imagine if you could finish all of your work in just a few days and still get the highest grade instead of being like everyone else spending months studying and barely making any progress I'm salm I'm a final year med student but I've also done an undergrad and postgraduate degree so I've spent more time studying than most people would do in their entire life but that helped me figure out how I can maximize my study output and minimize my effort so that I can study efficiently and still have time for other things in my life so
I'll go through the crunch method so that you can do the same and this covers the best approach to studying from knowing to start to knowing how to remember everything you learn and each part connects with the next so watch until the end to maximize your Study efficiency so when it comes to studying efficiently it isn't just about the time when you sit down to study because it starts even before with knowing where to start and there's quite a few parts to this so I'll give a personal example at the end of this section to
help you visualize it better but the first thing you need to do is list out the topics and subjects you have on one document breaking them down into subtopics and grouping them based on how closely related they are this is so that you can place them into a study Matrix which is a way to prioritize topics based on both your strengths or weaknesses and how important a topic is but how can you tell if something is important or if something is or isn't a strength of yours so for importance ask your seniors for what came
up in the exams and what was emphasized by teachers or professors check your syllabus for the biggest topics same for past papers and even check online for what seems important to focus on the last is especially useful because there's definitely a post online where someone asks the same questions for your exact subject and for knowing your strengths or weaknesses look at how you did in past exams or how much time time you spent on the topic so far and what you remember from them and remember back to the start I set to group subtopics based
on how closely related they are this is because these bigger groups share some fundamental knowledge so that you can go through them faster and build stronger connections helping you remember for longer so shift these grouped subtopics higher up in your study Matrix just make sure to group these quite sparingly if there's very little connection don't group topics together so now for an example to help you visualize if I broke down Cardiology into subtopics it includes heart attacks dyslipidemia arrhythmias high blood pressure myopathies and more the closely related subtopics include heart attacks high blood pressure and
dyslipidemia and they all happened to come up a lot in past papers so therm having a lot of connections between each other and other topics and being common in past exams ranks them high in the study Matrix but on the other end it's important to realize that if something is difficult doesn't mean it's important I remember how I didn't know much biochemistry making it a weakness but when I saw past papers no questions on them came up and myor said to ignore them too so that ranked it low in the study Matrix and in the
end it didn't come up in my exams the first step of knowing where to start Gets You Through the most important and relevant things first which is necessary if you want to do as much as possible in as little time so for now ignore anything too complicated because later in the video I'll tell you the best time to do them so now you know how to start but how do you actually approach each topic so again there's a few parts to this and as before I'll give an example at the end but the first thing
you need to do is cover your bases this is about making sure you get a general idea of what's in the topic before you go into the details because how many times have you done a class class or lecture where you kept taking notes on specific things but after the lecture you couldn't remember anything what's important to do first whether that's in a lecture from your textbooks or anything else is to Prime through the content for lectures or classes this is just sitting there to listen only taking notes on the key headings that come up
in the lecture slides or making a few questions based on the lecture for going through textbooks that's focusing again on key headings but also chapter summaries because those will focus on the key principles of the topics right after you finished doing this review what you went through by making some form of Mind map of anything you can remember also trying to find connections between what you went through these connections are especially important if you went through the subtopics that you could group together as in the first part of the video for this part people rush
and move on straight away if they don't remember but it's important that you give about 15 to 30 seconds to really think hard about what you went through because this active retrieval of information from your brain helps you retain information better than if you were to quickly move on so it's important if you're trying to get through a lot in a short amount of time this is all going to create the first most basic layer of your knowledge that helps you understand the core Concepts and vaguely how they come together and the rest of the
content you go through will build on this layer so as an example if I'm going through heart attacks I'll Prime through the content by picking out the headings such as the anatomy of the arteries the types of heart attacks and how they present and the management and I think of any questions that would be good to know the answer to making sure I actively try to remember what I read this shouldn't take more than 10 to 15 minutes to do because it's a very brief run through of the key points but this already cuts down
on the hours you would have spent on a single lecture and this leads on to the next point which is knowing how to build on this foundation so so you'll realize from your initial approach of the last section that there's a lot of gaps in what you know which is normal and in this point there's a lot of things that help you fill in these gaps to remember everything the first might sound weird but it's to look at practice questions for the topics you've gone through but not actually do them the idea is to just
skim through the questions and think about whether you'd be able to answer them if you don't know the answer write down what this question is about the reason to do this is because practice questions whether from textbooks your lectures or online question banks are more likely to cover the high yield and more relevant information in your topics and once you have a list of these questions on the topic you can start to fill in the gaps and one of the best ways to do this is by watching videos on the topics because YouTube videos are
created in a way that's more engaging and more dense with information than your textbooks or classes making it faster to absorb key information and only after you've seen this videos try to answer the questions and fill in the gaps you had in your initial mind map from the previous section of the video this works well because you aren't just gaining information and moving on to the next topic you're gaining information and testing yourself at the same time which is what helps your brain actively engage age and then store that information for the long term for
example if I do questions on Cardiology I might notice things I missed such as how to investigate and diagnose a heart attack or treatments to prevent future heart attacks so I look more into them after during this on the high yield and important parts of the topic builds a solid foundation of knowledge made up of the first layer from the approach section of the video and from the gaps you filled from this section and this map of Key information keeps you from having to constantly check through massive textbooks or lecture slides and now I know
what you're thinking what about the content that isn't as high yied that you would need to know for the higher marks so now you can start to worry about that because after building the foundation these smaller details are easier to remember now that you have connections to work with and if you remember back to the section and approaching your work I said to Prime through the content briefly so now as part of filling in your gaps to deepen your connections go back to your textbooks lecture slides or online resources and read through the content that
you briefly went through before but this time look for the smaller details that you missed making sure to add them to wherever they fit in your mind maps this is going to make you actively remember associations between subtopics and the small details so you again learn and test yourself at the same time after you've done one round of this go back to the questions and you should find yourself feeling that you can answer a lot more than before and that this point you should start doing the questions instead of just looking at whether the content
of them seems familiar to you just make sure that when you do them give yourself those 15 to 30 seconds of time to really try and remember what you went through instead of rushing through the questions but doing questions isn't the only way to practice and being able to repeat these steps a few times in different ways is what can help you build a higher level of understanding for your Topics in a short amount of time and another way to make sure you fill in any gaps is going through questions or quizzes with your friends
whether that's doing online question Banks or past paper questions or even making your own questions do them together so that you take turns in answering them this works well because if you don't know one question chances are one of your friends would so they can explain it to you by giving a brief summary with only key information and that helps them too since they practice active recall as they retrieve information from their brain if you find yourself getting quite a few questions wrong within a subtopic repeat both the build and deepen connection sections of the
method until you feel more confident and once you've done this for one topic or a group of them repeat this method for the next I really want to stress that all of these steps work because it makes you layer information in an order that makes sense for efficiency since you both learn and test yourself at the same time but now a big problem is that even if you know how to study efficiently it can still be difficult to get yourself to study if you don't have the motivation or discipline or even if you just feel
lazy and over the years I've been able to reliably make myself do work without needing motivation or discipline so that I can do well at med school and still have a personal life so in this video here I'll talk about how you can make yourself do work without needing motivation or discipline so click the video to learn more [Music]
