How I Built My Study Journal

I Tracked Every Minute Spent Studying: Here's What I Learned!

Lukas von Hohnhorst

1. Januar 2020 • 18 min read

In this article I explain how I built a Study Journal. What started as a simple Excel spreadsheet turned into a sophisticated app. Learn what I learned from tracking over 2,000 hours of studying and thinking about optimizing the study process.

1. Idea: Why I built a Study Journal

Autumn 2014. The finals phase is scheduled for December. I sit in the library with my MacBook and study for the Finance 301 exam. Somehow I am not satisfied with my whole study setup: I don't know how much I am doing, I have no overview, no plan - the study process is a black box. I open the AppStore in the hope of finding an app that will help me improve my study setup. Somewhere in the shallows of the internet I had read something about the Pomodoro technique and in that moment the thought came to me to try this technique. So I downloaded a Pomodoro app.

(Explanation: The Pomodoro technique is a time management method. It works like this. You dividie your work into 25 minute-long sessions. Between sessions you do a five minute break. After four such units there is a longer break of 15 minutes. The idea behind it: by dividing the work into short, highly productive work blocks and many breaks, you work more effectively and efficiently. By the way, Pomodoro is Italian and means tomato. The technique is called Pomodoro techhniqu becase Italian cooks use timers that look like tomatos.)

I use the Pomodoro app for a few days and log my study time. Yet the app and the whole idea behing it does not convince me. Why? Because it only offers predefined functions. I can't write down my study sessions the way I want to. But there is a silver lining: the idea of documenting my study sessions completely fascinates me somehow. I have an idea!

I start to draw up a table in Numbers (Apple's barebones Excel competitor). My goal: I'll setup my own little "database" to track my study time. I ask myself: What do I need for this? Well, I'll need the subject, the start and end time of the study session and maybe some information about the content of the learning unit. With these three pieces of information I start the race. The first version of the learning diary is born!

2. Concept: The Study Journal is a meta-study tool to help me study more

In essence, the basic premise of the Study Journal can be summarized as follows:

"More time spent studying" is better than "Less time spent studying"

My assumption is that time spent studying monotonically increases the chances of getting a better grade. Certainly, there are diminishing returns and eventually there may even be negative returns. So this probably sounds very simple at first glance, because it does not include factors such as efficiency. But this does not change the fact that more studying - ceteris paribus - is better than less studying.

One important caveat: Optimising the studying setup as such, i.e. through learning techniques, learning in groups or special mnemonics, is not the task of the Study Journal. Rather, the Study Journal ensures that the learning process is measured. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, the reality is like this:

What cannot be measured cannot be management.

In this regard, my Study Journal serves as a controlling mechanism to help me study more. It thus can be summarised as follows:

The Study Journal tracks every study session of a semester completely and systematically, creates transparency and controllability, and thus motivates and controls the study process.

3. Methodology: The Study Journal works

Since then I have continued to develop and improve the Study Journal in an iterative process every semester. At the beginning my Study Journal should simply give me an overview of what and how much I have studied. Put differently, I wanted to know whether the hard reality (i.e. numbers) was consistent with the experienced reality (i.e. subjective perception).

The heart of the learning diary is the data set that records a learning unit. Okay, this all sounds very technocratic, but at its core it is simply a table. And it looks like this:

In the screenshot you can see the picker to select the learning type. In the screenshot you can see the picker for selecting the type of learning. Data set

Each course unit is regarded - similar to a database - as a data record. Each course unit has the following column headers:

Date: The date of the day of the session is entered here.
Start time: The start time of the session is entered here.
End time: The end of the session is entered here.
Pause: Here you can enter any breaks, e.g. due to interruptions or the 5/15 minute Pomodoro break.
Duration: The core of each record; results from the gross learning time minus breaks ➞ Net learning time.
Person: Here I enter whether I learn alone or in a group.
Type of learning: Here I enter what is done in the learning unit. This can be, for example, "Looking at slides", "Reading paper", "Calculating exercise sheets", "Learning by heart" or "Working on examination tasks".
Subject: The subject to which the course unit is assigned is entered here.
Content: Here you enter what is to be covered. This could be, for example: "Rework Exercise 2" or "Watch Lecture 4 and note down important terms".

