many of us, faced with a big project we’re dreading, out of fear of the size of it, simply won’t engage with it, as the deadlines creep nearer and nearer each day.

Instead, face it head on! Your first step should be to sit down and break that big project into bite-size pieces. For instance, if you have to write a big paper, you can break it down into manageable steps, complete with time estimates.

• Look at the list of topics, and choose one. (15 minutes)
• Go to the library and find your preliminary list of sources (30 minutes)
• Being doing your primary source reading (4 hours)
• Brainstorm your thesis (30 minutes)
• Write a first draft (2-4 hours)
• Edit, do supporting research (2 hours)
• Polish final draft (2-3 hours)

Then each of the tasks on your list can be placed into your daily calendar over the next few weeks.

See? That wasn’t so bad after all. You’d be surprised at how much freedom that comes from just a little bit of this kind of strategic thinking.

Single Handling
Another procrastination elimination strategy is single handling. That is, handle each task only once. When you get the mail, sort it immediately. Pitch junk mail, pay bills, and deal with personal correspondence right away. Wedding invitation RSVPs, etc. It won’t take as long as you think. If you handle it right away, and you don’t have to deal with them again. Don’t just drop in on the end table where you’ll have to come back and give it more of your time.

When Pavlina was in college, he did single handling on his papers. He would write the entire thing in an uninterrupted 8 to 10 hour stream of time, start to finish. One shot. Done. Not everyone can do that, but for him the value of getting into “the zone” creatively was worth the effort. I’m not necessarily recommending it, but it’s worth thinking about.

The 60-second rule
Do you procrastinate on making decisions? Give yourself a 60-second rule for making all decisions. That is, once you have all the facts you need, why should it take you any longer than that? Analysis becomes paralysis quickly.

If you’re hesitant, try this: make the decision, one way or another, and then don’t do anything about it, just sit on it for an hour or two or a day or two, and see how it feels. Then you can put it into action. It’s much better that indecision and endless pondering back and forth, which will only waste time.

Make the cut
Too often, we let time slip away because we are for whatever reason unwilling to make a decision or start moving. The word “decision” is related to “incision”. When you decide, you make a cut: you cut something in, you cut something out. Stop worrying over what cut away when you decide. Make the cut! And do it now!

With that in mind, we’re going to talk about reclaiming desperately needed time by eliminating the things that waste it.

The Enemy’s main strategy for people in ministry is to keep them too busy to do the important things. Remember Pharoah?

That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: “You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” (Exodus 5:6-9)

Unlike the Hebrews, we’re not usually victims of a slave driver (although you may think some of your professors may qualify…). Too often, we oppress ourselves by wastefully throwing hours away with a few notorious activities. If we can discipline ourselves to minimize or eliminate these time wasters, we can redeem and reclaim large quantities of time for useful purposes.

Here are the top six Seminary Time Wasters (follow the links):

#1: Procrastination

#2: The Internet

#3: Interruptions

#4: TV

#5: Disorganization

#6: Saying Yes to Everything

This will suck your life away if you’re not careful. We must defend our own borders.

Of course, most of us in ministry ARE nice, and want to say yes. We find it hard to say no.

If that’s you, then 43 Folders has a great post on the alternative to saying yes or no. It’s the “qualified yes.” It’s basically yes with defined limits. Their example:

So, what used to be “Sure, I’ll do your web site” is now more often “Sure, I’ll give you 10 hours and 3 calls over the next month to use however you want.” If nothing else, it helps everyone understand that time is a precious commodity, but it also gets me out of being the de facto manager for every aspect of a project I touch.

Try it. Can you proofread my paper? Yes, if you email it to me by 4:00.
Can you lead VBS for 3rd graders this year? Yes, if you can find me an assistant and manage on Thursday when I’m gone.

HT: Pastor Hacks