113. The 6-System Ecosystem for School and Work (And Why Working Harder Isn't Enough)
Episode 113
Struggling to perform in school or work is rarely the result of just one missing skill. Sure, your procrastination tendencies might have to do with poor time management skills, but that's not the full picture.
Academic and professional success is the result of having a functioning ECOSYSTEM of skills that not only work by themselves but also interlock together.
In other words, if even just one skill is weak or missing, the whole ecosystem collapses in on itself.
There are 6 core systems to a healthy productivity ecosystem, and we break them all down in this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast.
What You Learn:
Why fixing just one productivity problem rarely leads to lasting improvement
The 6 interconnected systems that separate high performers from chronic strugglers
How weak skills create cascading failures across your entire workflow
Which system breakdowns cause the most common academic and professional struggles
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 92 - Your Kid Needs THESE Skills
Episode 104 - 3 Reasons Your Study Methods Stopped Working
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
The 6-System Ecosystem for School and Work (And Why Working Harder Isn't Enough)
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[00:00:00] Well, hello and welcome to the Learn Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 113, and I'm kind of excited for today's show because, well, I'm actually excited for all the shows because I love what I do. But today's show gives me an opportunity to zoom out on some of the core topics that we talk about all the time here and to help you see the bigger picture of how they all work together.
And trust me, by the end of it, you're gonna see why understanding these skills that we talk about on the show all the time as an ecosystem is so important. And it might help explain why you or somebody you know has been trying to make progress, but hasn't quite figured things out yet, despite all of their effort.
This conversation is relevant for students and professionals, and so if you're a student, definitely lean in. But if you have a student in your life who is struggling, I want you to listen with them in mind.
Remember the links to everything that I mentioned today can be found in the show notes. If you are watching this on YouTube, that is awesome. I would love so much for you to subscribe to the show and then follow me over on [00:01:00] Instagram at SchoolHabits. And with that said, we have a lot to cover.
So let's get started. All right. So to frame today's episode, I think that it makes sense for me to start with an error that I see all of the time in my private practice and inside SchoolHabits University too, and I'm gonna call it the single skill trap, for lack of a better name. But basically this is the common belief that one missing skill is often to blame for struggling across the board, maybe in school or in work.
So we're focusing just on one skill. Now, probably for the majority of the show, I am gonna be talking about the context of [00:02:00] school, but as I said, these concepts apply to the workforce as well. Just keep that in mind, so I might go back and forth between you or your student, but it applies to everybody.
Okay? But anyways, many people think, okay if my kid could just study better Then school would be easier, or if my kid could just get more organized, school would be easier. Or if I could just manage my time better, then I wouldn't be so stressed at work.
And I absolutely understand the thinking behind these kinds of ideas. Behind these kinds of hopes, I might say. I do think it's an easier pill to swallow when we look at ourselves or maybe a loved one who is categorically struggling in school or work and we tell ourselves, oh, well there is just this one thing, let's just pull this one lever and everything will be okay or, and then I will be okay. If I can just fix this one skill or teach them this one thing, then everything is gonna work out.
And this is the error right here. Focusing on just one skill [00:03:00] will never fix the larger problem. I want you to think of it this way. It's like trying to tend to a dying garden, but only watering one single plant. That single plant might perk up a little, but if the soil is depleted, the drainage is bad and nothing's getting enough sunlight, you're still gonna have a struggling garden. The whole system, all of the components of the garden have to work together. So that's kind of the ongoing metaphor that I'm gonna try to work into the rest of the episode today.
So when we say things like, oh, I just need better study strategies, or I just need to manage my time better, or I just need to get more organized. Or maybe we're saying all of that about our kid, I get it. And all of these skills are skills that will absolutely improve someone's entire work or school experience and their performance across the board.
But none of these operate independently. And focusing on just one of these skills is like watering that one single plant in the corner of your garden without ever thinking of the soil, the light, the [00:04:00] drainage, and all of the other things that are required for a healthy garden. Does that make sense? And so that's the point that I wanna make today, that none of these skills exist in a vacuum, and thinking they do, thinking that they can exist in isolation leads to frustration because it doesn't work.
Okay. So if fixing just one thing doesn't work, then what does? Well, first you have to understand what all of the moving parts actually are. If we are gonna stick with the garden metaphor, we have to talk about those other things required for healthy plants to grow.
