over the past 8 years I've completed both an undergrad and postgraduate degree and now I'm in my final year as a medical student and along the way I've experimented with countless study techniques and filtered through hundreds of tips and hacks to help me find the best ways to maximize my potential in both my academic and personal life and from all of this I've narrowed down to a handful of study tips that aren't just easy to do but also actually work so I'll walk you through them to help you study more effectively focus better and get
more done in less time so first I want to give you a personal example of a problem I know you've experienced too so a few years ago I remember how when I sat down to study at the library or at home the amount of work I got done varied quite a lot dayto day in one study session I would have gone through 100 questions in 2 hours but in another I'd only get through 50 but this wasn't because of the topics being harder or because I didn't understand it it was because of an unconscious loss
or shift in focus and because this happens unconsciously it's easy to feel like you've studied for hours but in reality half that time might have been spent daydreaming or thinking about unrelated things and important to recognize is that it's not that you weren't trying to study it's that your focus shifted without you even realizing so to make sure you maintain attention and focus towards studying for the entire duration of your study session make sure to use a blink alarm this is a simple idea of setting an alarm to go off at a regular interval when
you're studying like every 30 minutes to make you blink and act as a reminder for you to regain your study Focus it's not there to rush you to get work done it's instead there to prompt you to ask yourself what am I I meant to be doing right now or what am I thinking about right now so that you realign your focus to get back on track with studying I don't normally recommend small tips like this but this has actually been helpful for clients with ADHD because of how immediate the benefits are and it only
takes 10 seconds to set up so try the next time you study to save you from hours of wasted time and now for the second tip I want you to think back to a time where we've experienced a problem we've all had where you learn something difficult for the first time and spend hours trying to understand understand it and finally after all of that effort it makes sense but when you revisit the same concept and topic a few weeks later you completely lost your understanding and have to spend time to relearn it all again this
is a problem I've had even recently at Medical School when I was trying to understand the pathophysiology of conditions in neurology because it's hard to fully remember the exact initial train of thought that helped me understand the concept when I then revisit it later and as a result I often found myself struggling to piece things together and spend extra time filling in the gaps again so one thing that helped me cut down on this problem is making sure to enable multiple modalities for Learning and what does this mean this means actively combining written Visual and
especially auditory methods to learn difficult Concepts more effectively for example if you're learning something difficult and get to the point of understanding it don't just move on record a voice note of you explaining that Concept in your own words so that when you revisit the topic in a few weeks or month's time you can refer back to your own explanation of it so that you understand it again instantly this follows the final technique where explaining or teaching something is one of the best ways to understand and there's nobody better to explain a topic in a
way you'll understand than you using your own words just make sure to be organized with the way you keep these audio recordings I use a flashcard app called anky since that allows for audio recordings within each flash card but you can also use apps like notion or even just record with your phone's normal audio recording app and organize it into folders and now something that a lot of students want to be able to do is study for hours on end especially during exam season where they want to study and focus all day but it's difficult
and even almost impossible to get yourself to study that much if you've never been able to focus for more than 30 minutes but one of the biggest techniques I've tried that helped me study for hours with full Focus was adapting my study sessions with Progressive overload this follows the idea that when you're at the gym you'd gradually increase the weights you lift over time to progressively overload your muscles so that they grow bigger and stronger for studying this means gradually increasing the length of your study sessions or the difficulty of what you're learning so that
over time you're able to focus for longer periods without burning out for example this could be starting with 25 minute study sessions on day one then 30 minutes on day two where you eventually end up doubling this time in the next week or this could be aiming to do 30 questions in an hour to then doing 35 questions in an hour the next day this works because it's personalized to your attention span and focus helping you gradually expand your comfort zone so that you can build your mental stamina to handle more studying without feeling mentally
drained tracking your progress over time also shows you how far you've come which can be a great motivator to keep you going and now for the fourth tip is by far the best method I've used to study and learn content as efficiently as possible so that I retain information long term this is especially important for me at med school since there's thousands of things I need to know from conditions to treatments to signs and symptoms and this is making sure to use active recall and space repetition but with a few changes to make it even
more effective if you don't already know active recall is about testing yourself on the material you're learning rather than passively reading through notes or highlighting things which is one of the least efficient ways of studying active recall is different and works because it forces you to think harder and that strengthens the connections in your brain which makes it so that what you learn stays in your mind and combining this with space repetition where you review material at increasing intervals over time such as reviewing the next day then a week later then a month after that
strengthens your long-term retention much more efficiently than any other method making it one of the best ways to recall information during exams I've made a full video on active recall and space repetition where I mention the changes to make them even even more effective so be sure to check that out after and now something that students tend to overlook is the impact your environment has on productivity and by environment I don't just mean your physical location because it's also about changing your mental environment or state and one of the best ways to change this is
by having a study reset as well as changing where you study to a different physical location it could also be changing whether you study alone or with people you know are working hard too and I say people working hard because they might be your friends or those hardworking people might not be your friends so this could mean heading to the library not for the changing environment but for having other focused people next to you or going to a cafe where the atmosphere is all about getting things done the reason this works is because people try
to generally blend into their surroundings and if your surroundings consist of people doing nothing besides working hard you're much more likely to do the same so that you don't stand out I know this works because it's what I do I do my own work with a few of my friends that do their own thing as part of a co-working session and this also creates a good balance where we can take joy breaks together as a reward then get back to solid Focus after so experiment with different locations and with different people to see what energizes
you the most so these tips are simple to get on with and will definitely help you study more efficiently so that you use your time better but our problem is that studying is just a small part of your student life there's a lot of other things you have to keep on top of which makes it difficult to study in a way that's sustainable throughout the year I've spent a lot of time trying to improve my time management so that I could maintain a healthy balance between my academic and personal life without having a strict timetable
and in this video here I'll break down the four levels of organization to help you do exactly this so that you find time for everything you want and need to do so click the video to learn more [Music]
