all right going to show you a step-by-step protocol that takes me only 10 minutes to do but it saves me 10 or more hours each week I'm Mike founder of koi and we help you increase your learning and earning potential so a few years ago I was working full-time as a doctor while building this business and I had zero time but I also had to study for my licensing exams and so if I didn't have a system to learn more efficiently than my job my business and probably my life would have fallen apart and the
technique I'm about to show you is part of that learning system and it can save you so much time especially if you're learning new material but to use this technique correctly we have to first understand why it works so imagine that your mom sends you to the grocery store to buy some groceries sounds easy enough except there are a few challenges she doesn't give you a shopping list so you have no idea what she wants you to buy and all the lights in the store are completely out so you can't see anything right things just
got interesting so how long would it take you to find and buy those groceries it's a ridiculous scenar to think about but this is actually how I was approaching learning new information and it's how most people approach it blind and aimlessly now let's imagine the same scenario but this time the lights are on you can see where you're going and your mom actually gives you a detailed shopping list so you know exactly what you're looking for plus there's a giant map on the ceiling pointing to each item so you know exactly where to look and
you get a practice run during after hours when no one is there now same question how long do you think it would take to buy groceries you'd be be sprinting through the aisles basically so when it comes to learning new information most people just dive in head first and they read everything from beginning to end like they're reading Harry Potter but reading a novel is not the same thing as reading to learn it's actually the complete opposite it's okay to go in blind when you're reading a novel because the surprises and the uh the plot
twists are what make it fun to read right but if you read that way for learning then you're not going to retain anything we need spoilers when we're learning and so this is the goal of the 10-minute technique which we call the priming protocol it's one of the super techniques that we teach inside study quests which I'll leave a link in the description if you're interested and super technique just means that we've combined multiple learning techniques together to make a super effective one all right so why is it called priming well we always want to
learn in layers right kind of like how you're painting a house you paint it in layers and the very first layer you apply is the coat of primer to make sure that the second and the third layers actually stick all right so in the spirit of priming let's get a quick overview of the steps before we dive into each one step one set a timer for 10 minutes step two establish key learning objectives step three explore the map step four draw your thought process all right let's start with step one which is setting a timer
for 10 minutes priming should not take more than 10 minutes if it does then it's no longer priming right you're just basically reading at that point but when you set a timer it forces your brain to get hyper efficient with the information the brain is really good at forgetting information that it doesn't need so when you put a Time restrict ition it makes the information that the brain does acquire more significant when we have a ticking timer it also creates a sense of urgency it helps the brain concentrate better and get things done right if
you've ever procrastinated till the last minute on something then you know what I'm talking about here all of a sudden you just panic and you manage to get the thing done because there's a sense of urgency and this has to do with Parkinson's law which I can throw up here on the screen if you want to do further reading on it but let's move on without getting too far into the Wheats here step two is to establish the key learning objective Ives if you don't know what you're looking for then you're basically going in blind
but if you can establish ahead of time why am I learning this and what am I looking for then you won't waste any time like imagine if you're trying to fix your vacuum cleaner and you're flipping through the user manual right and you know for sure that the information you need is on page 17 second line from the bottom then you can just jump straight to that line and read it without wasting any time reading anything else right obviously it's not always going to be that simple in real life but the next closest thing is
at least know what are the learning objectives what topics will you be tested on or what does a syllabus say that you need to know think about what the teacher says or what the teacher hints will be important and then what do you need to know in order to apply this knowledge in real life and when in doubt you can ask chat GPT but all of these are questions that you can ask and use as learning objectives for me personally when I have learning objectives it just keeps me actively engaged with what I'm learning it's
like I'm hunting for the answers whereas if I didn't didn't have objectives I'd just kind of be passively reading and not really know what I'm looking for and I'd probably quickly fall asleep at that point all right step three is to explore the map this means doing a first run through the entire material super fast if you're reading a textbook then you're just flipping through the pages really quickly if you're looking at presentation slides then you're flipping through the slides or you're flipping through the table of contents really quickly and you're just scanning the headings
scanning for the bold words the images the diagrams and the key Concepts you're really forcing your brain to focus on only what is important you're not deep diving into any details and keep in mind that you've already established the learning objectives so if you find a section that you think has an answer to those objectives then focus on that or you can quickly mark it down Mark the location so you can come back later and look at it so you only have 10 minutes to do this focus on the 8020 rule right the headings the
bold words the key Concepts those are the 20% of material that gives you the 80% of what's important the rest are just details that you can come back for later this 8020 rule is so true and after so many years of teaching this to students we found that this applies across pretty much every subject and every topic all right step four is to draw the core concept of what you just read and yes I mean draw as in using a pen and paper or your iPad and stylus and literally draw out the Core Concepts or
the main ideas and show how they're all connected to each other so for example if you just read about forces vectors and acceleration then draw out these three ideas onto the page and then use arrows and boxes to visualize how are these three main Concepts connected and related to each other right are they cause and effect are they each a part of a bigger hole is there an order to them right let your mind really think about it and draw it out and a pro tip here is try to do it straight from memory and
it's okay if you get it wrong or if you can't quite remember what these Concepts were about or how they related to each other but remember you only had 10 minutes to do one single pass right so it's okay the next time when you officially go through the material you'll know exactly what to look for and it'll stick in your mind that much better because you got it wrong the first time this is something called the hypercorrection effect when I did this consistently with all the new information I was learning it saved me about 2
hours a day because I was no longer wasting time just passively reading stuff and having my brain quickly forget it and I was no longer wasting time relearning information later on because I actually wasn't learning it correctly the first time but even outside of the classroom I found priming to be just a useful life hack in general like for example if I'm putting together a piece of furniture just quickly priming through to make sure I have a general understanding of what the steps are right learning from online courses reading a research paper right priming isn't
just about studying it's about learning efficiently and effectively and saving time in all areas of your life we've taught this technique to thousands of students and over the years we've refined it so that SA saves you hours of learning but priming is just the first step of the learning process notice how the acronym for the four steps spell out seed priming is just planting the seed and this sets the stage for our next Technique we call the tree not taking technique this is our version of how to take better notes this is how we take
the seed and nurture it into knowledge structures that the brain can easily retain so tree note taking technique if you want to learn more about that check out this video right here and I will see you next time
