The System (of how not to waste time when studying)

In trying to organize my reading ToDo list, I developed a SYSTEM in which I put my faith upon, that will quickly give me the means to learn the important things I must, in order to pass the first step of the doctoral routine.

It consists in classifying topics or articles or discussions into one of four categories, namely:

1- EFFICIENT
2- USEFUL
3- LOGICAL
4- INTERESTING

The above-mentioned categories are rated in decreasing order of importance. Now some explaining is due. In the following, I will refer to (topic|article|discussion|conversation) simply as "topic".

EFFICIENT means the topic will make be better in doing something I can already do, or avoid doing something in an inefficient, or unprofessional way. A simple example is when you learn to program your first algorithms in scientific computing (say, in Matlab/Octave for starters), the first thing you learn (or at least it should be) after it works, is to vectorize the code. Following this simple example, the EFFICIENT kind of stuff is of prime importance, hence it's number 1 priority in the list.

USEFUL is similar. The topic in question is important to learn, but maybe not ASAP. It will probably be used in a somewhat near future, so it receives number 2 priority.

LOGICAL is as in Spock's usual saying. I may not need the topic itself, but it broadens the understanding of an EFFICIENT or USEFUL topic, so it just makes sense to seek some degree of deep understanding in the later, by reading the LOGICAL topics.

INTERESTING is something I would really like to read or learn, but has whatsoever no positive impact in the above mentioned framework. It must be dealt with in the spare time. Actually I created this mostly to accommodate music listening and geek stuff I like.

If a topic doesn't fit in any of the above categories, it must be discarded at once.
(I can imagine Dr. Spock saying: "This is illogical").


There. The system. The method.

If a more complex framework is needed, one can adapt it to use weights into each category. Maybe some Linear Programming can be done in order to decide how much time exactly one should spend on each topic in one's list. This would certainly be interesting. Unfortunately, for me, not logical, so...