And there are six. There are six core systems that have to function together for school or work to feel manageable.
And I'm gonna walk you through what each one does and how they depend on each other to create that larger ecosystem. So just simply listed out here they are: task management, time management, note taking, annotating, study skills and organization. So each of these systems has to be up and running adequately by itself in order for them to [00:05:00] then connect with the others in the larger ecosystem.
Make sense? Here's how I want you to think about this. Each of these systems answers a different question and I'm gonna tell you what that is. Just hold on. And academic and work performance essentially will collapse when even one of these questions can't be answered. So let's go through this sort of one skill at a time.
System number one, task management. That answers the question, what am I supposed to do? System two, time management answers the question, when are these things realistically going to happen in my day or in my week? Systems three and four, so that's note taking and annotating, answer the question, what information matters?
Alright, both of these are about capturing info, making sense of it. So essentially, what is the information that I need to work with? System five, study skills. That answers the question, how do I work with this information so that I can actually learn it and apply it? And then system six, [00:06:00] organization, answers the question, where is everything?
Like where does everything live?
And as I said earlier, each of these is a system in itself, and then they're also part of a larger ecosystem, the larger garden, so to speak. Now one little interjection. Okay. If this is the first time that you're hearing me talk about these six systems, or you want a deeper dive into what each one actually looks like in practice, I have an episode that you might wanna check out when you're done with this one, obviously. That is episode 92. It is called Your Kid Needs These Skills to Be Okay. And that goes into far more detail about each individual system. But for today, I want to focus on, well, what they are, which is what I already just said, and then how they work together, which is where we're gonna go.
For example, let's look at just two of these, okay?
We're gonna take time management and task management to start. Whether you are a student or a working professional, these relate to you. Time management rarely ever collapses on itself because we're just bad at time. I'm air quoting that if you're not watching this on [00:07:00] YouTube, but like batted time. Time management falls apart because we don't know what needs to be done, which is task management.
So it's the what and the when that really depend on each other. And this relationship is inverted as well. Task management is gonna fall apart when we don't have good time management. For example, you might be moderately okay at knowing what you need to do and somewhat okay at, you know, keeping track of your tasks.
But if you don't know when you're doing any of these things, you don't have some kind of calendar or time management system, then you're not gonna know when to work on the tasks and you are gonna procrastinate thinking that you have way more time than you really do, or you're gonna miss your deadline and be stressed out.
And that's not a good scene. But sometimes we look at that situation and we think, well, that was just a task management problem, when in reality it was also a time management problem too. And probably actually a deficit in some of the other of the six systems too.
Do you see how that works? Now this same pattern shows up with [00:08:00] every single system in the ecosystem. That is why it's an ecosystem. They have to work together.
So let's take note taking and annotating. I'm kind of putting those together, right? Um, 'cause both of those are about capturing information and then how they connect to study skills.
So a lot of times I'm gonna hear students say, well, I didn't know how to study and that's why my grades are bad, so I just need to learn some study skills. And it's true that you do need to know legitimate study methods that are based in active recall, but just focusing on study methods alone are not gonna give you better grades if you don't have a system for capturing information and making sense of it.
Think about it. All of the information that you get from school has to be in some kind of notes, right? The teacher gives you a lecture, it goes in your notes. You read a book, you extract the information from the book, and you put it in your notes. You read a textbook chapter, and you extract the most important information from the textbook chapter into your notes.
You watch a video, you extract information from the video, and you put it in your notes. That's the information you're studying. If you're working professional, this might be information you get at meetings or [00:09:00] from an email or conversations, right? Phone calls. But if you don't have that system locked and loaded, but you have, you know, good study methods, your good study methods don't matter because you don't have good information to work with in the first place.
Same thing in reverse. Let's say that you have incredible notetaking skills because you have my notetaking power system program and you know how to annotate and you know the difference between annotating and notetaking. There is a difference. That is awesome. But if you don't know legitimate active recall study methods, then information is never gonna make it past that initial very short term memorization phase. That is super temporary.
You're never gonna learn it well enough to remember it enough to apply it on your tests, and then your grades aren't gonna get any better. That's the pattern. And this is why focusing on just one skill is never gonna get you the results that you're looking for. And this is what I mean by an ecosystem and the common error I see all the time is focusing on one skill at a [00:10:00] time and thinking that that is just gonna unlock everything.
