How To Be A High School Superstar Part 5

Facebook Is the Tool of the Devil

My local library got me into Dartmouth. To be more specific, I mean an isolated row of study carrels, stacked against a windowless wall across from the magazine racks. This library, you should understand, occupied a small lot next to the midsized, central New Jersey public high school I attended. This made it easy for me to visit after school, without having to make a special trip. In the fall of my senior year, when it came time to study for the SAT, I took full advantage of the proximity of this ideal study location.

The thing about preparing for the SAT is that taking practice tests is hard. My mind has a way of wandering when faced with a difficult ch.o.r.e. This proves especially true, as I discovered around this time, when you're in a household with multiple screaming siblings and every other imaginable distraction.

"That's enough for today" was the inevitable declaration that signaled that I had once again succ.u.mbed to temptation.

This sad state of affairs led me to the library's study carrels. Once I was there, something about the silence and the idea that I was far from home and its distractions, in a place that served no purpose other than being a quiet spot to work, focused my attention. I could concentrate like a monk when sitting alone back by those lonely racks of magazines. And this concentration helped me master the art of taking the SAT. The resulting high score put schools like Dartmouth on my admissions radar. (Recall, as I explained in the "Common Questions" section, that the first step to college acceptance is getting your grades and scores above the minimum threshold for your reach school. Only then can the relaxed superstar lifestyle work its magic.) I became so enthralled by the concentration generated at the library that I began to do more of my schoolwork in its quiet recesses. The effect was profound. When I would arrive at the library and say, "I am going to work for the next two hours, then go home," I could accomplish a sizable amount of work. By contrast, if I spent two hours "working" at home, ten feet from an Internet connection and a flight of stairs away from a TV, my work amount plummeted.

This brings me to the following crucial point: Your environment plays a huge role in how well and how long you do your schoolwork. If you're careful about when, where, and for how long you study, you'll experience a significant reduction in the time required to do good work. Here are some basic work rules:

Rule 1: Work in Isolation

Find your own equivalent of my isolated library carrel. It should be a location that's silent and separated from easy distractions. Don't choose somewhere near your home or where your friends regularly congregate. It should be enough of a pain to get from this location to anywhere interesting that you're likely to actually stick with your work until you're done.

Rule 2: Work in Fifty-Minute Chunks Followed by Ten-Minute Breaks

Break up your work into hour-long chunks. Focus during the first fifty minutes of the hour, and then take a break for ten minutes. Once the break is done, immediately start your next chunk. You can tweak these amounts to better suit your own energy rhythms, but I've found that the fifty/ten split almost always works best for students. After about three hours of this rhythm you need a longer break; make it somewhere between twenty minutes and a half hour. (Fortunately, if you follow all of the advice in this playbook, you should rarely need more than two or three of these chunks on any given day, so these long breaks may be unnecessary.)

Rule 3: Get as Much Work Done in School as Possible

When interviewing underscheduled students for Part 1 of this book, I was surprised by the amount of schoolwork they were able to accomplish during the school day. On further reflection, I saw that this strategy makes a lot of sense. For one thing, during the school day you don't have the possibility of stopping to watch TV or go online, so you concentrate more easily. Underscheduled students take advantage of this forced concentration to whip through homework fast. You may protest that you're already busy during the school day, but experience has taught me that most students do have quite a bit of free time sprinkled throughout their schedule-they just need to know where to look. For example, several of the underscheduled students I interviewed accomplished a lot of their math or science homework during cla.s.s. As the teacher explains Lewis structures on the chalkboard in chemistry cla.s.s, you can immediately be putting that knowledge to work, while it's still fresh in your mind, to make progress on the related homework problems. Similarly, if you have a study hall period, forget idle gossip and go to the library to get stuff done. And so on. Once you activate the mind-set that you're trying to squeeze work into every free slice of the school day, you'll be surprised by how much actually gets accomplished.

Rule 4: Avoid State-Transition Cues

A state-transition cue is any activity that shifts your mind-set from high-intensity concentration to low-energy relaxation. Checking your Facebook feed is a state-transition cue-your mind has jettisoned its focused work mind-set for the low-energy search for easy stimulation. Turning on the TV, checking e-mail, or texting a friend are also state-transition cues.

