Ultralearning Read online

  Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both. In my case, I procrastinated on writing this chapter because I had a lot of ideas and I was unsure where to start. My anxiety was that by committing something to paper, there was a good chance I might end up writing it poorly. Silly, I know. But most motives to procrastinate are silly when you verbalize them, yet that doesn’t stop them from ruling your life. Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

  Much procrastination is unconscious. You’re procrastinating, but you don’t internalize it that way. Instead you’re “taking a much-needed break” or “having fun, because life can’t always be about work all the time.” The problem isn’t those beliefs. The problem is when they’re used to cover up the actual behavior—you don’t want to do the thing you need to be focusing on, either because you are directly averse to doing it or because there’s something else you want to do more. Recognizing that you’re procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.

  Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else. You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.

  Once you can easily and automatically recognize your tendency to procrastinate, when it occurs, you can take steps to resist the impulse. One way is to think in terms of a series of “crutches” or mental tools that can help you get through some of the worst parts of your tendency to procrastinate. As you get better about taking action on the project you’re working on, these crutches can be changed or gotten rid of altogether when procrastination is no longer a problem.

  A first crutch comes from recognizing that most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break. Telling yourself that you need to spend only five minutes on the task before you can stop and do something else is often enough to get you started. After all, almost anyone can endure five minutes of anything, no matter how boring, frustrating, or difficult it may be. However, once you start, you may end up continuing for longer without wanting to take the break.

  As you progress, your first crutch may start to get in the way. You may find yourself starting but then, because the task is unpleasant and focus is hard, taking advantage of the five-minute rule too often to be productive. If this is the case and your problem has switched from being unable to get started to taking breaks too often, you can try something a little harder, say the Pomodoro Technique: twenty-five minutes of focus followed by a five-minute break.* Keep in mind that it’s essential not to switch to a harder goal when you’re still mostly impeded by an earlier problem. If you still can’t start working, even with the five-minute rule, switching to harder and more demanding crutches may backfire.

  In some cases, the moment of frustration may not come at the beginning, but still be predictable. When I was learning Chinese characters through flash cards, for instance, I’d always feel an urge to give up whenever I couldn’t remember the answer to one of my cards. I knew this feeling was temporary, however, so I added a rule for myself: I can only quit when I’ve remembered the most recent card correctly. In practice, the cards were quick, so this usually only took an extra twenty or thirty seconds of persistence; however, my patience for doing flash cards went up dramatically as a result.

  Eventually, if working on your project is not troubled by extreme procrastination, you may want to switch to using a calendar on which you carve out specific hours of your day in advance to work on the project. This approach allows you to make the best use of your limited time. However, it works only if you actually follow it. If you find yourself setting a daily schedule with chunked hours and then frequently ignore it to do something else, go back to the start and try building back up again with the five-minute rule and then the Pomodoro Technique.

  Eventually, you may reach Mary Somerville’s level of focus, one that she could activate on a moment-to-moment basis, making a decision as to whether she had time to spare. Despite her formidable capacity for focus, it seems that even Somerville would deliberately block out time for the study of particular subjects. Therefore it was a conscious habit, not merely spontaneous studying, that enabled her many successes. For myself, I find that some learning activities are so intrinsically interesting that I can focus on them for a long time without pressure. I generally had no problem watching lectures during the MIT Challenge, for instance. Other tasks, however, required the five-minute rule for me to get past my desire to procrastinate. If I had to scan and upload my files, they’d often build up in a pile before I would finally tackle them. Don’t ever feel bad if you have to back up a stage, either; you cannot control your aversions or tendency to distraction, but with practice you can lessen their impact.

  Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)

  The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus. This can happen when you’ve sat yourself down to study or practice something, but then your phone buzzes and you look away, a friend knocks on the door to say hello, or you spin off into a daydream only to realize you’ve been staring at the same paragraph for the last fifteen minutes. Like the challenge of initiating focus, sustaining focus is important if you want to make progress learning hard things. Before I talk about how to sustain focus, however, I’d like to raise a question about what kind of focus is the best to sustain.

