I recently finished reading Cal Newport’s book Slow Productivity and was inspired to share how his insights can be applied to preparing for the PE Exam.
Cal observes that many of us are overwhelmed by work and have a difficult time recognizing what our priorities are, so we just try to work on a lot and hope to make progress. We have learned how to look busy from years of knowledge work in offices, but when it comes time to block out distractions and focus, many of us struggle. The goal of Cal’s three “rules” that follow, adapted from the book, is to enable us to apply our cognitive effort and transform our time and energy into something of lasting value. Specifically for PE candidates, we wish to build the knowledge and skills to be able to pass the PE exam demonstrating technical and professional competence in a specific discipline of engineering.
Rule #1: Do Fewer Things
“Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.” –Cal Newport
Knowing that it is “crazy at work” for most people, Cal invites you to be creative and even radical in how you select and organize your work. This means constraining your workload by giving preference to projects that give you the autonomy to be productive as opposed to dealing with a large number of meetings and emails. Administrative burdens are often understated and have an outsized and adverse impact on how much time and energy is left over for deep work.
If you have already decided that you want to pursue your PE, but have not yet assigned this goal a high priority, you could be setting yourself up for disappointment, because serious exam prep does not lend itself to sporadic, half-hearted effort the way that dialing into another Zoom call or scanning your email inbox does. If you have too many critical projects on your plate right now, it’s fine to defer the exam until you have more bandwidth. If you do not foresee any reduction in your workload on the horizon, all the more reason to take on the challenge of figuring out how you can free up some capacity, otherwise you will defer the PE indefinitely. I’ve spoken to many engineers that are 15, 20, or 25+ years into their career and feel like it’s “too late” for them. (It’s not, but it’s true that it gets harder.)
Rule #2: Study At a Natural Pace
“Allow your work to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.” –Cal Newport
My former triathlon coach used to repeat an old Navy Seal motto: “Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast”. Obviously the goal of a race is to finish as fast as possible, but his point was that slowing down during training enables us to move through the water or the pedal stroke or our running stride more efficiently, and by learning to improve these movements, speed naturally emerges. Instead of focusing on frantic energy expenditure, he wanted his athletes to set their focus on being smooth. Speed is something that happens automatically while working on technique.
Imagine I handed you a rubik’s cube and challenged you to solve it as fast as possible with no previous experience. Would you immediately start moving the pieces around, making as many twists as possible in the hopes to randomly stumble upon a solved position? Of course not. Even the fastest solvers on the planet once had to learn how to do it the first time (or the first 100 times) and only then did they begin perfecting their craft by speeding up their movements incrementally over many repetitions.
The key in both of these examples is that we should only begin adding speed once we have achieved a base level of knowledge and skills related to any particular topic. Too often I work with candidates who insist on solving problems against the clock, limiting themselves to 6 minutes per problem because that is how much time you will have on average during the exam. This is foolish and rooted in unrealistic expectations. Partly because of ignoring Rule #1 (Do Fewer Things), candidates find themselves constrained on time but remain forcefully committed to making progress on their exam prep. Their intensity remains pegged at a high level as they scramble to try to hit targets before they have demonstrated the ability to to solve a particular type of problem at all.
By definition, learning is a cognitive endeavor which works best when you get into a natural groove. “The grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.”
Rule #3: Obsess Over Quality
“Quality demands that you slow down.” –Cal Newport
The reason we are uncomfortable with slowing down is usually because we feel as though we are wasting time. Practically, this could mean foregoing the opportunity to ‘bank time’ on the exam to work on other more challenging problems. During studying, this could mean fitting less problems into a given session or simply not covering as much material as possible for that day, week, or month.
But by now we should be clear that the “focus required to get better is simply not compatible with busyness.” Our goal should be to tackle a little quality work every day which will produce more meaningful and satisfying results over time. This requires patience and faith in the process. It helps if you have study resources you know are organized and sequenced to bring you to a passing result. The process can actually become fun when approached with an obsession over quality, because you are creatively generating your own questions and to some degree getting lost in your head along the way, convinced that you can find the answers, which you often do. This is the way!
The caution here is to temper the obsession over quality before it starts to resemble perfectionism. We need to allow enough time to build something great, but not unlimited time. There is such a thing as good enough – passing the exam with confidence – but you need not achieve mastery. We are looking for progress over perfection.
In summary, Slow Studying can, paradoxically, enable you to become a Professional Engineer faster and with more certainty than you otherwise would. Cal Newport courageously blazes a path for you to follow, by (1) Doing Fewer Things, (2) Studying at a Natural Pace, and (3) Obsessing Over Quality. In doing so, your study journey will be rich, satisfying and efficient.
This article only scratches the surface of the many valuable ideas from Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, so I would strongly recommend you check out the book for the inspiring stories and specific tactics.
If you found this article helpful, I’d be honored to support you on your journey toward professional licensure. To learn more about the process and our programs, contact Dan@mechancialPEexamprep.com.