The How To series

Last year, I had prepared a how-to series of articles on "How should one prepare for civil services examination." I will take up that series now and whenever I will be short of ideas or events to discussed, I would pick topics from that series.

In my times, I never used to stack my books on the shelf over one another. Civil services preparation does not happen in silos. When I am studying history, I would often relate it to geography or economics or the polity. Now often it happens that we keep only relevant books on the table and rest are stacked in Almirah and lying on bed burdened under loads of other books. I find it an unintelligent way of studying.

When You are sitting on the chair for a couple of hours, you develop some sort of inertia. This inertia demotivates you from getting up from the chair and pull out the relevant book from the stack. Moreover, if the stack is arranged over one another then the motivation to pull out the book or register is reduced by a factor of 10. One needs to use all the force to pull out the register and in the process, some ten other registers fall from the stack or at the least, their arrangement is disturbed. So the very thought of pulling the register from the stack or the effort required to find out the relevant register is enough to desist one from interlinking concepts and understanding the concept thoroughly.

So, I observed this for a number of days and as a result, I rearranged my whole book stack. I kept all the books side by side and began keeping pointers to the most frequently used material. I brought a separate rack and kept all the necessary tools like history's spectrum, geography's maps, polity's Laxmikant and other most often used books at a distance of my hand from my chair. This way, I won't have to get up from my chair again and again. This helped me immensely in analyzing, interlikning and understanding the concept in details.