As someone who studied at two universities in different schools and also in different departments within these schools, I’ve seen my share of university professors, lecturers, research assistants and students. Through the pursuit of two rather unrelated degrees at the same time, namely Media and Cultural Studies as well as Philosophy I’ve especially met quite a range of students. Some of them were successful and very productive, but most of them were not. A lot of them weren’t interested in success anyway, so they didn’t really care about not being productive. Others tried hard to be productive, but only ended up doing busywork and failed to achieve anything.
While I successfully passed exam after exam with excellent marks they failed or just didn’t go to the exam or forgot to even apply for taking the exam in the first place. The most amazing and for me totally not understandable thing was that a lot of them were really working their butts off and still didn’t get anywhere with it. And even more strange or frustrating for people like me was that some of them got their degree without even having learned anything throughout their studies. I was quite amazed how many Media and Cultural Studies graduates I met who still didn’t know what a medium is! Obviously the people who got their degrees without the knowledge did something wrong and obviously the people who got the knowledge without getting their degree failed in a similar fashion. So, what went actually wrong for them?
Well, apart from them actually avoiding the hard work of learning and growing they did what was expected of them – I won’t even consider the percentage of people who don’t bother at all – they read their papers, they read their books according to their reading list and at the end of the semester they either sat their qualification – which was an essay, a presentation or something along these lines – or they sat their exam – an oral exam, an unseen one or a dissertation. Sometimes you could choose, sometimes you couldn’t.
The interesting thing about German universities is that they’re quite free. You get a module plan, but you have to choose your courses yourself. You won’t get a timetable or anyone making sure that you actually pass the right amount of exams. Friends of mine accidentally took 2 exams in the same module and forgot to take another module instead. One of my friends is a student now for … well more than 15 years and he is still not even close to finishing one of the old Magister/Diploma degrees. Whenever I ask him, when he will consider graduating, he just tells me to shut up. You can imagine how many unproductive people you can meet in a German university!
In 6 semesters, i.e. 3 years I finished a whole degree and 50% of another degree. In this time I took a whole semester off and in the semester afterwards I went abroad and my courses there contributed only about 12 lousy credits to my actual degree. Did I mention that I also started 2 months late, because I got my offer in late clearing? So, I basically finished 1 1/2 degrees in 2 years. People who started at the same time and never actually failed a course are still studying this one degree I already finished, they’re still studying it a year after I graduated!
Let’s find out what went wrong for the people who got the knowledge, but fail to get the degree after the appropriate time: Mostly they did all their reading or spent a semester in the library working through the textbook and then something went wrong. Some of them don’t apply for the exam, because they’re scared that they’re not prepared enough, some of them apply and don’t show up, because they started the revision and realized that they can’t remember a thing they read throughout the semester and some of them don’t realize that and fail even though they put a lot of effort in. It’s a question of dealing with a lot of information in the right way. They didn’t take notes, they didn’t think about likely exam contents and a lot of them didn’t think about the important bit at all: that there will be an exam! They actually did everything they were supposed to, but it turned out to be just a lot of busywork that didn’t get them anywhere. Their problem is that they are busy instead of productive.
Now let’s look at the other percentage of people, who got a degree, got a job and suddenly realized that they’re useless, because they didn’t learn anything in university. I got the impression that these people were people who had a lot of fun during their uni time, went out, got drunk, ditched the reading, didn’t show for the classes and then somehow managed to cram enough knowledge for the exams into their heads. For a dissertation you don’t have to have read the entire reading list, but rather go off and read about a topic in more detail. Some exams only test the knowledge in very little detail and therefore these ones are easy to pass with some last minute preparation. I passed some exams like this when a course didn’t interest me at all. Doing this with your entire degree means that your degree doesn’t say anything about your knowledge. The knowledge you gain through it are isolated islands of in depth knowledge that don’t fit to anything else, especially not into the broad flat knowledge in other subjects throughout your degree. In the end you know a little bit of everything, but not enough to actually be useful. Those people were neither busy nor productive, even though they were slightly more goal oriented than their busy bee pendants.
Productive in this relatively isolated university background means that you meet the degree objectives which specify the knowledge tested in your exams and that this knowledge also makes sense to you in a broader spectrum. In short: You gotta know your shit and prove it to them as well. If you’re just busy rooting through knowledge, then go to a library and look around. There is so much knowledge, you can’t possibly keep everything in your head, you just have to make sure that you know the structure of this knowledge and that you can put this knowledge into practice. Studying is mainly there to either get enough background knowledge to understand problems posed in this field and then solve them with this background (and a library close by) or it is there to give you some relevant skills with enough background knowledge that you can for example go and become a programmer. The former is the humanities and social sciences perspective, the latter is the science perspective.
Productivity forms on top of what is considered productive in a certain field of expertise. For lecturers having a lot of knowledge and being able to teach it are two different pairs of shoes. Researchers don’t have to teach, they only have to know. Programmers have to be able to put their knowledge in code, carpenters in objects and sales manager into sells. Being productive for a programmer means producing useful code. Productivity on top of that means to also be productive in as little time as possible. Productivity means cutting down on the busywork to get down to the juicy bits.
Busywork can mean filing information, sorting cables, correspondence with clients, phone calls, booking flights for a business trip etc. pp. Mainly it is all the work that doesn’t need real expertise. It needs time. Asking the question how you can be more productive therefore works on different levels: 1. How can I use my expertise more efficiently and 2. How can I reduce the work for which I don’t need any expertise. The former is something that personal development articles can’t really help you with. I can’t tell you how to be a better and more efficient accountant or sales manager, because it needs expertise that I don’t have. This distinction between the expertise and the reduction of busywork is generally really useful though and a lot of people never thought about this distinction.
Think about your own situation: What means “being productive” in your field of expertise? Can you book a training course to become more efficient in your field? Are there books to help you with that? On the other hand, think about the parts of your work that don’t need your expertise, think about your busywork and how you can reduce it. Can you afford an assistant to do this work for you? Can you use automation to cut down on the busywork? If you think it would help you to actually know how much time you spend with busywork instead of doing something that you’re actually needed for, then monitor how you spend your time for a week and then think about how you can improve the busywork – actual work ratio!
This concludes the productivity week on selfdev. Want to read more about productivity, then check out the other articles this week:
- On the meaning of productivity
- How to make your procrastination productive –
Part 2 - How to make your procrastination productive –
Part 1 - Productivity tips from a busy bee
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