Now, I could do the same mental exercise with all six of the systems and explain how they each relate to one another, but you don't need that to get the point. So next I'm gonna move into how this pattern will show up in your real life as a student or as a professional and why it is that we tend to misread and misdiagnose the symptoms.
Now, what usually happens, this is what I see all the time in my private practice, is that people only focus on the most visible, painful symptom. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? So for example, if a student is getting, bad grades in school, they or their parent might think, well, it's just because they don't know how to study, right? Because it's easy to connect bad grades to studying. And at work, if you're constantly stressed out about deadlines and feel like, like you're running outta time and you don't have enough time to complete all of the things, then you know, we often tell ourselves, well, I just need to get better at managing my time.
Because that's the most painful symptom. [00:11:00] We tend to focus on the most visible and painful symptom, but the most visible symptom is rarely the root cause of our pain. And that's really important for everyone listening to understand. So I'm gonna break down two examples. The two examples I just rattled off, starting with the studying one.
So let's say the symptom, it's obvious and painful, it's bad grades, and the most common explanation is, okay, well I have bad study skills. But what's actually happening in that larger ecosystem is that a student might not have good notes, they may not be adequate, they might not, um, be complete. They might be missing information.
They might not even have notes at all. They might be studying the wrong material because they didn't have good notes, or maybe they didn't know how to extract information from the larger source, whether that was the lecture or the video or a textbook. They might actually have poor grades because they didn't block any study time on their calendar because they were lacking calendar skills and also hadn't yet been taught that studying is a task and that they have to put it in their task management system.
But maybe they didn't even [00:12:00] have a task management system to begin with. So in that case, the bad grades a result of nearly every system in the ecosystem being weak, inadequate, are not there at all. Now moving to the professional example, the bad time management one, right? So the symptom might be late work, it might be, um, procrastination, stress about meeting deadlines.
And the common explanation, and I get that this is what we would think is, oh, I just have poor time management. That is such a reasonable thought to have, but what's often happening below the surface, below the soil, if we were to get all gardeny about it, is weak. Task management, so tasks aren't being captured in a single system as they should be, one source of truth. The tasks aren't defined, they're not clear. Maybe there is a skill deficit with managing long-term projects, like someone hasn't just, you know, hasn't yet been taught how to break down a long-term project into a series of tasks and schedule each of those tasks discreetly into a task management [00:13:00] system.
Prioritization might be a skill that needs some development to figure out which tasks need to be focused on. Organization could be at play here because maybe you're getting overwhelmed, not just with the tasks themselves, but like where all of this information is and then how to manage it.
And then I wanna talk about motivation. I probably have like, no joke, like 10 conversations a week about motivation. And it often goes like this, my kid's not motivated. And if they could just get more motivated, then school would be easier. And oftentimes I too will have a student who is self-aware enough and defeated enough to say, I literally don't care about this.
Now, it can be tempting to explain this symptom as a matter of just, you know, missing grit or missing like, the discipline. But what's often happening under the surface is that maybe they don't have a task management system that helps them get clarity in what they really need to do. And so that's why they're feeling overloaded.
And then when they feel overloaded and overwhelmed, that will kill motivation really, really fast. Maybe they [00:14:00] don't have a calendar system or a time management system, so they don't even know what the heck they're doing, right? And maybe somebody is like, well, I taught them a calendar. I gave them a calendar system so they have that, have they really been taught how to use it? And that they need to go in every single day to look at it, to touch it, to build trust with that system. And what types of things go in a calendar versus what go on a task management system, for example. Oftentimes we assume that our kids or even our US
know how to do these things and know what these abstract concepts mean, but they don't. And you know, at this point too, task management and time management are like first cousins, right? So it does make sense that if someone doesn't know what they're doing or when they're doing it, they're gonna be overwhelmed and therefore super quickly unmotivated.
Even studying. Let's say that somebody attempts to use a study method that's really common, but ineffective. Maybe something like rereading your notes. Everybody does it and it does not work. Mark my words.
And then the studying doesn't [00:15:00] work, of course, because it doesn't work. And now the kids feeling defeated and unmotivated and they're thinking, well, I literally am just not good at school because I studied and it didn't work. But in reality, that study system wasn't adequate.
