Lesson 4: 90/10 Rule

In college, you won’t have enough time, and contrary to popular belief, you can’t just “make time” by not sleeping or cooping yourself inside your room and saying no to social events, because it’s important to have a balance. How do you finish things on time and succeed? The answer lies in a coding axiom called the 90/10 rule: “90% of a program execution time is spent in executing 10% of the code.”

Put into life and time management terms, you spend 90% of the time finding how to do all your work in 10% amount of the time. So, I realized that strenuously waking up at 8:40am to go to a 1.5 hr lecture could save me over 5 hours of  both unproductive and gruesome self-studying of the material. I realized that going to a 1 hour professor office hour would saved me the late 5am hours I would spend grinding on a multi or physics problemset. And even more importantly, I realized getting a good nights sleep actually led to a more productive day and therefore less time spent studying in general simply because I could pay attention fully in class without getting tired and zoning out, and be able to fully understand and learn the material!

So, when you think you’re taking the easy way out or “saving time” by skipping lecture to study or not going to office hours, or getting less sleep to do more, you might actually be doing quite the opposite!