In the course of a semester hundreds of such records accumulate. With the possibilities of a spreadsheet (or, if you want to take it to the extreme, an SQL database) you can gain various insights from this. Let's take a look at the Analytics. But first a few words about the time required.

4. Evolution: The Study Journal grows up and becomes more sophistacted

Time expenditure

I often hear that such a learning diary must be very time-consuming. This is only partly true. As an economist, you know the difference between fixed and variable costs. The structure of a learning diary corresponds here to fixed costs; the recording of each learning unit corresponds to variable costs. The fixed costs are quite high, but once you have set up the tool, there are no more fixed costs. Those who know Excel or Numbers sit down for one or two hours and set up a template. You do this once and then you benefit from it for the whole semester.

The logging of each course unit is unfamiliar at the beginning, but it quickly becomes a habit. It's a matter of a few seconds to enter the time, select the type of course unit and then type in what you do. Even if it would take a minute per session - which it doesn't - with 500 sessions that's less than 10 hours for the whole semester. In contrast, there is full transparency of the learning process and numerous other advantages - everything in life is a tradeoff.

5. Features: What does the learning diary do?

In the beginning, the learning diary only had the task of documenting the learning process, but I have found that one can gain exciting insights from the data. There are three main areas:

Making the learning process transparent ➞ Learning Analytics
Controlling the learning process ➞ Psychotricks
Understanding the learning process ➞ Insights

We will look at each of these three areas in detail. But before that, I would like to briefly outline the three major benefits of the learning diary.

Advantages: How does the learning diary support the learning process?

Systematics & Structure: A learning diary brings systematics and structure to the often chaotic and emotionally guided learning process. Every learning unit is recorded systematically and with the same rules. This systematic approach allows the learning process to be controlled.

Control & transparency: The systematic approach of a learning diary makes the learning process controllable and transparent. Every learning unit can be viewed and it is possible to check exactly what was done on which day - and what was not done. The learning diary makes not only subjects, but also semesters comparable with each other and thus allows conclusions about the efficiency and effectiveness of certain learning techniques.

Motivation & Control: Finally - and I think this is particularly important - the learning diary helps to achieve motivation. Often, the learning diary leads to an effort to push the number of hours. Furthermore, instruments such as the medal table and the share price (see below) can create additional incentives.

Dashboards are known as cool, interactive display(s) with lots of colorful graphics from movies and presentations of management consultancies. In the fall/winter semester 2016 I thought: why don't I build a dashboard for my learning diary as well? I had already used graphs in previous versions, but the presentation was not sexy enough for me. So I built myself a dashboard. It gives me an overview of different elements of the learning process at a glance. Let's take a look at these elements in detail.

Learning time per day | The learning time per day was one of the most important information for me at the beginning. I was interested in whether the objective learning time coincided with the perceived learning time. My conclusion: this is not always the case. There are days when you learn a lot and it feels like little. And there are days when you only do three hours, but it feels like five hours.

Learning time per subject | Here I can see how much I have learned in which subject. This was the most important KPI at the beginning, besides the learning time per day. Because I wanted to create comparability between the subjects. I asked myself: Does the learning effort correlate with the ECTS of a subject, or is it rather related to the difficulty of the subject or even completely different factors. In fact, it turned out that I learn less for subjects that I enjoy from the outset than for those that I find less interesting.

Learning time by type | I used this technique for the first time in my bachelor thesis. I wanted to know: how much time do I spend on research, reading papers, creating outlines, writing and correcting. I then introduced the same for the regular semester. Each course unit is therefore assigned a learning type, as described above. In the dashboard you can see how many hours I have looked at slides, read papers, or done exams.

Moving average | A graph shows a curve with the learning hours per day for the whole semester. The red curve shows the weekly average of the last seven days (moving average). As you can see, this moving average rises continuously during the semester and then reaches a plateau in the five hours per day range during the exam phase. This corresponds to the value of a gold medal (see below).

Accumulated learning time | A graph shows a curve with the accumulated learning time. The gradient of the curve is quite flat for me at the beginning of the semester. Gradually the curve gets steeper, because towards the end of the semester more is learned every day: the pace is higher. Psycho tricks: How does the learning journal control motivation? The learning diary is also - and here I see one of the main advantages - used for motivation and incentives. Two concepts have proven to be very effective for this: the medal table and the share price.

