i only have one rule that i always stick to at uni that's that i'm only allowed to study
between the hours of nine to five and that means that my life looks a bit more like this
than this what's up guys welcome to our three-part series on how to study smart in
the intro i said i only revised nine to five and i'm not even joking i do whatever i want
after 5 pm pretty much right up until exam time and that's because whenever i do study
i've trained myself to be so intensely focused for three hours that i don't revise anything
anytime after 5 pm in this first video of the series i'm going to explain to you why you
should study using a technique called deep work in the second video zoe will talk to you about
how you should actually revise in those three hours to make them as effective as possible
and in the third video i'll discuss how to remain focused in these study sessions let's get into it
what is deep work cal newport the author of deep work defines it as professional activities
performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive
capabilities to their limit these efforts create new value improve your skill and are hard to
replicate basically for students it's studying intensely with no distractions for certain
periods of time to create the best possible work that you can create the author uses the formula
high quality work produced is equal to time spent multiplied by the intensity of the focus
to produce high quality work you can either spend a lot of time with a low intensity of
focus and that's what most students tend to do or you can spend much less time but with a very
high intensity of focus and still produce the same high quality work cal newport the author
of this book is a professor at mit and when he first started implementing these rules of deep
work he went from publishing four academic papers one year which is already difficult to achieve
to publishing nine papers in just one year while writing this book teaching and making time for
his family every day after 5pm studies show that the highest achieving students study less than
those who are scoring just below them in terms of gpa rankings in america's top colleges and that's
because a lot of them are utilizing deep work i use these same methods to be able to study for
my final year at dental school run this youtube channel maintain a social life and play games
for hours on end every single day before i move on to discuss shallow work i'd really appreciate if
you guys gave this video a thumbs up it really helps the channel grow and reach more people
so shallow work on the opposite end he describes shallow work to be non-cognitively demanding tasks
often performed while distracted these efforts tend not to create much new value and are easy
to replicate this is basically when you randomly decide to sit down and study but you also have
your phone notifications on and you're distracted every now and then you can spend a whole lot of
effort studying in shallow work and not really achieve a quarter of what you would in deep work
that said there are certain tasks which shallow work is perfect for and there's no need to put
in all that focus and energy like replying to emails for example or dealing with social media
or planning your next day's work schedule so let's say you're studying alone and
you get a notification on your phone you check it and bob's commented on your
new ig post you read the comment you briefly think about what you want to reply and then you
think oh damn no i don't want to lose while i was just studying let me reply later now for the rest
of the duration while you're studying you have a small part of your brain which is focused on
what you're going to reply to bob which means you wouldn't be able to study 100 focus now let's say
more things pop up while you're studying your mum tells you to do the dishes and you also receive
an email from uni which you need to reply to at some point the more and more things you're allowed
to distract you the more divided your attention would be and now you might only be putting in 50
in studying even though you decided not to do anything about bob the dishes or the
email straight away this is a phenomenon called attention residue it's the idea that the shallower
you study the more fragmented your attention would be between all the tasks the intensity of focus
here has reduced so to be able to produce the high quality of work needed for you to pass the exam
you will need to spend a lot more time studying this is the struggle most students go through
hopefully by now you can see why you'd be better off working in a state of
undistracted concentration it saves you time and the work you produce is so much better
in 1985 bill gates took eight weeks to build the operating system which changed the course
of existence for microsoft and made him over 100 billion dollars today he did this in a cabin in
complete isolation from everyone working in a state of deep work this kind of quality of work
just is not possible with shallow work even until today bill gates continues to have these think
weeks where he isolates himself and completely disconnects i can appreciate most students
don't have that kind of luxury and so the way of getting around this is by developing a routine
and this is called the rhythmic approach that is you schedule one to four hour blocks of deep work
into your week for me it's every day either at nine to twelve or two to five depending on which
block i'm free for based on my clinical rota every sunday night i check my calendar for the
week ahead and add these blocks wherever i can this creates a routine imagine without routine
like this on a random afternoon after watching some tick tocks you decide to stop and start
revising this switching of attention and focus will draw heavily on your finite willpower to be
able to resist the urge to watch more tick-tocks attempts like this most often fail on the other
hand if you implement a routine and schedule deep work blocks into your calendar you require much
less willpower to start and keep going and so in the long run your deep work attempts will succeed
more often so now let's say it's time for you to do some deep work the main idea with deep
work is that you want to be able to work at your maximum intensity of focus as mentioned before
the best and only way to do this is to create a distraction-free environment for yourself the main
things to consider are the location making sure no one will interrupt your flow knowing what you're
going to study and finally removing all sources of distractions like your phone now i'll cover
this in a lot more depth in the third video of the series where i'll also give you ideas on how
to remain distraction free even when you have to use your laptop or your phone while studying once
you've started deep work set your timer and aim to study for a scheduled amount of time cal newport
says in the book that experts claim a novice can enter deep work for about an hour a day while
experts can enter deep work and truly be intensely focused for up to four hours in his book he
discussed the myelinated pathway where the longer you train yourself the more myelin sheaths are
made and so you can last even longer the next time you do it in my short three years of entering the
state of deep work i found that it takes a little while to build up this stamina and i'm averaging
about three hour sessions at the moment and you can try it yourself to see how long you lost
i'm literally giving you the tip of the iceberg of this book it honestly changed my life and everyone
who's read it says the same thing i strongly recommend reading the full book and i'm going
to leave a link for it and it's audio book in the description next week so we'll talk to you
about how to make the most of your deep work sessions using principles laid out in the book
make it stick so make sure you subscribe and don't miss it and i'll see you soon take care