Study Sessions Should be Short and Frequent as Opposed to Long and Sparse

First, you want to form a habit. Second, you want to operate at peak productivity during your session. Third, you want to minimize the amount you forget between sessions.

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When learning math, it’s best for study sessions to be short and frequent (as opposed to long and sparse). ‌ For instance, suppose you’re budgeting 3 hours per week to learn math. It would be better to study 30 minutes six days per week, as opposed to 90 minutes twice a week. There are a handful of reasons why.

First, you want to form a habit. The more consistently you study math, the more it will become a habit that you naturally do each day without thinking, just like (hopefully!) taking a shower and brushing your teeth.

Second, you want to operate at peak productivity during your session. During a short 30-minute session, it’s easy to maintain a high level of focus and intensity – whereas, during the second half of a long 90-minute session, fatigue will set in and make you significantly less productive.

Third, you want to minimize the amount you forget between sessions. When you have multi-day gaps between study sessions, you’ll have to spend more time revisiting previously covered material.‌

(Just ask any teacher how much their students forget over weekends, and how much valuable class time they have to spend on Monday re-teaching the things that they covered on Thursday and Friday.)

However, there are some caveats to consider.‌

Whenever you switch to a different activity, it takes a few minutes for your brain to catch up and enter a state of flow in the new context. This is called “context switching cost,” and if you make your sessions too short (less than 20 minutes or so), then the proportion of study time that is wasted on context switching will outweigh the other benefits of daily practice. Consequently, it’s best to spread out your practice as much as possible subject to the constraint that each session is sufficiently long for the context-switching cost to be proportionally negligible.

Additionally, if you have a hectic schedule and “six days per week” in theory ends up being just “three days per week” in practice, then you’ll need longer sessions just to achieve the same volume of practice.

Just think of it like working out. 30 minutes six days per week? No problem, easy.‌

45 minutes four days per week? 60 minutes three times per week? Takes some discipline, but it’s doable.

90 minutes twice a week? It’ll feel like a grind with slow progress, and you’ll constantly feel tempted to skip workouts.

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