Last article we talked about Common Mistake #4: Trying to do everything yourself. Sometimes it can be much more valuable to just let other people do things, even if that’s a bit counter-intuitive.
The example I gave was paying a housekeeper to help keep me focused on activities I could do that would generate more value.
After years of coaching thousands of Six Sigma certification candidates I’ve learned one thing; we are all pressed for time. We all have the same amount; not enough!
The common thread among people who are successful on the exam (and I’d guess likely successful in life are the ones who learn to take advantage of the time they have.
Stop Doing This
There’s likely several things that you might be doing right while studying for your exam right now that you could stop doing and put towards higher-value activities.
Here’s a few:
- Looking for practice questions.
- Looking up answers to practice questions.
- Reminding yourself to study.
- Making your own plan to study. And then making it again. And then making it again.
- Interacting with Six Sigma “experts” on forums. only to leave more confused than ever.
- Studying for several hours straight.
Ok, Ok, enough of that.
Promised follow-through, not just a cliffhanger: here’s why each one is a time sink, and what to do instead.
- Looking for practice questions: the hunting itself produces nothing. Pick one source you trust and stick with it instead of browsing five forums for “the best” question bank.
- Looking up answers to practice questions: if you’re looking up more than you’re attempting cold, you’re building recognition, not recall. Attempt first, check second.
- Reminding yourself to study: put it on a calendar once, as a recurring block, and stop re-deciding every day whether today is a study day.
- Re-planning your study schedule repeatedly: a mediocre plan you actually follow beats a perfect plan you keep rebuilding. Pick one, adjust weekly at most.
- Arguing with forum “experts”: if a thread has three confident, contradictory answers, it’s not teaching you anything, it’s just noise with a login screen.
- Studying for hours straight: comprehension drops off a cliff well before hour three. Shorter, more frequent sessions beat one long grind, almost every time.
None of this is exotic advice. It’s the Pareto Principle again: a small number of these changes (probably just picking one source and putting study time on a fixed calendar block) will do more for your exam readiness than the rest of the list combined.
Finding Your Own 20%
The generic list above is a starting point, but the real power move is finding your own personal 20%: the specific few topics or habits that are quietly eating most of your study time without moving your score. A simple way to find it, after you finish any practice test:
- List every topic you missed a question on.
- Circle the ones you missed more than once.
- Stop studying everything else for a week and drill only the circled topics.
Most students, when they actually do this exercise honestly, find the list of repeat-miss topics is shorter than they expected, often 3 to 5 topics out of the dozens covered in a full study guide. That’s your 20%. Everything else is review, not a weak spot, and review deserves far less of your remaining time than the honest gaps do.
The Baseball Version
A hitter who’s batting .180 doesn’t spend equal batting-cage time on every pitch type. A good coach looks at the film, finds the one or two pitch types he’s actually missing, and drills those specifically. Treating every topic as equally important, the way treating every pitch as equally weak would, wastes the limited reps you have on things that were never the real problem.
One more habit worth naming directly, since it’s the one students resist hearing most: multitasking while studying. Studying with the TV on, or flipping between a practice test and your phone, isn’t actually studying twice as efficiently, it’s studying once, badly, while feeling busy the whole time. If you only change one thing from this list, protect a block of genuinely undistracted time, even if it’s shorter than you’d like, over a longer block interrupted every few minutes.
What to Do With the Time You Reclaim
Cutting the low-value habits above only helps if the reclaimed time goes somewhere better, not just into more scrolling. Put it directly against your personal 20% from the exercise above: active recall on your repeat-miss topics, a timed practice section, or explaining a hard concept out loud to someone else (or even to an empty room), which exposes gaps that passive re-reading never will. The goal isn’t to study more hours overall, it’s to spend the hours you already have on the handful of things that actually move your score.
Small shift, big payoff, and it costs nothing to try this week.
Try it for one week and compare your results before and after.
Some of the items on the list are obvious. Others are less so – and that’s intentional. Sometimes the best strategies are counter-intuitive.
Not to worry, we’ll cover the hows and whys next time. If you want a head start, this is really just the Pareto Principle applied to studying: a small slice of what you’re doing accounts for most of your progress. I’ve written more about how the Pareto Principle can change how you study and work if you want to go deeper.
Best, Ted.