But also maybe their study system wasn't adequate, not only because they weren't using real study methods based in active recall, but because they didn't have a time management system to map out their study sessions in a way that wasn't stressful or last minute, or that used spaced repetition. Maybe they didn't have an organization system, so they had no idea where their things were.
So in this case, there's usually a lot of breakdowns underneath the surface. There's much more than that one pain point.
Let's talk about disorganization. So the symptom, there could be just, you know, classic, whatever disorganization looks like. Maybe it's lost work, maybe it's missing things, having to get duplicates of things and then finding the original one later, not remembering if something is digital or paper, or if it came in an email or maybe a text message or a phone conversation. And the common explanation here is, well, [00:16:00] they're just disorganized and maybe need to clean out their folders more.
But that too is rarely the only source of disorganization because usually what's happening under the surface, under the soil is they may not have good time management system that has email management routines built into it. So their email inbox is basically the wild, wild west. Or maybe they don't have a good note taking system so some of their notes are digital and some are paper, and they don't have a structure to their notes in a way where it's easy to find things. But that looks like disorganization. But in reality, that's under the category of information management or a note-taking strategy. Right. So I hope you're starting to see that when we misdiagnose a problem, we start applying the wrong solution or we go barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.
And that's really the root of why so many people are working harder, but they're not getting the result they want because they're still stuck in that single skill mindset that all [00:17:00] of these six core systems are standalone skills that can singularly solve their issues. But again, that's not true. They all sync together.
They all kind of flow back and forth and are interconnected. Like an ecosystem. Okay, so I'm hoping at this point in the episode some things are starting to make sense. You might be looking at some of your own struggles differently and thinking, well, maybe you know, this pain, um, feeling is due to a breakdown somewhere else that's a little bit less obvious.
And then you might be wondering, okay, if these systems matter so much, why don't I already have them? And I want you to lean in here and hear me when I tell you up to this point, you haven't done anything wrong. Like so many smart, capable, successful people are missing these skills. Definitely students, right?
Just 'cause of their age. And they haven't had enough experience or direct instruction to get these skills yet. But many very successful, um, working professionals that I work with are missing these skills, but their job is just so much harder than it needs [00:18:00] to be. Like they're still achieving what they wanna achieve, but they're being held back and they're working harder.
They're working um, more hours. They're working on the weekends because these skills are missing . Now, technically a lot of these skills are called executive functions, and people with A DHD do have less developed executive functions, but even if you don't have a DHD, you could just have gotten through school or you know, maybe you're a working professional, maybe even up to the point of your career without ever having been taught executive functions.
This is just how it works because schools teach content. They teach vocabulary, they teach math concepts. They're teaching history and Spanish and French, and you know, they don't teach these skills. These are the skills that have to be explicitly taught, and honestly, if you're not explicitly taught them you wouldn't know. Some kids kind of just figure out as they go. They might serendipitously stumble upon a strategy that works and then realize it works and therefore they just keep using it going forward without even [00:19:00] knowing that the strategy has a name, may, that's what happened to me.
Maybe somebody might have been taught somewhere along the way how to do some of these things, but most people are not.
And unfortunately, students are often punished for missing these invisible skills that they weren't taught. They are reprimanded for not knowing vocabulary words when they were never taught how to learn them. Or maybe they're scolded for getting bad grades, but they're never been taught how to study.
They're told they need to stop procrastinating, but they literally don't even know what that means or how to do that. People are just like, oh, you need to get better at time. Management. Such an abstract concept, like what does that even mean? What does that look like? And then what happens is we learn coping mechanisms.
We learn to survive these skill deficits by overworking, by taking shortcuts that don't serve us. And this causes stress and anxiety and obviously lower performance across the board. And then of course, when we have that stress and anxiety, that clouds our judgment and our perception, and then we put ourselves in a position of not being able to self-assess at all.
So [00:20:00] these systems are mostly invisible when they're working. When, when we're good, we don't just wake up thinking about task management or your, you know, time management system. We just get up and we function and we go and we feel generally okay. It's only when something is not working or it blows up in our faces that we realize something deeper is missing.
And what makes this really, really tricky, I think, is that many people did have systems that worked At one point, they just didn't realize that as the demands of their lives increased, maybe through school or as they advanced further in their careers, those systems needed to be upgraded too. the demands scaled, but the systems didn't.
