To make this determination, the experimenter taught the material to groups of students using different approaches and then tested the amount of learning accomplished per approach.

Somewhat surprisingly, the experimenter's main finding was that it made little difference which teaching approach was used. The only thing that was found to matter was the amount of time the students spent learning the material -- the more time they spent learning, the more they learned (Murdock 1960, 1962; Jung 1968 pp. 56 & 145-46).

This made me curious about how much time I was actually spending on my courses. This led me to make the form and to start tracking my time.

The first thing I learned from tracking my time was that I was spending much less time on my courses than I had guessed. I saw that the gaps on the form often represented wasted time -- time that I realized in retrospect was unwisely spent. This led me to spend more time on my courses and on other activities that I judged were impor