As you might imagine, once such a transition occurs, it becomes very difficult to return to work-and the work you do manage to do will be slow, inefficient, and sloppy. In recognition of this danger, foster an obsession for avoiding these cues-like a vampire shunning garlic-until your student workday is complete. After this workday is done, of course, go nuts. But before then, be on your guard.

Going straight from school to an isolated study location, of the type described in rule 1, is an easy way to steer clear of these transitions. Setting simple and clear rules also helps. You might declare absolutely no Internet until after dinner, or disable the text message notifications on your cell phone until after you get home. If you don't own a car, you can use this situation to your advantage. Find an isolated location that is walkable from your school, but not from your home, and then arrange to be picked up by a parent right before dinner-perhaps on his or her way back from work. This physically prevents you from encountering most transition cues; you're stuck in an isolated study location, so you might as well study. Once you know your enemy (in this case, the transition cues), it is much easier to defeat it.

Rule 5: Keep Your Energy Levels Stoked

If your physical energy gets low, studying becomes a dreary ch.o.r.e. So be vigilant about keeping yourself fed. After school you should be eating something that provides good energy once every hour or so. The simplest rule for choosing these snacks is to avoid anything that comes in a plastic bag or wrapper. Such items aren't really food; they're just fancy-looking mashes of corn syrup and artificial flavoring, and they will make you crash. Anything with protein (e.g., peanut b.u.t.ter, cheese, yogurt), or anything unchanged from its natural state (e.g., fruit), will give you longer-lasting energy. I don't care about your Doritos craving. You can eat c.r.a.p when your student workday is over. During the heat of battle, you need every ounce of concentration you can muster.

Rule 6: Do Not, under Any Circ.u.mstances, Do Any Work Anywhere Near an Internet Connection

In rule 4, I described going online as a common state-transition cue that should be avoided until after the student workday is completed. This point is so important, however, that I'm giving it a rule to itself. I don't want there to be any ambiguity here, so let me be clear: Do not do any work while online. If you're writing a paper, or working on math problems, or taking notes on your history textbook, with an instant messenger window open, there's absolutely no way that you can realize the ideal student workweek. The work done in this state is poor, it is draining, and it takes forever. If you work while online, you will end up staying up late, you will end up doing shoddy work, and you will fail to achieve an underscheduled lifestyle-and therefore lose all the benefits that this lifestyle generates.

This rule is so important that I sometimes advise parents to physically remove the cable connecting the computer to the modem until their kids are done with their homework for the day. If the student needs to do research for a paper, parents and student can agree on an exact time frame in which this research will be done and the parents can reconnect the cable for only this period.

When it comes to productivity, there's no avoiding this truth: Facebook is the tool of the devil. If you want to significantly reduce the time you spend working, then you absolutely have to keep the Internet far, far away until you're completely done for the day.

Time Management for Students Who Have No Interest in Time Management

When I advise college undergraduates, I spend a lot of time discussing time management. These students face demanding commitments, from rigorous academic work to joblike clubs. Because of this reality, I offer them a mature collection of tools, referenced by the decidedly uns.e.xy name Getting Things Done for College Students (or GTDCS, as my most hard-core readers like to call it). They have in-boxes, calendars, next-action lists, and complicated project rules. It's not easy, but for many of these college students, it's crucial.

Fortunately, high school students don't need anywhere near this level of complexity to manage their time, especially if they're living an underscheduled life. The high school workload is easy and predictable enough to make such intricate planning unnecessary. However, if you let your schedule flap completely loose in the erratic winds of your work responsibilities, you're often going to be dragged into trouble. a.s.signment deadlines will sneak up and collide, and you'll be forced to scramble, maybe late into the night, to get everything done. This will happen again and again. You'll hate it, and it'll destroy your attempts to maintain the ideal student workweek. With this in mind, I suggest a simple technique that will help you avoid such a fate.

I'll start with the underlying concept. The key to avoiding work pileups, not surprising, is to spread out your work. If you need five focused hours to study for a biology test, divide the task over a few days to avoid having to keep five full hours free on any one night. In general, if you break big projects into lots of small chunks, it becomes much less likely that too many time requirements will acc.u.mulate on a single day.

