How to be a better learner

Learning a new thing may be challenging for some persons and may be lot easier for others who keep learning new things on regular basis.

Talking about myself, I find learning a new thing a bit challenging especially when its not of my taste. But everytime I intend to learn something new, I have to encounter the hindering forces like,

• Procrastination,
• Time management,
• Urge to finish the task within one read, etc.

Procrastination is the biggest factor due to which I have to delay the study. Then comes the time management issue, another hurdle as I have lot of works to do so couldn’t take proper time out for studying and learning something new.

To cope with these devils, I have decided to employ Pomodoro technique and To-do-Lists in an attempt to manage my time well and bust procrastination. As if I do Pomodoro, it can help me finish my desired amount of work within shorter period than I usually do, mainly because of the more focus I gain while using Pomodoro and this focus can also help me retain the information more effectively in my memory box and also can help in busting procrastination.

And talking about To-do-lists, these can help manage my time quite well like, if I prepare a to-do-list a night before, the next morning I would be more prone to get all the tasks done in the stipulated time and thus save a fairly significant amount of time to relax and then to study a newer thing which otherwise is not much easier as I have lot of things in my mind to do but I end up doing small amount of tasks because of the unplanned doing, and thus carrying more stress in mind.

And we remain stressful because of the tasks still-to-do which had to be done on that specific day. Thus to-do-list is really an effective tool to stick with and have some extra time to do something extra like learning something new or anything, also by giving us time to relax our mind and body.

An urge to finish the task in one read or one sitting sometimes becomes so much overwhelming for me that I start to grind my teeth. And in this way, maybe I am able to retain a very small piece of information out of big learning period because I am not giving proper time to brain to process and handle information more effectively.

For this issue to resolve, I have made up my mind to use ‘Chunking technique’. Chunking technique means to divide something into pieces and thus learn something into pieces rather than swallowing the whole frog simultaneously.

Like, if I have to do a course on basic Psychology comprising 24 lectures, I will divide it into almost 4–6 lectures per day so that I can spend more time on just 4–6 lectures to understand better and let the brain handle and retain the information more effectively rather than doing all 24 lectures thus overwhelming my brain with information overload in one sitting. This technique would also allow brain to have more time to retain information, make me consistant on doing things, and avoid that overwhelming and distressing feeling to do things in one sitting.

Exercise is the most important tool as regular exercise keeps us healthy both mentally and physically and also keeps us active due to which we can stick to our routine more easily and be open to more newer things.

So, as a conclusion, I would say if someone faces challenges like I face while learning a new thing, he should follow the techniques I mentioned above.