Medal table | I have found that a net daily learning time of five hours is the optimum for me. Five hours is the sweet spot for my learning performance. But for five net hours you spend much more time than five hours in the Bib, because there are still lunch and coffee breaks. I consider both to be very important, because I can't work very concentrated for a long time at a stretch. But back to the five hours. At some point I had the idea to award a gold medal for days with a net learning time of more than five hours. The following medal regulation resulted:

≥ 6h: Platinum
≥ 5h: Gold
≥ 4h: Silver
≥ 3h: Bronze

The aim is to collect as many medals as possible. I also try to build up streaks, that means for example to collect five gold medals in a row. And this is also the main function of the medal table: It motivates immensely to collect more medals. After all, you can turn a silver medal into a gold medal with just one hour's extra effort. And you want to collect as few bronze medals as possible, so the bronze medal quickly becomes a silver medal. All this leads to learning more. You could extend this concept with medals and introduce extrinsic rewards, for example money, chocolate or whatever for certain medals. For myself, however, it is currently enough for me to know that I have achieved a gold medal. And on very good days there is platinum. Also nice.

Share price | One of the latest developments from the first master's semester is the learning share. This is a funny idea, but it has an amazingly good effect. I have started to define a "target learning time" for each day. The target-performance deviation is calculated in a cell. This affects the share price; and it works as follows. If I hit the exact target, the share price will neither move up nor down. If I miss the target, the share price falls in line with the target/actual deviation. The more I exceed the target, the higher the share price rises. The goal is, of course, to achieve the highest possible share price at the end of the semester. I named the share after me ("von-Hohnhorst share") and somehow this motivates me to let the share price rise. Sounds funny, but it is.

Insights: Insights about the learning process itself

Through the learning diary I have learned to understand myself and my learning process better. I can compare semesters with each other and know how many hours I will need to reach certain grades. Finally, I would like to briefly describe my core insights here.

Insight #1: More learning also brings more | I did a correlation analysis and the following proved to be true. If you look at the "learning time per ECTS" of a semester, and then compare the semesters with each other, there is a correlation of -0.952 for the relationship between "learning time per ECTS" and grade point average (the sign is negative because more learning lowers the grade point average). In plain language: more learning correlates with better grades. Of course, we know that correlation does not equal causality. However, rational considerations suggest that learning time is certainly an important factor in the grade point average. But it is also interesting that this correlation only applies at the semester level. I suspect that individual subjects are too heterogeneous for the learning time of a subject to be used to draw conclusions about the grade in the subject in question.

Insight #2: From 5h hours net learning time per day, there is shift in the shaft | I have personally found that five hours per day is a sweet spot in terms of net learning time. If I start early and get a good night's sleep, I can manage six hours and more, but then I have the feeling that I'm not quite as productive. I have also noticed that with five hours a day I go through everyday life stress-free and balanced and still have enough energy for my other habits like training, reading, writing etc. If you want to activate the hardcore mode in the exam phase, you can certainly learn a lot more per day.

Insight #3: When learning diary is 80/20 to consider | In the current version, the learning diary is in exactly the right place on the simplicity-complexity spectrum: it is powerful, but not sluggish. One could add even deeper analyses and feed the data sets for a learning unit with information in an even more granular way. But then the learning diary would become too complex and thus difficult to handle. As with (almost) all things, the Pareto principle also applies to the learning diary.

Insight #4: Perception and reality are two pairs of shoes | There are days when I think I have been learning for a very long time. But the hard facts from the learning diary speak a completely different language; they are objective and you cannot trick them. Nevertheless, I think there are differences in how far you have come in one day of learning. And that doesn't always depend on the learning time, but has to do with neuronal factors and learning itself. On some days it clicks and you understand a concept that you didn't understand for days before - the learning process is not linear.

Insight #5: The learning process does not correlate perfectly with the exam result | The most important insight at the end: despite a well-structured and optimized learning process, an exam cannot run as you would like it to. Because "learning" and "writing the exam" are two different processes. A very good preparation increases the chances for good performance massively. Nevertheless, a bad day's form or an unusual, even mean question can lead to an unsatisfactory grade. But this is no different in sport. After a defeat, it is also important here to look where the mistakes were and what needs to be done better next time. Every exam offers the chance to attack anew. The learning diary can help to make the preparation excellent, to optimize the learning process.