If you are a GRE student who is struggling to find study time amid busy weekdays that seem to just fly by in fulfilling job-related obligations, then this article may help.
This struggle that you are facing is also an opportunity for you to try a new work system that can help you skillfully manage not only your GRE prep today but also similar challenges that may lie ahead in your future of balancing a time-hungry waspish job with a project that does not sting you for not doing it but that, if done, can greatly enhance your well-being.
The work system that I am asking you to consider is based on the moral of Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise: slow and steady wins the race. You already know this adage, I am sure, but do you believe it?
Anthony Trollope did, and acting as per this simple belief made him one of the most successful and prolific novelists of nineteenth century while being employed full-time with the General Post Office of Britain. Starting in 1834 as a clerk at a salary of 90 pounds a year, he grew in his career to be a high-ranking authority with a salary of 700 pounds a year by 1867, when he took an early retirement. In 1843, he started writing his first book as a side-project to his day job. Over the remaining thirty-nine years of his life, he wrote more than 70 books, including 47 novels and 18 books of non-fiction.
I feel much inspired by Trollope’s example. Let me:
- first quote his own description of the tortoise-like system of novel-writing that he used,
- and then I’ll share, in that order,
- how I have applied a similar system in my life, and
- how you may apply one with respect to GRE prep.
The following excerpts are taken from Chapter 7 of Trollope’s Autobiography (emphasis where laid is mine):
“I had . . . arranged a system of task-work for myself, which I would strongly recommend to those who feel as I have felt, that labour, when not made absolutely obligatory by the circumstances of the hour, should never be allowed to become spasmodic. There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office. I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession, I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.
When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. According to the circumstances of the time,—whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,—I have allotted myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went. . . There has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.
I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius, but had I been so I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels. Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water-drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always catches the hare. The hare has no chance. He loses more time in glorifying himself for a quick spurt than suffices for the tortoise to make half his journey.
I have known authors whose lives have always been troublesome and painful because their tasks have never been done in time. They have ever been as boys struggling to learn their lesson as they entered the school gates. Publishers have distrusted them, and they have failed to write their best because they have seldom written at ease. I have done double their work—though burdened with another profession—and have done it almost without an effort. I have not once, through all my literary career, felt myself even in danger of being late with my task. I have known no anxiety as to “copy.” The needed pages far ahead—very far ahead—have almost always been in the drawer beside me. And that little diary, with its dates and ruled spaces, its record that must be seen, its daily, weekly demand upon my industry, has done all that for me.
There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till—inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting. . . I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. I certainly believe in the cobbler’s wax much more than the inspiration.”
I was moved . . . by a determination to excel, if not in quality, at any rate in quantity. An ignoble ambition for an author, my readers will no doubt say. But not, I think, altogether ignoble, if an author can bring himself to look at his work as does any other workman. This had become my task, this was the furrow in which my plough was set, this was the thing the doing of which had fallen into my hands, and I was minded to work at it with a will. It is not on my conscience that I have ever scamped my work. My novels, whether good or bad, have been as good as I could make them. Had I taken three months of idleness between each they would have been no better.”
How I have applied Trollope’s system
My primary profession is GRE coaching, and for quite some time, I struggled to find time for a side act that is fulfilling and important for me: writing articles about my coaching experience.
Despite my best intentions, the article-writing usually kept getting postponed to the days when I would be freer, but when one such longed-for free day did arrive, I did not always write; now the writing-work to be done seemed too much for that single, short day, and to feel relief from the oppressive feeling of overwhelm, I would – with solemn self-promises – park the project for a shinier, magical future ‘someday’ when I would have more time and then nothing could stop me from writing the article; for the present day, I would choose to work on some more manageable or more fun project. In short, I had no system for article-writing. From November 2020 to November 2021, I wrote and published a grand total of three articles.
From December 1, 2021, I switched over to a Trollope-like system.
I now set myself just one goal for the article-writing project: to work on it for 20 minutes every day. In this writing slot, I could:
- free-write on an article idea in:
- a physical notebook specially designated for articles,
- a Word document on my computer, or
- the Notes app on my phone,
- edit a work-in-progress,
- create images for a work-in-progress, or
- upload a ready article on my website,
but one of these four activities I must do, or the writing slot would be considered undone that day.
To track my fidelity to this goal, I wrote dates on a Post-It strip and put it up on the wall opposite to my work-desk. After completing the 20-minutes slot each day, I put a vertical line next to that date. Within three or four days, the consecutive vertical marks started to look like a serpentine line. I referred to it now as ‘my wall snake’ and my motivation became to never break my wall snake.
