at university i trained myself to be able to study with 100 focus for an average about 8 hours a day increasing to 12 hours a day during the exam period although i would never recommend studying 12 hours a day as a long-term strategy as i'll explain later on in the video but the problem i see often is that you can be studying long hours the whole day even but if you're not focused on what you're learning and you're not processing and retaining your study material because you keep getting distracted then essentially you're wasting your time
so in this video i'm gonna go through how i went from struggling to stay focused when studying for even 15 minutes at a time i would get distracted so quickly to being able to concentrate for a full 12 hours with just a few breaks in between this is something that i've been thinking about quite a lot recently the difference between what would be called an average student and a high performance student and what makes an average student average and what makes a high performance student high performance i've realized that the first hour of the day
what i'm going to call the golden hour is kind of what determines how your day will turn out so whether you have a productive day or an unproductive day it is influenced heavily on what you do in the first hour of the day so let me explain when my alarm clock goes off in the morning but i keep hitting the snooze button and i finally wake up and i spend 30 minutes scrolling through social media i then slowly go and shower and have breakfast watch netflix for a bit then two hours after waking up i
finally leave the house it's very likely that that slow energy momentum will carry on throughout the day on the other hand let's say i wake up early i get straight out of bed i get ready i go straight to my task list and see what tasks i need to complete first and i have a very productive morning then of course i'm likely to have a productive day too it's this golden hour in the morning the one hour after waking up that often determines whether i'm going to have a productive day or not and i see
this a lot with the students that i coach the high performance students live their lives with urgency they have things to do people to see goals to achieve and so their actions match that it's like when you start working your graduate job and you'll have key performance indicators or kpis to read you'll probably have a manager keeping an eye on your performance so for every hour that you work the company is investing money in you so naturally they want you to work at a decent speed so if you're working slow and you're not reaching your
kpis and just your general demeanor is slow and lethargic then it's very likely that your manager will pull you into their office and have a world review and ask you to speed up the thing about being a student is that students don't have a manager like you would have in a workplace right they don't have a manager to keep track of their performance and to apply that bit of extra pressure to speed up their performance so essentially you have to be your own manager you have to be regularly monitoring yourself and be asking was i
productive today was i working as fast as i could have been or did i take it easy and just let the day slip by because i've noticed that this is one of the main difference between what you might call an average student and a high performance student so a high performance student doesn't need a manager to be looking over their shoulder when they're studying they can kind of manage themselves they can motivate themselves and once you learn how to do this and how to manage yourself properly it's an absolutely indispensable skill to have not only
as a student but in the working environment too like henry ford once said if you always do what you've always done you'll always get what you've always gotten you must develop a sense of urgency in the pursuit to transform your grades you must step up your efforts in life if you wish to level up and live a life that is based on your own terms not on those dictated by other people your dreams can be transformed into reality only when you put in hard work and dedication apart from you yourself no one else can stop
you from being extraordinary if others have done it then so can you so you can take initiative or laser round in bed all day you're the one who has to make that choice and live with its consequences if you are determined to live with urgency you will know that you do not have the time in your day that you can just waste if your goal is to stand out from those around you then you will choose to live differently when urgency is the driving force behind you you look at every hour as an opportunity to
do something new to become a better person now at the beginning of this video i mentioned that you probably don't need to be studying for 12 hours a day every day in order to get really good grades right you need to study how to study you need to learn how to study smart so i made two courses on skillshare which you can access for free going through exactly how you can do that on how to maximize your time so you're studying as efficiently as possible meaning that you can essentially study fewer hours right so i
have two one-hour 40-minute classes not just a short 10-minute video like i have on youtube but these are in-depth courses going through topics such as advanced information processing and pareto principle and by the way if you're not implementing the pareto principle into your studying strategy then you absolutely should but just in general skillshare classes tend to be far higher quality with better teaching is crazy value for money considering that you can access all of my skillshare courses essentially for free because the first 1000 subscribers to click on the link in the description will get one
