Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe on Learning Like a Pro

The world is morphing and to understand what is going on around us, we have to be lifelong learners.  Learning how to learn or learning like a pro becomes imperative if we are to navigate this new world of ours successfully.

Oakley and Schewe provide us with a book and online course to guide us through science of learning.  There are several sessions I enjoyed.  

One topic stands out for me, however - procrastination.  

According to Oakley and Schewe, procrastination dogs us when faced with heavy tasks.  When faced with such difficulties, part of the brain called the insular cortex registers pain.  Rather than facing the pain, we resort to ameliorating it by resorting to activities like watching funny videos, playing games. or engaging on social media.

One countermeasure effective against procrastination is the Pomodoro technique.  We can break down our tasks to be manageable through multiple twenty to twenty-five minutes intensive sessions followed by five minutes of relaxation.  The relaxation is as important as the taxing sessions.

When we relax, the hippocampus, part of the brain tasked with organizing and creating long term memories, gets to do its job efficiently.

What is Pomodoro?  Oakley and Schewe tell us that Francesco Cirillo, the man credited with creating the technique in the 1980s, used tomato shaped timer to manage the sessions.  Pomodoro, in Italian, means tomato.  

I am grateful for Oakley and Schewe's clever guide on avoiding procrastination and being sustainably productive.