Now, if you've been listening for a while, you might remember episode 104. Well, I actually doubt that anybody just remembers episode 104, but that's an episode where I talked about why study methods stop working as you advance through school. I will leave that linked below, but today I wanna zoom that concept out a little bit because it's not just study methods that stop working over time.
It's the [00:21:00] entire system stack, right? This whole ecosystem concept. Most people don't realize that this is happening until they're already underwater or until their plants already dead. Okay? But here's what I mean. The systems that got you through one level of school or one stage of your career were probably moderately appropriate for that level. They worked for you then when the demands were what they were then, but maybe they weren't built to scale over time. And this is where we get confused because something that worked really well in eighth grade feels like it should work in 10th grade, right?
But the demands changed. And if your systems don't change with those demands, then we're gonna struggle.
Now let me walk you through what this looks like at different common, um, transitions in our lives. 'cause I think it's gonna help to see where your own systems may have gotten, um, I don't know, maybe where they stopped scaling and that that'll help you figure out, okay, well what do I need to adjust from here .
We're gonna start [00:22:00] way at the beginning. Just to set the scene. So in elementary school you probably had just one teacher, one classroom, and so much external structure. Your teacher was reminding you what was due. You probably didn't even have anything due. Your parents checked your backpack every night before bed and probably packed it for you.
Maybe you had a homework folder that was labeled homework folder, or a little planner that someone else helped you used and checked every day, and all of that worked perfectly fine. Because the demands in elementary school were manageable and they weren't that hard, and the scaffolding was there to save you.
But then you hit middle school and suddenly you have multiple teachers. You have multiple classes, you have different expectations from each one. No one's checking your backpack anymore. You're expected to keep track of everything by yourself. And if you're still relying on this, well, my teacher will remind me system from elementary school, you're gonna start losing track for your things.
You are gonna forget your things. And that's 'cause the components of your ecosystem didn't upgrade with [00:23:00] the new demands. Back to the garden metaphor. Your teachers stopped measuring the soil pH for you, and you never even knew that that was a thing to think about with gardening. You're like pH of the soil. What even is that? So when your teachers stopped doing it for you, nobody's even doing it now because you didn't even know that was a thing. Like that's scaffolding and teacher help, and those are essential. We need that. But at some point that becomes too much for or too much scaffolding for where we're at, and it becomes a disservice.
Then middle school might have been the first time that you had to juggle multiple classes, but high school is where long-term projects are now a thing. In middle school, you did your homework or it was assigned one day you did your homework, you turned it in the next day. Doesn't work like that in, in high school. In middle school, if you did your homework that counted as studying for the test. You'd probably be fine without, you know, studying a lot on your own.
But in high school, that stops being true and you have to start seeing studying as its own task that belongs somewhere on your task management system or [00:24:00] in your calendar. You also start dealing with more platforms. You've got Google Classroom, you've got Canvas. Some are just emailing you, some of this stuff comes in conversation.
And if you don't have a system for capturing all of that in one place, a single source of truth, then you're gonna miss stuff. You're gonna maybe show up to class not knowing that there was a reading due, or you're gonna forget about an assignment that was only mentioned once in an email, or maybe just once in your LMS, but you didn't even have an email management system where you regularly checked your email, so you had no idea that that assignment was in there.
So the task management system that worked in middle school where everything was pretty immediate and short term, that doesn't work anymore. And so now you need a system that can handle things that are due three weeks from now and break them into smaller tasks.
But most students don't know that, so they just keep trying to hold everything in their head or rely on their LMS: huge mistake. And then they wonder why they're so stressed and missing a million things. And then the transition from high school to college, that's a big one. This is where I see probably [00:25:00] the most dramatic breakdowns, and it makes total sense.
Why? Because in high school, even if you were disorganized, there were still guardrails. Because teachers checked in more, parents are still asking about homework. They're not checking your backpack, but they're still like, did you do your homework? And this is what not a lot of people talk about. But let me tell you, having worked as a high school special education teacher, let me tell you this.
Admin or administration doesn't wanna fail students. 'cause that means a lot more paperwork in trouble for them. Alright, so the teachers are gonna do everything possible so they don't have to to pass you because they don't wanna have to answer to admin. There was also a bell schedule that told you where to be and when.