This idea is straightforward, but a lot of students will still balk, claiming that they're const.i.tutionally incapable of starting work early. They will then utter, in hushed tones, their fear of "procrastination." Let me demystify this fear once and for all. Most procrastination comes from bad work habits. If you study haphazardly, in big, painful rote-review sessions, never quite sure what you should be doing or for how long, your mind will revolt and try to stop you. On the other hand, if you follow the advice given earlier in this playbook, and apply smart review techniques in focused locations with high energy levels, you will reduce the procrastination urge to something you can conquer.

The challenge that remains is constructing the plans for how you'll spread out your work. You cannot rely on a spontaneous decision to start work early on a long-term project. Tomorrow will always seem like a better day than today, and you'll end up waiting until the day before. What you need is a concrete schedule, constructed in advance, that spells out exactly which days you're supposed to be working on each big a.s.signment, and what you'll be doing during those days. You can then blindly follow this plan-avoiding the need to fight the daily mental battle generated by asking yourself: "Should I work today?"

This brings me to the simple time-management technique I promised in the heading above. Here's what I want you to do: Buy a large calendar and place it somewhere where you'll see it. I recommend the fridge, as this makes your work commitments public. If your mom knows you're supposed to get started on your paper the Sunday before it's due, you'll gain two immediate benefits: (1) she'll be impressed by your studiousness and therefore be more lenient where it counts, and (2) you'll be more likely to actually do the work, because if you don't, you'll have to face the inevitable questions about why you're ignoring your schedule.

Once you've set up your calendar, use it to record the due date of every major test, paper, and a.s.signment. This ensures that you'll see, every day, in plain black ink, what deadlines are looming. Never again will due dates sneak up on you.

You're not done yet. The second piece to this technique is to follow what I call the two-week method. Each evening, right before dinner, take a look at your calendar. Find the current date, then jump ahead two weeks. For each deadline on this future date, you need to construct a plan for how you'll complete the corresponding work. First, make a rough estimate of what steps are needed and how long each will take. Break this work into a collection of reasonable-sized chunks-perhaps one to two hours each-that can fit easily into your student workday. Next, schedule the chunks on specific days on your calendar-actually write them down on those days.

Imagine, for example, that you look at your calendar and see that a history exam is two weeks away. It's time to create a plan. You might decide that you need around two hours to catch up on the final reading a.s.signments, another three hours to do active-recall review on the big ideas captured in your notes, and around an hour to memorize the dates on your flashcards. It adds up to six hours of studying time. You might then break this amount up into three chunks, each around two hours. Let's a.s.sume that the test is on a Friday. Furthermore, let's a.s.sume that, during the week of the test, you have a track meet on Monday and plans with a friend on Thursday. Noticing these existing commitments, you might schedule the first chunk on the Sunday before the test, the second on Tuesday, and the third on Wednesday.

To make things more interesting, let's a.s.sume that you also have an English essay due that same Friday. Once again, you shift into planning mode. Using the three-day paper-writing rule presented earlier in this playbook, you know that you need three chunks of time: one for research, one for writing, and one for editing. Because the paper is short, one hour each for the first and third chunks, and two hours for the second, will suffice. Looking at your schedule, you notice that your free time is rapidly diminishing. Let's a.s.sume that in addition to your test studying on Tuesday, you have to tackle your weekly math homework on that night as well. You fear that adding work on the paper to this day would make the pile too high. With this in mind, you move back another week in your schedule, and put your research chunk on that Thursday. This is pretty far in advance, but your calendar made it clear that time was too limited to fit all three chunks into the week before. You might then put your writing chunk on Sunday, and the editing chunk on the Wednesday before the deadline. (Notice, I didn't consider Friday, as it's always nice to keep this night free.) Once you see the plans in plain ink on your calendar, they seem like an obvious way to break up the work on those projects. And they are. But without the calendar, you would never have stumbled into this schedule. There was no way that a week before a paper deadline, for example, you'd suddenly think: "Maybe I should start working on my outline today." The calendar captures the reality of the work landscape you face, and helps you navigate an efficient and low-stress path through it. This simple tool, coupled with the two-week method, will keep your student workday intact, even through the busiest of periods.