That was all! As of the day I am publishing this article, I have been adhering to this system for 237 days. Here are the results:
- I have written and published nine articles (including this one), with three others more-than-half written.
- I have missed the slot only twice (represented as round holes in the wall snake).
It amazes me that this simple system works and works so well!
I had got the idea to try this approach of working from four different people – Anthony Trollope, Robert Boice, Virginia Valian, and James Clear – and I feel immensely grateful for their guidance. You’ve read about Trollope in this article; I plan to write articles about the other three too in due course. But the magical results of ‘moderate, daily efforts’ are to be experienced to be believed!
How may you experience them, you ask? Here are my suggestions.
How you may set up a Trollope-like system for GRE prep
I have four suggestions:
- Set an input goal and track it.
- Don’t worry too much about the score goal. The score takes care of itself.
- Focus.
- Stop.
I’ll elaborate on each.
Set an input goal and track it.
Trollope’s only demand from himself for his writing was that he should produce so many pages (a page meaning ‘250 words’) in a day.
He set himself a quantifiable input goal – to put this many words per day into the manuscript-in-progress. These two properties of the goal – being quantifiable and being based on inputs – made it possible for him to get the thrill of verifiable success every day.
Now imagine if he had set himself a quality-based goal instead, such as writing 10 ‘beautifully written’ pages per day. He would most likely have started to second-guess himself soon after beginning the day’s writing. What did ‘beautifully written’ mean? Was he writing beautifully? Was he even capable of writing beautifully? Those doubts would probably have made him go again and again through what he had written and cut and write and cut and write and cut again, and who knows, drained after a few days of this self-flagellation, he may have convinced himself that writing was beyond his wherewithal and given up on the project altogether!
My article-writing system too is based on one quantifiable input goal – put in 20 minutes. I need to complete just this simple to-do to get my reward: the pleasure of growing my wall snake.
This then is my first suggestion to you: give yourself a single input goal, preferably based on study-time, and track it.
If your work-demands mean that you can only study for 40 minutes at the most each day, and you want to divide this time equally between quant and verbal, then, your single input goal for quant prep can be ‘20 minutes of distraction-free, fully-focused study.’ Likewise for verbal. Do this and you earn a tick-mark in your tracker (or a vertical mark if you want to grow a wall snake like me) and the satisfaction of having done your duty to the GRE for the day.
Do this day after day and before you know it, your journey will be complete. One step and then another and the longest walk is ended.
The score takes care of itself
When Trollope devised his system, could he have foreseen the impressive body of work it would lead to? I doubt. I know that I did not foresee eight months ago that I would be able to write so many articles.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year.
If 40 minutes is all you can manage for your GRE prep per day, then so be it. Start putting in this much time daily.
You worry that this time will not be sufficient to get into a good college this year? Well, will 40 minutes put in every day for 14 months be sufficient? You bet! If you really can’t put in more time and your choice is:
- either to quit your job and have a full-time GRE prep binge for the next month,
- or to apply next year,
why not choose the latter?
Quick wins and binges are overrated and stressful. Why not relax the self-imposed pressure of deadlines and simply focus on your input goals? The output is a function of your inputs. When you consistently put in sincere time and effort, the output takes care of itself.
Focus
Trollope was a man of focus. For his non-work hours, he had just one major project – writing. And, within his writing time, he worked on a single novel at a time, starting a new book only after finishing the one he had been working on.
What if he had sown too many seeds in the same patch of time, lined up too many book ideas to work on during his writing time, planning perhaps to write five pages each of five different books every day, or to work on one book the first day, another book the second day, a third book the third day, and so on, returning to the first book only on day six? I think that his lifetime harvest of completed books would then have been much lesser than the seventy books he did publish. The number might even have been as small as one or zero. I guess this from experience.
When I first began my daily writing commitment, I did spend most of my time scattering more and more seeds onto the ground instead of tending just one seed, growing it, taking it to fruition and then sowing another. I thought it was all right to use this slot to only write outlines or rough ideas for articles while leaving their execution to ‘some day.’ There came a stage when the cumulative output of my writing slot was:
a notebook full of article outlines and just one completed article.
I was like a cook who has been laboring in the kitchen since morning, but when you arrive hungry at dinnertime, he has nothing you can eat because he started and abandoned a hundred dishes.
I modified my definition of ‘writing’ for the daily slot then to ‘execution of ideas and not mere ideation.’
Though apparently small, this change was effective. I started to finish and publish articles at a steady rate of about one per month after this. So, Focus is something that I have struggled with and that I am now mindful about.
What would Focus mean for you?
Two things, I think.
One, for the duration of your GRE prep, make it your only major project outside of your job.
And two, do not overseed your study time with a thousand resources.