And you were just sitting in class all day, so it's not like you had to leave school and then remember to come back for a class. But college just, you know, dismantles, all of that. No one's checking on you. Nobody cares. That sounds so sad, but like nobody cares if you show up to class. You might have three classes on Monday and none on Tuesday, and if you don't have a time management [00:26:00] system that helps you figure out when you're actually gonna do your work and what that work is in the first place, you are gonna procrastinate until the night before and then you panic, which means that you're gonna do a junky job. And then at this point too, studying, I feel like I'm talking a mile a minute, but you, you can always like speed me up if you're listening to this or you can like slow me down.
Whatever you need. Studying now at this point, when you go off to college, it becomes completely self-directed because in high school, a lot of teachers are giving you study guides or reviewing material during class, but in college you're totally on your own. If you don't know how to study effectively, and if you're still just rereading your notes and kinda like flipping through your textbooks, maybe making flashcards super hastily the night before, you're gonna struggle no matter how smart you are.
Also, I'm just gonna keep going. It's not just studying, it's also that your notes matter way more now. In high school, if your notes were bad, you could sometimes manage because your teacher would review everything again before the test. You just grab your, you know, classmates notes or grab the [00:27:00] slides that were posted to the portal and they were kind of like notes in the first place.
They're not, but that's what you might think. But in college, your notes are basically the only record you have of what was covered in a lecture. And if you didn't capture it well, like you don't have it. And if you don't have a good note taking system, you're gonna be studying incomplete or completely inaccurate information.
And then your study methods won't matter at all because you're working with the wrong material to start with.
Now, last one, let's talk about the transition from college to work. So you graduate, you enter the workforce. Now the rules have completely changed again. At work, there is no syllabus, no one hands you a list of everything that you're responsible for on day one. If a task is hard, you are expected to just handle it. You have competing priorities. And this is kind of a thing that I don't feel like people talk about enough, but here we go. I think time management or time becomes a little political in in the workforce. It's not just about logistics, and what I mean by that is in school, if something was due on Friday, it was due on Friday, [00:28:00] right?
It didn't matter who assigned it or how you felt about it. Like the deadline was the deadline. But at work, deadlines can change with little notice based on who's asking and what else is going on. Maybe your boss's boss has decided something else is more important now. Okay, well now you need to move around your entire plan.
Someone emails you at 4:00 PM asking you for something by the end of the day, and suddenly your entire plan is out the window. And you can't always just say like, no, sorry, can't do that. Like, I already planned to work on something else. Because there is a power dynamic at play.
That's what I meant by sometimes it gets political, not like politics, but you know, office politics. Time isn't just about what you need to get done anymore. It's about managing competing demands from people with different levels of authority and different agendas. And if you don't have a task management system that can handle that kind of fluidity and a time management system that lets you reprioritize things on the fly, [00:29:00] you're gonna feel like you can't keep up and you won't.
To be frank.
And also at this level, organization is also becoming non-negotiable because in school, if you lost a handout, you could ask a friend or just like reprint it from the portal, right? If it work, if you can't find the email or that document, you look incompetent. We need a reliable system for everything lives, and we need a routine where we are regularly maintaining that system.
It's not like set it and forget it. None of these systems are, as you can tell by the my entire premise, that these systems don't always scale with you, And if you move into any kind of leadership or management role, your systems have to scale again, because now we're not just tracking our own work.
We're tracking other people's work and managing projects with a lot of moving parts and often a lot of moving emotions, other people's emotions, and we're dealing with tasks that are more abstract, like check in with so-and-so about, about that thing or follow [00:30:00] up. If I don't hear back by Thursday. And if you're still using the same task management system you use, when you are just responsible for yourself, it's probably not gonna hold up.
You need something more robust and again this is what not a lot of people know, and this is where a lot of frustration comes in. So here's what I really want you to hear. The systems you had before at the level you were at before, wherever you are now, were fine for back then.
And that's why you're feeling like nothing is working. And we don't often notice there's an issue though, until something happens.
Like going back into our, um, garden metaphor, right? We don't often notice that our soil pH is off. We're not even thinking about soil pH and we're not, you know, even thinking about we're the sun levels and our watering methods aren't, right. We're not even thinking about any of that until we see our plants die.
