Once I decided to shift my career focus from System and Network Admin towards Security, I got really nervous that studying simply wasn't my strong suit given my time constraints.  Between family obligations (Married and father to a three year old girl) and professional obligations (Renewing my CCNA or getting CCNA:S and I really should be reading Powershell in Action instead of EH!) and even just personal hobbies (Getting into the Arduino, studying Japanese, and yea, I knit).  All these things that have claims on my time and one of my biggest weaknesses is my impatience.  So, deciding to sit for the CISSP, I picked up the Shon Harris book and just started reading and highlighting.  I'm sorry to say that I got quickly overwhelmed.  Not that the material is too difficult, but I was reading in the vicinity of 30 to 50 pages a night. 

So I decided to try to take a long view (Marathon not a sprint!) and swapped my study habits to what is listed below. 

• Read 15 pages of Shon Harris' CISSP All-In-One
• Each night, highlight passages or concepts that would make good test questions.
• At the end of 15 pages, fire up Anki and review the notes I made with the highlighter and enter each in question format with chapter tagging.
• Try to clear my Anki reps every day and set the new fact number to 20 per day.
• When I've finished the All-In-One book and worked through my Anki deck take some practice exams and note where I fell short.  Review those chapters and reset my Anki counts for those chapter tags.
• Take the exam
• If I fail reread the book and maybe look into a boot camp type of prep course

For reference Anki is a Spaced Repetition System and has worked miracles for my studies in Japanese, I think it will easily translate to CISSP studying.  I've been using the Cloze deletion technique for my facts, so it forces me to memorize versus hunt for an answer in multiple choice.

I chose 15 pages a night because it allows me to get through a decent amount of information without finding myself up at 2am and too tired to pick up my CCNA books or even enter the CISSP info into Anki.  I'm currently at page 375 and if I can manage to read at least 5 nights a week I'm projected to finish the book in about 15 weeks.  If I manage it every night of the week, I'm projected to finish in 10 weeks.  From what I've read about the CISSP, I feel that's a significant amount of time to study and really familiarize myself with the information. 

If anyone has any thoughts or comments or even warnings, I'd greatly appreciate them. 

Hey,

While my main focus is OSCE right now, but CISSP is my second goal.

I spend a lot of time on commute, driving in traffic (about 2 hours a day). So what I did is convert Shon Harris video training in MP3s and I listen to them while I am driving. Since 90% of the videos are really looking at her telling you stuff, I don't loose much by not watching the videos.

When I reach a more complexe section, I take note of it and go read in her book about it (same book as you, Macphisto). This way, I spend most of my energy on OSCE and once this big cert is out of the way (crossing fingers!), I will take many CISSP practice exams.

I have to say that being a PMP (Project Management Professional) and having three other security related certs help me a lot. I took a short CISSP practice test before starting studying and scored 70%. So listening to MP3s suits me.

BTW, I recommend Shon Harris video training. Add her book as a complement and reference, and it is quite good...

Good luck Macphisto!

Regarding this:
Did you mean buying the practice questions from cccure.org?

Thanks alucian!

I think this is the one:
https://www.isc2.org/studiscope/default.aspx

I didn't buy it back then, so I cannot guarantee for it, but...