The other day, one of my verbal students asked if I could recommend word lists to him. I knew that he was already spending good time in learning and revising:
- 30 vocab lists of Greg Mat (=30 lists*30 words per list = 900 words)
- The words he did not know in the official questions I assigned to him.
In response to his query, I asked for a break-up of how he spent his vocab time. He said that about:
- 30-minutes went to revising already-learnt Greg Mat lists.
- 15-minutes went to learning words from a yet-undone Greg Mat list.
- 20-minutes went to the new words in my assignments.
Where was the time for another word list? He saw my point and agreed to first master the vocab tasks he had already undertaken; only if he got done with them well ahead of his test would he consider doing a new list.
If your task is just one – to learn a finite set of 900 words – and you put 40 minutes daily into it, then let’s say you reach the Finish Line in 3 months. Completing this important task gives you a tremendous rush of joy and accomplishment and is a huge confidence booster. However, if you start with the 900 words list and then a week later, add 300 words more to the study mix, and a month later, add another 500, then where will you be after 3-months of the same amount of daily effort? Still far away, alas, from the Finish Line that kept moving away even as you moved towards it.
Which race will you run more spiritedly – where you can see the ribbon you’ll run through get closer and closer, or where the end line is a mirage?
Start one thing, stay focused on it till you finish it, and only then take up a new thing. Successful workers are finishers.
Stop
When the alarm set to signify the end of your daily slot sounds, stop. Try not to impatiently push the project towards completion by arbitrarily stretching that slot to five hours or ten hours or fifteen hours in one day.
Once Trollope met his day’s writing quota, he calmly proceeded to his other chores and returned to the writing the next morning. He spent more than his usual time on writing only if his total word count for the in-progress manuscript was less than what it should have been, and once he had made up for the deficiency, he returned to the regular schedule.
Though my writing slot is to be 20 minutes long, at times I do allow myself to extend it by another 10 or 20 minutes if I am in a flow state or if I fear that the ideas bubbling in my head may be lost if not captured at once. But, when the alarm sounds again, I stop and move on to other things.
If an article takes 15 days from start to finish with a steady writing time of 20 minutes each day, does it mean that I could also have written it instead in a one-day binge of (15 days*20 minutes per day = 300 minutes =) 5 hours?
I don’t think so. That article took 5 hours because I worked on it for 20 minutes daily. Outside of those 20 minutes, my mind was still subconsciously thinking about the topic and this thinking enriched what I wrote the next day. If I binged one day, my output after 5 hours would probably be far inferior in quality, if not also in quantity.
Here is a thought exercise to check if the same principle applies to your learning.
Assume that at the rate of 40 minutes of study-plus-revision per day, you can master 300 GRE words in a month. Over the month, your input time for vocab will have been (40 minutes per day)*(30 days per month) = 1200 minutes = 20 hours. Now, imagine that instead of being such a tortoise, you studied nothing for the first twenty-five days of the month, then, on the twenty-sixth day, you sat on your study table at 9 AM sharp, opened your 300-words list and kept studying till 5 AM the next day. For the next four days, you stayed away from the words.
If a test is taken for those 300 words on the first day of the next month, in which of the two scenarios above will you fare better?
Stopping when the daily slot is over is also a part of the discipline that makes steady and regular progress possible. Letting one day’s slot get overlong due to the greed of getting more done that day may feel like a smart strategy in the short-run but it will only weaken your discipline. Maybe for the next two days, you will allow yourself to skip the slot altogether because look at how much you got done on day 1! Then on day 4, you miss the slot and think that you will make up for it on day 5. On day 5, you binge again and feel that you’ve done your duty not only for day 4 and 5 but also for the next two days. This gallop-sleep approach made the hare lose the race; how well do you think will it serve you?
*
A man once went to a venerable martial arts teacher and, expressing his desire to train under the old man, he asked how long he would take to master all the techniques.
“Ten years,” the teacher replied.
“That’s too long! I promise to work twice as hard as your other students. I’m ready to practice for ten hours daily or even more if I need to. How long will I take then?
“Twenty years,” was the teacher’s answer.
Conclusion
Being able to manage a major project on the side along with one’s day job can change one’s life dramatically; it can open doors that one has only dreamed of, without compromising on the financial security that the job provides.
Trollope’s success as a novelist enabled him to earn an extra 600 or so pounds per annum and as the success increased, so did the income, till eventually he was able to retire from the post office eight years before becoming eligible for retirement benefits.
My success in my daily writing project has made my day-job a more fulfilling and enriching experience for me.
Your success as a GRE student will enable you to step towards a more rewarding career.
All it comes down to is this one simple idea:
A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.
Anthony Trollope, in Chapter 7 of his Autobiography