  Flow, a concept pioneered by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is often used as the model for what ideal focus looks like. This is the state of mind you associate with being “in the zone.” You stop being interrupted by distracting thoughts, and your mind becomes completely absorbed in the task at hand. Flow is the enjoyable state that slides right between boredom and frustration, when a task is neither too hard nor too easy. This rosy picture, however, does have some detractors. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, the researcher behind deliberate practice, argues that flow has characteristics that are “inconsistent with the demands of deliberate practice for monitoring explicit goals and feedback and opportunities for error correction. Hence, skilled performers may enjoy and seek out flow experiences as part of their domain-related activities, but such experiences would not occur during deliberate practice.”2 Ultralearning, with its similar focus on performance-driven learning, would also appear to be unsuitable for flow, in the same way that Ericsson originally argued for deliberate practice.

  My own thought is that a flow state is not impossible during ultralearning. Many cognitive activities associated with learning are in the range of difficulty that makes flow possible or even likely. However, I also agree with Ericsson that learning often involves entering into situations in which the difficulty makes flow impossible. Additionally, the self-consciousness that is absent in flow may need to be present in both ultralearning and deliberate practice, as you need to consciously adjust your approach. Working on a programming problem at the limit of your abilities, pushing yourself to write in a style that is unfamiliar to you, or trying to minimize your accent when speaking
a new language is each a task that goes against the automatic patterns you may have accumulated. This resistance to what is natural may make flow harder to achieve, even though it is ultimately beneficial for accomplishing your learning goal.

  My advice? Don’t worry about flow. In some learning tasks, you’ll achieve it easily. I often felt as though I were in a flow state while doing practice problems during the MIT Challenge, drilling vocabulary while learning languages, or drawing. At the same time, don’t feel guilty if flow doesn’t come automatically. Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow. Remember, even if your learning is intense, your use of the skill later on will not be. Investments made in pushing through learning now will make skillful practice a much more enjoyable activity down the road.

  After considering how you should focus, let’s consider duration. How long should you study? While this problem presumes that you’re getting distracted and giving up focusing long before you should, the literature on focus does not suggest that ever-longer periods of focus are optimal from a learning standpoint. Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together. Similarly, the phenomenon of interleaving suggests that even within a solid block of focus, it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembered.3 Therefore, if you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one. Doing so has trade-offs, however, so if your study time becomes more and more fractured, it may be difficult to learn at all.

  What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks. If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn. Of course, these are merely efficiency guidelines; you ultimately need to find what works best for you, considering not only what is optimal for the purposes of retention but also what fits your schedule, personality, and work flow. For some people, as little as twenty minutes might fit their lives best; others may prefer to spend an entire day learning.

  Supposing that you’ve found a chunk of time to learn that is as optimal for you as it can be, how can you sustain your focus during that time? I’ve found that there are three different sources that cause focus to break down and distraction to occur. If you’re struggling to concentrate, look at each of these three in turn.

  Distraction Source 1: Your Environment

  The first source of distraction is your environment. Do you have your phone turned off? Are you accessing the internet, watching television, or playing games? Are there distracting noises and sounds? Are you prepared to work, or might you need to stop to look for pens, a book, or a lamp? This is a source of the problem of sustaining focus, but it’s also an aspect people frequently ignore for the same reasons they ignore the fact that they are procrastinating. Many people tell themselves that they focus better while listening to music, let’s say, but the reality might be that they don’t want to work on a given task, so music provides a low-level, amusing distraction. This isn’t to condemn anyone who doesn’t work in a perfect environment. I certainly don’t. Rather, be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Do you actually get more work done with the television on in the background, or do you just like hearing the television and feel that it makes the work more bearable? If it’s the latter, you can probably train yourself to avoid multitasking and enjoy greater productivity. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task at hand. It’s better to rid yourself of this vice than to strengthen bad habits of ineffective learning.

  Distraction Source 2: Your Task

  The second source is the task you’re trying to learn. Certain activities, due to their nature, are harder to focus on than others. I find reading harder to focus on than watching a video, even when the content is the same. Whenever you have a choice between using different tools for learning, you may want to consider which is easier to focus on when making that decision. This choice of materials shouldn’t supersede other considerations—I wouldn’t opt for a tool that is much less direct (Principle 3) or offers no feedback (Principle 6), simply for the sake of greater focus. Fortunately, these principles are generally aligned, and it is actually the somewhat less effective methods that are less cognitively demanding and therefore harder to sustain focus on. Sometimes you can subtly modify what you’re doing to enable greater focus. If I have difficult reading to do, I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me. I do this mostly because, while I’m writing, I’m less likely to enter into the state of reading hypnosis where I’m pantomiming the act of reading while my mind is actually elsewhere. More intense strategies, whether solving problems, making something, or writing and explaining ideas aloud, are harder to do in the background of your mind, so there are fewer opportunities for distractions to creep in.