When All Else Fails ... Quit

I've just taken you through a lot of advice on study habits, procrastination defusing, and time management, along with comparisons of a certain social network to the devil (which will likely earn me fun letters from the more religious among you). My hope is that this advice proves sufficient to streamline your current schedule to fit inside the ideal student workweek. If, however, you're the type of student who lobbied your school for permission to squeeze in an extra hour of AP cla.s.ses during your lunch period-the type of student who views extracurricular activities as a volume business-then calendars and isolated study carrels won't be enough. The advice will help, but it won't get you down to the ideal schedule. To accomplish this final goal, you must wield the underscheduling weapon of last resort: quitting.

Fear not, I won't ask you to haphazardly hack and slash your commitments down to an unimpressive pile of slackerish nothing. There's a fine art to quitting without reducing your perceived impressiveness. In the next two subsections, I'll introduce you to this art. Coupled with the smart work habits already described, it will enable you to get to the underscheduled lifestyle you need to enter the world of the relaxed superstar.

The Art of Quitting, Part 1: The Final-Straw Effect

I'll begin by focusing on your course load. In an age in which many students consider the number of AP courses they take as a key metric for college admissions, it's common for homework alone to be enough to bust your ideal student workweek-even if you have smart work habits. If this is the case for you, then your only option is to reduce your course burden.

When considering your schedule, divide your courses into three categories: s...o...b..at, required, and elective. s...o...b..at courses are your most impressive offerings. Depending on your ability, they might be AP courses, or they might be honors-level courses. Regardless, they're the most rigorous subjects you're taking and they're important for establishing a high level of academic rigor on your college application. By contrast, required courses are those you have to take because they satisfy some requirement you need for graduation. You may not care much about them, but they're there because they have to be. Finally, elective courses are those that are not particularly compet.i.tive-you choose them, mainly, because they seem fun, and to fill the remaining free slots in your schedule. These might include an English course dedicated to Shakespeare or something more technical in nature, like architecture.

The question you face is how to take this collection of courses and reduce it down to something less time demanding. Fortunately, the right answer doesn't usually include a drastic reduction to the number and difficulty of your subjects. The more common experience is that a student's academic schedule is fine until he adds those extra courses that destabilize the whole thing. Those final courses become the straw that breaks the camel's back-taking a schedule that was stable and manageable and pushing it into a stressful, time-consuming mess. I call this the Final-Straw Effect, and knowing about it is good news for you, as it means that you don't have to take a hacksaw to your courses to gain some relief-a carefully wielded scalpel will serve instead.

For example, imagine a student named Charlie. a.s.sume he's eager to gain acceptance to the Ivy League, and he believes that having his guidance counselor check that all-important "toughest course schedule available" box on his application is crucial to his goal. This leads him to pack as much as possible into his course load. For his s...o...b..at courses, he's planning on taking AP English, AP European history, AP biology, and AP chemistry. For his required course, he's taking geometry. For his electives, he's signed up for art history and computer science. Add gym and lunch to the mix, and that's one full schedule.

Charlie knows that a similar schedule proved overwhelming during the previous semester. Even with efficient work habits, he was often up late, struggling to keep pace with his a.s.signments. He wants to know what to cut before the next semester begins.

He doesn't need drastic reductions. His problem comes from having one or two hard courses too many-creating just enough work to ensure that deadlines frequently collide and pile up, and to transform any missed day into a disaster that necessitates late-night catch-ups.

Charlie's first step is to remove his single most time-demanding s...o...b..at course. The removal of one such course won't change an admissions officer's perception of his academic rigor, but it can significantly reduce his stress. For Charlie, this thinking leads him to kick AP chemistry off the island-hearing horror stories of long lab write-ups and complicated exams has caused him to rank this course as the most demanding of his s...o...b..ats.

Summary of step 1: If you foresee that your upcoming course schedule will be too demanding, your first move should be to jettison the scariest of your s...o...b..at courses.

