The Best Study Styles: Prolonged Concentration or Lots of Short Sessions?

A Discussion of Study Styles in our Cisco Cert Zone Community

It seems like every place I turn here of late, I'm reminded at the number of distractions in life. These distractions might be useful - a newscast at the lunch place, twitter from your phone, and the entire universe of information just a few Google searches away. It doesn't have to be technology either - could be daydreaming, or an unexpected need to do something for a family member. This whole line of thinking can be applied to many parts of life, but in this case, it got me thinking about the role of these distractions during the time you have set aside to prep for a Cisco exam. I've included a few polls to see what the trend is with those who happen across this blog space.

First, let me ramble for a bit of background. Everyone has different study styles that they develop over time. Part of what got me started was some extra time I've spent lately with my daughter (8), watching her sometimes spend 2X the required time on her homework because of these distractions. Of course, I've got work tasks that are due by certain dates, and I spent part of my time yesterday daydreaming about how to help my daughter focus more when doing her homework - in effect, doing the same things at work that she does at homework time. (This is definitely a do-as-I-say kinda thing.)

I kept thinking that she needs to learn to concentrate - but then I stopped myself. Maybe that's the wrong goal? We current parents sometimes joke that the 21^st century western culture almost teaches our kids to have Attention Deficit disorder (ADD), with 3 minutes a pop video games, TV, the ability to find/read something on the Internet in 5 minutes instead of the good old days when it used to take hours to find and learn the same thing in a real library. So, maybe the goal isn't to learn how to concentrate - well, ok, there has to be some concentration - but maybe it's how to quickly recover from the useful distractions and get back on track, and how to avoid the unproductive distractions.

Of course, figuring out the whole issue of how to develop good study habits may not be solvable from a discussion here in the blog, but it did drive me towards today's blog topic. The vast majority of folks studying for any Cisco cert exam spends a good chunk of their day with an Internet-connected phone, an Internet-connected PC, with skills to use them to study better. There are many useful study resources available at our fingertips. You might spend 100 total hours studying for some Cisco exam - so maybe some people work better with 600 different 10 minute study periods. Maybe it's 10 minutes searching for an reading an RFC, 10 minutes digging into a topic in a book, 10 minutes on a short e-learning video, or 10 minutes posting queries in a study forum (like Cisco's CLN). It would drive me crazy personally, but then again, my friends would claim I'm half way there already. ;-)

The temptation to use what's available to today is strong, mainly because it can be so useful. Just to give the younger of ya'll some perspective, back in 1990, I read my first RFC. To get it, I had to send a correctly-formatted email to an auto-responder system, which would then in turn email me an RFC. I couldn't use a browser to look at the RFCs, of course, because there was no such thing yet. I'd get the email back in a few hours to a few days later - and I was pleased. Before that, for good old SNA protocol stuff, you had to order the paper books from IBM, or better yet, see if your buddies down the hall happened to have the right book already. Now, if you really want to know how a protocol works, in that 10 minute window, you can search for the RFC, display it, and maybe read enough to get a specific question answered.

I know this is no revelation to anyone out there - but does the amount of information, in many different formats, with different levels of interactivity, cause all of us Cisco cert candidates to move away from the age old "concentrate on it for several hours at a time" study model to a "fit 10 minutes at a time" model? In particular, what tools and topics, if any, do you simply turn off when it's time to study?

 To stimulate the discussion a little further, imagine that you've set aside 2 hours tonight to study for some Cisco exam, and you don't know the next subject well at all. For instance, maybe you're studying for CCNA, and all you know about Spanning Tree is that it exists, and you think switches use it. Tell me things like: How many of the useful distractions do you purposefully disable or ignore, and which do you keep using? EG, do you keep your phone beside you? Answer calls? Read texts or emails? Check out the latest posts from buddies on Twitter? Allow yourself to Google to search for more info on the topic? Search around study sites? Search around other web sites for a mental break? Keep an eye on friends on social networking sites? Or do you take your primary study tool, be it an RFC, online (free) doc, book, video, whatever, and stay locked in?

Also, if you post, it'd be interesting to hear your general age range, e.g., I'm in my 40's. Plenty of you grew developed your study styles in school in an era with easy searchability for info in the Internet, and I'm sure that impacted what younger folks are more comfortable with. Thanks to you all...

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