A studying plan organizes three things: What you have to learn. How you’re going to learn it. When you’re going to invest the time. Although it sounds simple, most students don’t make a detailed study plan. Of those that do, they often make mistakes that render the plan highly unrealistic…

A reader emailed me citing a few examples of people who abruptly changed their lives: they started exercising, built better habits, studied hard and got good grades, moved up in their careers … basically turning themselves into “successful” people seemingly overnight. …

What are the best books to read to become a better learner? (Aside from my book, of course.) I get asked this question a lot, though most of my recent reading lists have been more academic and somewhat removed from immediate applications. Today, I’d like to change that and share…

Using applications like ChatGPT requires some care. Part of the difficulty is that ChatGPT’s human-like conversation abilities can be deceptive. Feeling like you’re talking to a real person encourages you to rely on conversational expectations that may not hold with a machine. For instance, we generally expect that most people…

I’d like to share a selection of some of the papers that had a significant influence on my thinking and might do the same for you too. Side note: I’ve tried, when possible, to include links that follow to a PDF in case you want to read it yourself. Where…

1. Beginning to Read by Marilyn Adams I didn’t expect to find a 500-page book on the science of early reading to be interesting. But I was enthralled — both by the amount of work that has been done on figuring out how people learn to read (and the best way to teach them) and by what…

A recent Gallup poll finds that American adults are reading fewer books each year: Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three…

If you’ve been following productivity advice for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced the following cycle: You find a new tool, system or motivational slogan. You get excited, work hard and get far more done than usual, seemingly proving that the new thing works. A few weeks pass, the…

Scientists receive fewer citations as they get older. Matt Clancy explains: Pick any author at random, and on average the papers they publish earlier in their career, whether as first author or last author, will be more highly cited and cited by a more diverse group of fields, than a…