Plan for a two-hour lecture
Enter one lecture. Decide the few things that are decided before it starts. Get back a plan in your own words.
The short version
- Two hours of continuous listening is a demanding format for almost everyone. It survives because it is cheap to timetable, not because it is how people take in information.
- Most of what makes a long class survivable is decided before it starts: what you decided to listen for, where you sit, and what your hands are doing. This tool makes those few decisions once, for one real lecture.
- Nothing is saved or sent. It rearranges what you type into a pre, during and post plan and hands it back to copy.
This will not make the format good. It moves most of the effort to the edges (the two minutes before, and the ten minutes after) where effort is cheap. Pick one lecture that is actually on your timetable this week and fill it in for that.
Before you begin
Have one specific lecture in mind, the module, the day, the room. Six short steps. Nothing you type is saved.
Steps
Step 1 of 6
Your plan for this lecture
Before it starts, the first two minutes
During, the middle hour
Afterwards, the ten minutes that pay
Copy it somewhere it will survive
Select the text below and copy it into whatever you already use, or print this page. This tool keeps nothing.
Read one line back to yourself
Look at what you wrote under gaps and questions. Every one of those is a question with a short expiry date. Ask the person next to you, or the lecturer packing up two metres away, before you leave the building. In three weeks each gap costs half an hour to reconstruct; tonight most of them cost a sentence.
Worth knowing. Phone face down on the desk is not neutral. Ward, Duke, Gneezy and Bos (Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017) found that the mere presence of a person's own phone reduced available cognitive capacity, even switched off and face down. Bag, not desk. The lines-from-memory step at the end rests on retrieval practice, which repeatedly outperforms reviewing (Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science, 2006), and which a separate page here covers properly.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.