Dr Priya Vance

Convenor. Spent five years building study systems that did not work, kept the records, and teaches from them.

Affiliation

School of Applied Attention, Slop University

Email

p.vance@slop.university

Contact

I ran three systems on myself before this course existed, and all three failed.

The first replaced time with a unit I called effort — one point for every hard idea I got through — on the theory that an hour means different things on different days but a hard idea always costs the same. It worked for a month. Then the currency inflated: things that were not worth a point in March were worth one by June, my daily totals kept rising, and nothing about my actual output changed. I stopped counting.

The second was decomposition. I got good at breaking work apart, seeing what depended on what, arranging it. It genuinely helped me think. It did not make me do anything, and I can find weeks in that period where the plan is immaculate and the record of work is empty.

The third was timer discipline. For nine months I logged every sitting. The number that ended it: sixteen waking hours a day, of which six were at the desk, on a good day. I had suspected four. Knowing it was six changed nothing, because a timer measures how long you sat there and says nothing about whether anything came out.

What all three have in common is that they measured what I put in. I was recording my inputs and quietly refusing to look at my outputs, because inputs are the part you can always feel good about. That is the mistake this course is built around not repeating.

I still study badly some weeks. The mechanism is supposed to survive that, which is why nothing in this course punishes you for a bad week.