Returning to Charlie, let's a.s.sume that he still needs more time reductions. His required course is there for a reason and cannot be lost, so the next place to look is his electives. Here's the great thing about these courses: they're hiding in the shadow of their s...o...b..at brethren-so no one will notice what you do with them. You can take advantage of this reality to gain significant time reductions without making your course load appear less rigorous. a.s.sume, for example, that Charlie's art history course has a reputation as a silent killer-memorizing all those dates, he heard, takes forever. Because electives fly under the radar, he confidently drops the course and replaces it with a study hall. Not only does this remove a big time sinkhole from his schedule, but it adds forty-five new minutes during school each day to get a head start on his work for other courses. The total gains, therefore, are huge.

Summary of step 2: The more you reduce the time demands of your electives, the easier your life will become, without decreasing the perceived toughness of your schedule.

To simplify the process of reducing the demands of your electives, you should keep two things in mind. First, as in Charlie's example, don't hesitate to replace an elective you're ambivalent about with a study hall. A study hall adds a negative amount of work to your schedule by providing extra time to reduce the load generated by other cla.s.ses. Ambitious students sometimes fear that taking study halls will mark them as not being the type of hyperdiligent m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t they think impresses admissions officers. Forget this fear. Your s...o...b..at courses indicate that you can handle a college-level course load. No one cares whether or not you took that pottery elective.

My second suggestion about electives is to be wary of silent killers. A silent killer, also as in Charlie's example, is a course that seems nonrigorous but ends up generating a huge amount of work. I've met students who had to dedicate many late nights to finishing sketches for a drawing course, or getting the glue to dry cleanly on a model for an architecture elective. These courses can deep-six your schedule with little to offer in return. Avoid them at all costs.

In the end, Charlie's final schedule seems just as impressive as his original schedule. But by dropping the hardest s...o...b..at course and replacing a silent-killer elective with a study hall, he has significantly reduced the demands on his time. This is the beauty of the Final-Straw Effect: you can gain huge benefits from nearly unnoticeable changes.

I'll conclude with a final big-picture warning. Always allow genuine interest to trump the rules I've just presented. If you're excited about a course, you should stick with it. As I emphasized earlier, authentic engagement is the fuel of interestingness. This doesn't give you permission, however, to maintain an unreasonable schedule. Instead, take your favorite courses out of consideration when you start cutting.

The Art of Quitting, Part 2: The Activity Andy Test

Now that you've lightened the demands of your course load, it's time to examine the other side of the student work coin: your extracurricular activities. If you still haven't achieved the ideal student workweek, even with efficient habits and an intelligently reduced course schedule, your extracurricular activities are the next logical place to start making some serious cuts. Don't be nervous about these reductions. Many students labor under the belief that surviving an overwhelming activity load, like surviving a killer course load, is a mark of ability and commitment that impresses admissions officers. This belief is flawed. Remember Olivia and Jessica: their extracurricular schedules were negligible, yet they still breezed into their reach schools. Their secret was interestingness, which trumped hardness and busyness during the admissions process. The path toward interestingness, however, requires an open schedule, so it's time to say goodbye to your position as secretary for the French club. I'm about to teach you how to underschedule your extracurricular life.

Imagine a student. He's plain vanilla through and through. He's not dumb, but he's not particularly bright either. His grades are fine, but not great. He's generally a happy guy, but not all that ambitious. I'll call this unremarkable soul Activity Andy.

Now consider your own list of extracurricular activities. For each activity, ask yourself the following question: Is this something Activity Andy could do?

It's a simple query, but it touches the core of what makes some activities worth it and some a waste of time. Any club that requires only that you show up and invest a certain number of hours, for example, is something Activity Andy could do. Ditto for any activity that's open to anyone who can pay. Examples of such Andy-friendly commitments include becoming vice president of the French club, attending a summer program for high school students at a nearby university (i.e., a money mill that feeds on students' college admissions ambition), going on an expensive, prepackaged international mission trip, or being a non-officer member on the student newspaper or yearbook staff.

Activity Andy could do any of these things. They require a reasonable investment of time. Some require money. But there's nothing about them that requires any particular sparkle of creativity or any real drive. There's no whiff of innovation or hint that the student is curious about the world. They'll all glaze the eyes of admissions officers and serve mainly to make your life more difficult. In fact, as you'll learn in Part 2 of this book, partic.i.p.ating in too many of these activities can actually make you appear less impressive to the outside world.