• Recall is king. Everything should involve recall.
• Do your hardest thing first thing in the day, so it’s out of the way, and done! Cal Newport disagrees, calls this the amateur hour strategy, but I can see how he has evolved past this.
• Handwritten notes stick better than typed.
• Memorising is necessary to some extent in mathematics, because it lets you access formulas and concepts like a chunk. But you still need to understand the formula intuitively.
• Chunking is also king. Go over solutions again and again until they are deep neurological chunks. Chunking lets you fit more into your working memory. It also allows you to build on your knowledge later.
• Explaining a topic to someone else is a great way of understanding it better.
• Working with others is a good way to check your understanding. That’s why a study group is good. But the study group has to stay focused.
• Sleep well! It makes everything else invalid if you don’t sleep well
• For test taking, work on the hardest problem until you get stuck, then easy. This way you can use diffuse mode thinking to get insights
• Diffuse mode vs focused mode: diffuse mode sees big picture, focused mode the details, and both are needed. Diffuse mode gets you out of idea preoccupation.
• Study in constant, spaced out periods of time, interleaving topics. The more times you relearn something, the more it sticks.
• Don’t look at the answers and convince yourself you understand them. You need to be able to generate them yourself, starting from scratch. “What I cannot create, I do not understand!” - Feynman
• Skim a chapter before reading it. This gives you ‘mental hooks’ to be able to structure your knowledge. I think another way of putting this is that you establish the big picture
• Test yourself on everything, constantly. Practically, this means using review of previous concepts, redoing past exercises, redoing your quiz questions, and looking for exercises online to test your understanding.
• Use analogies! All the time. Refine them as your understanding of the topic grows deeper.
• The technique of problem solving, then instruction (Kapur 2012). Basically try to solve problems before you go through the text. You learn from your failures and you can apply the material in the greater context.
• Every mistake is a chance to learn. Think Edison: “I have discovered 9000 ways not to make a light bulb!”
• Studying before sleep is good. Your brain goes over the concepts before you sleep.
• If you can’t get a concept: look up the first place it was discovered. What need did it fulfil? Why was it invented?
• Procrastination: keystone bad habit. It often happens in ways you don’t realise. How do you start web surfing? Keeping a log of what you were doing when you started procrastinating helps you identify your procrastination triggers.
• Let others know when you’re working and you don’t want to be disturbed. A good point for this would be to set a time limit, and go into another room.

Finally, my favourite point.

Chunking is like compound interest. Earlier chunks help you grasp later chunks. Don’t worry about going slow. Err on the side of slow rather than fast. You want to remember these things five years later!