If you’re like me, self-studying mathematics is not a thing that goes smoothly. I think most of us know the drill: you start off motivated and start by studying a lot. But as time goes on, you start going slower, and you start skipping days. In the end you might even give up. In this entry, I want to share some tricks to avoid this.
You might like math all you want, but self-studying can feel very tedious many times. The idea is to really trick your brain into doing it. This is what happens to me: I plan to study 6 hours a day, and some days I do this and I feel really fulfilled. But some days, I wake up an hour too late, and I think ‘Oh, it is already too late to get in my 6 hours, I’ll just skip this day’ or ‘I have an appointment at 2, so I won’t be able to put my 6 hours so I won’t bother to do it today’. The paradox here is that the more you expect of yourself, the more you’ll procrastinate. The trick here is that of the micro-habit. A micro-habit is something you do every single day without ever skipping it. But the idea is that you do very little of it each day. Instead of doing 6 hours, you plan to do only 15 minutes, or one problem from a book each day. That way you got no excuses, after all what is just 15 minutes of your time? Everybody has time for this. The idea is to be really satisfied with those 15 minutes or that 1 problem and if you wish to stop there, that’s fine. If you feel like doing more, then you do more, but you shouldn’t force yourself. The weird thing is that this way you’ll actually end up doing math more than if you do 6 hours a day.
Another trick is to make it into a habit. It takes a month to form a habit, so you got to keep going for that time. The idea is to do your micro-habit always on the same hour of every day and to fit it into a broader schedule. For example, you wake up, take a shower, make yourself some nice hot coffee and then start doing some math. By fixing the math to your daily cycle, you are more inclined to ingrain it into your daily life and you’ll be skipping it less and less. In the beginning it is tough since your mind will not want to do it. But after the habit sets in, it is really hard to break.
Finally it is important to pace yourself right. Don’t speed through the book in a week. Go slow. Going slowly in math is very important since it allows the concepts to sink in and become second nature. If you read through an entire chapter in one day, you’re definitely doing it wrong. Take time to reflect on the concepts and to find connections. Do many exercises. Math is not a race, and if it is, the one who finishes first is probably last.