And then that's the moment when we're often like, oh shoot, I think something's wrong with my garden. Like something is going on here. We know that we just feel [00:31:00] overwhelmed or we feel stressed, or we feel disorganized or like we feel like we're bad at school and work and at our job, when really we're just trying to operate with systems that were not built for where we are right now. Or this could happen too, we're just like flat out missing a skill altogether, which means that the entire ecosystem is incomplete.
And remember, the six core components of this ecosystem we're talking about are task management, time management, note taking, annotating, study skills and organization. And then when this happens, when our current skillset can't sustain us, We don't always know it, it's just that we feel like everything suddenly got harder.
And this is why figuring out what's missing or inadequate is so important. 'cause if we don't know which systems need to be upgraded or which ones we never had to begin with, we're just kind of standing in the corner of our garden, like watering that one plant that's dying while not even thinking about all of the other parts of our garden that are sustaining or trying to sustain, or in this case, [00:32:00] failing to sustain that plant under the surface.
That's why Inside SchoolHabits University, all students complete a comprehensive academic and study skills self-assessment. It is 72 questions that evaluate not just your academic skills across all of these six systems, but also your executive function profile because you need to know where the gaps are.
You need to see which systems are missing, which ones are weak, and which ones just need maybe a little tweaking or a little bit of an upgrade. And once you have that insight, you can start focusing on the most critical pieces of your ecosystem, and then systematically address each component by itself so that it contributes to the healthier system overall.
This is also why SchoolHabits University doesn't teach these skills in isolation, because as we've been talking about this entire episode, that doesn't work. We can't just fix your note taking and expect everything else to become gloriously easy. I mean, it absolutely makes a huge difference to fix your notes and for many people that's where it starts.
That's why I have, you know, the [00:33:00] college note taking power system. 'cause that's a really easy entry point to like fix something. But that's not where it ends. We can't just learn time management and assume our grades will improve. These systems are interconnected and they need to be built as an ecosystem.
Inside SchoolHabits University, you learn all six core systems. Task management, time management, note taking, annotating study skills and organization. And not only like do you learn each system independently, but how they connect to each other. You learn how to build them so they scale with you as your demands increase, which they will if you're like making progress in in any area, and then you learn the executive function skills underneath all of that, that make these systems sustainable and practical and simple to maintain once you set 'em up.
If listening to this episode has finally awakened something inside of you that knew this was going on beneath the surface and now that little inkling that you had about joining SchoolHabits University is fullblown, and you know this is the next right step. [00:34:00] Head to SchoolHabitsUniversity.com, which is also linked in the description box below and in the show notes. There are two different tiers to the program. One is a fully independent track called standard enrollment where you get all six core modules we covered today, as well as some pretty sweet bonuses to help you implement and stick with the strategies, especially if you have a DHD.
But then if you're looking for more hands-on interaction with me q and as, that's the signature enrollment where I've got your back by answering any questions you have in monthly q and as for 12 months straight. So you are never gonna get stuck on how to figure out how to make these systems work for you in the context of your unique life.
Because standing in the corner of your garden, pouring all of your water into one flower and wondering why it's still collapsing, will not fix your garden, and it's only gonna run you outta water. Man, I really like this metaphor.
Okay, let's wrap this up. Here is what I want you to remember from today's episode.
First, there is no single skill that is gonna fix your struggle in school or work [00:35:00] task management, time management, note taking, annotating, study skills, organization, all work together as an ecosystem. And when one is meh or missing altogether, the others they fall apart under the weight of trying to carry the burden or compensate for that piece that's missing.
And then second, the most visible symptom is really the root cause. Bad grades might look like a study problem, but it's often a note-taking problem or time management problem, or both. Missed deadlines might seem like procrastination, but it's usually a task management or organization issue underneath the soil.
And third, whether you're a student or a professional, these skills are essential for working productively and efficiently towards your goals. Maybe that better grade so you can get into a good college. Maybe that's a better college GPA, so you can get a good job. Maybe that's a better work evaluation so that you can get a raise.
At the end of the day, these are the skills that are required even to meet your own personal goals outside of the context of work and school. And might I venture to say that apart from empathy and communication, these are the [00:36:00] most critical skills anyone could have. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might need to hear it.
If you wanna dive deeper into building these systems, join me Inside SchoolHabits University. All of the links are in the show notes. Alright, my friends, that is it for today. Kind of a longer episode, but I had a lot to say. Always do. Thanks so much for your time. Keep showing up, keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.
