The Middle Things.

It was 10:30 at night. The most important science test of my year was coming up, the last one, the one that determined if I got an A in the class. I opened my notes.

I immediately started looking through them, scanning for topics I didn't know. I didn't worry about every single little thing, but I also didn't just look at things so big picture that when I took the test, I wasn't able to catch the nuance. I looked in the middle, the things that we'd like to graze over. The things that are boring.

I was able to secure the A after that test. But what was the reason that I was even in a situation where I might have not gotten the A in the class? It was because of the countless times I would sit down and worry about every single small detail and worry about the big details, but forget just the obvious things - the middle.

A mistake that a lot of people, including myself, make over and over again regarding productivity and working and learning is intentional focus. A lot of the time it's not necessarily time management in the major sense. A lot of time it's time management while actually doing the task. It's one thing to sit down at your desk and open your book, and just have it open, be sitting in front of it, and then be distracted and not actually doing it in a focused manner. And it's another thing to sit down, and do the task, and actually make it happen, being intentional with, dare I say, every single pencil stroke, but it's also important not to major in the minors, per se, with each pencil stroke. Haha - you might ask, "what do you mean by that?"

A lot of people worry about the major thing, focusing on just sitting down and starting, that's the beginning, and then they focus on all the little things, like which Pomodoro works the best, and sure, all that can make a difference. Obviously sitting down to start is a major thing. However, I'm speaking to the person who is fine at sitting down and opening their books to do the work. But then after they're done with their work period, they feel like they didn't accomplish much when they should have. "What! I just sat down and worked for hours, and I only got a tiny chunk of it done." You absolutely sat down and started to work, and good for you. You sat there for hours doing it. That's great, but the intentional focus is key, because you just closed the book and you thought, "Hours and hours of work, and what happened, what did I accomplish?"

That's when you need to look at the amount of time you spent worrying about the little things, those little distractions. It could be something as simple as 15 minutes out of your hour block. That's not actually contributing to getting your work done. That's you looking at your pencil and then thinking, "oh, maybe I should get better mechanical pencils," and then, "oh, maybe I should get a different backpack or pencil case to carry all these pencils, but how am I going to organize all these things?" Or even just staring off into the distance.

In reality, a lot of times it's not necessarily the big or the little things, but it's the middle things (maybe you focused on the little/big things too much and it stopped you from the middle things), and a lot of people don't like to think about the things in the middle of doing the work, because they're not very spectacular. They're not fun to think about. A lot of times it feels productive to think about which pencil case and which calculator is most "efficient," but the best calculator, the best computer, is the one that you have access to. If you have a solar powered calculator and the solar panel's not working, you can't turn on your calculator and you have math homework to do - maybe that's the main thing that you should be focused on.

But a lot of the time you already sat down, you already had the materials you needed. Yet in that whole work period, it was the things in the middle that stopped you. It comes down to intentional focus.

Putting your phone in another room is a little thing, but it prevents the things interrupting the middle, such as picking your phone up and getting distracted while you're working.

A lot of times these things are obvious. That's the biggest point right here, is these things are obvious, yet when we finish the work block after not accomplishing as much as we wanted to, it seemingly feels like we did everything we could, yet it wasn't enough. That's totally understandable - sometimes you did give it your all. Sometimes your all is getting capped by your inability to intentionally focus. Yet at the end of the study session, at the end of the work period, it feels like it's impossible to understand what was holding us back. What was stopping us?

It's not big or small. It's just there. It's usually not a complex study thing. It's usually not an organized schedule. It's the simple things, it's the things in the middle that we always forget.

"Oh man, I understand all these big topics, I for some reason know the old name for this element before they switched it to the new one, yet I can't answer the thing that was basic retrieval from the notes. I can't solve this problem, because I forgot to practice the system that was required to solve the problem, but I know the little things and the bigger things."

Don't lose it in the middle.