month free trial for skillshare i think everyone should have a plan of the content that they need to learn before their exams so a study plan is so important when it comes to achieving decent grades but also when it comes to things like stress management and staying focused it's easy to kind of get distracted when we're studying if we don't have a plan to follow or we don't have a schedule or an endpoint inside so i was in a coaching call with one of my students earlier this week and she was panicking because she had
her exams in 10 months now 10 months usually is a relatively long time to prepare for exams right however this student hadn't studied much for the last few months therefore her workload had piled up so understandably she was feeling a little bit stressed so on the coaching call we spent about two hours going through every single assignment that she had to hand in and all the course material that she had to learn and then the exam dates so she gave me three pieces of information all the materials she needs to learn all the assignment deadlines
and all her exam dates then we plotted this information onto a study plan this is the annual study plan that i created for her on microsoft excel when we're on the call and as you can see i spread out her workload evenly throughout the entire year up until her exam dates so she had four topics to study for maths economics business and literature and what i did was i assigned about two assignments for her to do per month and two modules to learn per month at the beginning of the year now this is suddenly more
manageable right mentally saying i have two assignments and months to write is a lot more manageable than saying i have 12 assignments to write in six months and as she completes each assignment and learns each module she takes it off so she can see exactly what she has left to do that month and just as a side note there are four modules highlighted in red these are when this student has her mock exam so i made sure that she had learned every module before each mock exam now her final exams are at the end of
june so i made sure that firstly all her assignments are completed well before her exams because i wanted her assignments to be completely submitted and finished with by february so from march she can start focusing entirely on her exams so her exams are in june so by may all of her modules should be learned and technically by may in theory she should be ready for her exams and this part is important because with her class it's quite unique in that she can actually choose when to submit her assignments as long as they're all submitted before
june and i can bet that there are a whole load of students that would wait until june to submit their assignments right but it's the worst thing that they can do here because you don't want to be writing your assignments at the same time as you're having to revise for your exams so then we have may in june which is the review period and this is where she needs to go through all the modules once again and make sure that all the information is fresh in your mind and this is a really important period of
time the one or two months before her exams where she can test herself and fill in any gaps of knowledge she may have and just generally make sure that she's prepared now did you notice how i made sure that she had learned all the material for her exams two months before her exam date and the reason for that is twofold firstly things come up right we get sick or we become particularly unproductive for a month or we go on holiday these kind of setbacks have to be taken into account when making a study plan so
even if she falls behind in her study plan it's okay there's still some wiggle room in there however to really excel in her studies i advised her to absolutely stick to the plan because those last two months the review period is absolutely crucial when it comes to getting extremely high grades the month before an exam is usually when most students are cramming in their studying and trying to learn all the material but if you have enough time for a one or two month period to make sure that you know 100 of the content that can
be an incredibly powerful position to be throughout university i really wasn't stressed at all i genuinely can't remember a time throughout university that i was properly stressed and i'm not saying that to kind of brag or show off but i just want to kind of illustrate how effective something as simple as a study plan can be because i wasn't stressed so i could actually enjoy my studying i could in some ways just take my time and i think looking back now it's a major factor of why i enjoyed my studying so much at university i
had a really good experience at university because i knew that i was on schedule i kind of had peace of mind that an unexpected assignment wasn't going to spring up on me or an exam was coming that i wasn't prepared for and chances are when an exam came around the corner i had been preparing for it and studying for it for months ahead of time a study plan helped me kind of stay focused and know exactly what i needed to do that day it gave me almost like a road map of where i was heading
and it kept me motivated because i knew that if i didn't study that day i'd probably have twice the amount of work to cover the next day so if you haven't created a study plan i highly recommend you do you might just be surprised how much it changes your whole studying experience and if you'd like more tips and strategies on how to study more efficiently i made a video seven ways i study smart not hard you can click on the card on the screen alternatively i made another video on why you struggle to stay focused
on one task again you can click on the card on the screen and for more in-depth study training my skillshare courses are available for free with the one month free trial link in the description below