  Distraction Source 3: Your Mind

  The third source is your mind itself. Negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus. This problem has two sides. First, it’s obvious that a clear, calm mind is best for focusing on almost all learning problems. A mind filled with angers, anxieties, frustrations, or sadness will be harder to study with. This means that if you’re struggling with problems in your life, you’ll have a harder time learning well, and you may want to look at dealing with those first. Being in a toxic relationship, having anxiety about some other task you’re procrastinating on, or simply knowing you’re going down the wrong road in life can interfere with your motivation, so it’s often best not to ignore these issues. However, sometimes there’s nothing you can do about your emotions, and feelings arise spontaneously without requiring you to do something about them. A random worry about some future event might bubble up, let’s say, but you know you shouldn’t stop the activity you’re working on right now in order to deal with it. Here the solution is to acknowledge the feeling, be aware of it, and gently adjust your focus back to your task and allow the feeling to pass.

  Allowing negative feelings to pass, of course, is a lot easier said than done. Emotions can hijack the mind and make the process of returning awareness to your project feel like a Sisyphean task. If I’m really anxious about something, for instance, I may feel as though I’m returning my attention to a task, only for it to jump away fifteen seconds later, repeating again and again for an hour or more. In such moments, recognize that by not reacting to the emotion at the level of abandoning your task entirely, you’ll diminish its intensity in the future. You’ll also strengthen your commitment to continue working in future situations like this, so they will become easier. Mindfulness researcher and psychiatrist Susan Smalley and meditation teacher Diana Winston of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center argue that when we are engaging in a behavior, our typical reaction is to try to suppress distracting thoughts. If instead you “learn to let it arise, note it, and release it or let it go,” this can diminish the behavior you’re trying to avoid.4 If it ever feels as though continuing working is pointless because you’re so distracted by a negative emotion that you can’t possibly work, remember that the long-term strengthening of your ability to persist on this task will be useful, so the time is not wasted even if you don’t accomplish much in this particular learning session.

  Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus

  A third, problem, subtler than the other two, has to do with the quality and direction of your attention. Supposing you’ve managed to wrangle the problems of procrastination and distraction down long enough to focus on your task, how should you do it? What’s the optimal
degree of alertness to maximize your learning?

  Here there is some interesting research relating two different variables, arousal and task complexity, to the question of how you should apply your attention. Arousal (the general, not sexual, variety) is your overall feeling of energy or alertness. When you’re sleepy, you have low arousal; when you’re exercising, you have high arousal. This bodily phenomenon occurs due to sympathetic nervous system activation, and it consists of a range of effects in the body that often occur together, including faster heart rate, increased blood pressure, pupil dilation, and sweating. Mentally, arousal also influences attention. High arousal creates a feeling of keen alertness, which is often characterized by a fairly narrow range of focus, but one that can also be somewhat brittle.5 This can be very good for focusing on relatively simple tasks or ones that require intense concentration toward a small target. Athletes require this kind of concentration to throw a dart at a target or shoot a basketball properly, where the task is fairly simple but requires concentration to execute properly. Too much arousal, however, and focus starts to suffer.6 It becomes very easy to be distracted, and you may have a hard time holding focus at any particular spot. Anyone who’s drunk too much coffee and feels jittery knows how this can impact your work.

  More complex tasks, such as solving math problems or writing essays, tend to benefit from a more relaxed kind of focus.7 Here the space of focus is often larger and more diffuse. This has advantages when, in order to solve the problem you’re facing, you must consider many different inputs or ideas. Trying to solve a complex math problem or write a love sonnet is likely to require this mental quietness. When doing a particularly creative task, if you get stuck, you may benefit from no focus at all.8 Taking a break from the problem can widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and you can make new discoveries. This is a scientific explanation of “Eureka!” moments occurring during leisure or while falling asleep, instead of while at work. Still, before you begin to think that sloth is the key to creativity, it’s clear that such an approach often only works when one has been focusing on a problem for long enough that the residue of ideas remains in one’s mind. Not working at all is unlikely to lead to creative genius, but taking a break may help breathe fresh perspective into a hard problem.