two years ago i graduated in the top
five percent of my university
and i wasn't studying 15 hours a day i
didn't sacrifice
my social life i wasn't cramming in my
revision for weeks before the exams
it was all a relatively smooth and
stress-free process and a lot of people
have this false idea that
in order to achieve incredibly high
grades you need to be studying
all of the time and you need to
sacrifice all other areas of your life
in order to achieve them
but that's just not the case of course
it does take a lot of hard work but
something that is just as equally
important
is working smart because often working
hard just isn't enough
maybe you've been in the situation where
you're studying and studying maybe 10 11
12 hours a day but you're just not
getting the grades that you're aiming
for
and if you are in this situation i
created the project heath and transform
your grades in 30 days course
exactly for you check the link in the
description for more information but
this video is going to go
through the exact steps that i took that
made me study smart that made me study
more efficiently therefore consuming
processing
and retaining more information in a
shorter amount of time
spread out your studying now this is
such a
simple concept but it's so incredibly
underutilized so if your exams or just
your education in general is stressing
you out
then this is for you the vast majority
of students when
their semester first starts the number
of hours of studying they do will be
relatively low
as the semester progresses and their
exams get closer the number of hours of
studying will steadily
increase and then one or two weeks
before the exam
the studying will suddenly increase even
more as the pressure from the exams
motivate them to start cramming in
preparation
and that's maybe how you study it's how
most students study
but it's just not studying smarts it's
quite a stressful way
of approaching your exams and at least
in my opinion
there is a better and smarter way of
studying so what i would do is at the
beginning of the semester
i would set a goal of the number of
hours that i was going to study every
day
now that could be six hours eight hours
ten hours it really is up to you
but just make sure that whatever you
choose you can maintain it throughout
the whole semester
so for me it was studying eight hours a
day i treated university like a
full-time job so eight hours was perfect
and at the beginning of the semester i
would be studying
eight hours a day and this was focused
intense studying
and at the beginning of the semester it
would often be background reading
of the new material going through past
papers to get an idea of
what i'm going to be learning about in
the lectures and watching documentaries
and youtube videos about the new subject
just to have a broad basic foundational
understanding of the subject
you see at this point no one else will
be putting in
as much studying there's no exam
deadline for months to come so most
people don't have the pressure of an
exam to motivate them
to study so this is where you get ahead
of most of the students because there's
no pressure of deadlines it's a
relatively stress-free way of studying
and it can be fun too watching
documentaries and watching youtube
videos on the subject
can be an engaging way of being
introduced into a new subject
and is far more interesting than reading
thick textbooks
now this is where it gets interesting as
you progress through the semester
your eight hours of studying stays the
same where most other students have to
increase the number of hours they study
because they need to catch up
you don't you stick to your eight hours
throughout the middle of the semester
and even just before the exams
there were so many exams that i had
approaching where i didn't have to
increase my studying in order to prepare
for them
and this is why university on a whole
wasn't a stressful experience for me
because i had exams coming because i had
started preparing for them well ahead of
time
i wasn't panicking or rushing to
cramming my studying
days before the exam so if i had one tip
for you to study smarter and not harder
i'd suggest setting a number of hours to
study at the beginning of the semester
and
stick to it whether it's four hours six
hours eight hours ten hours whatever it
is
start preparing for your exams right
before the beginning of the semester
and then when your exams do come around
you'll be completely
prepared for them eliminate pseudo
studying
now i just mentioned that you should be
spreading out your studying throughout
the entire semester
rather than just cramming in a few weeks
before the exam
but there's one big mistake that i see a
lot of students make when doing this
they space out their studying more which
is great but because there's no pressure
from deadlines or exams
they begin pseudo-studying so pseudo
studying is when you just sit there with
your laptop and your textbook
and you are studying but you're not
really taking in the information you're
more just studying
to feel like you're being productive
rather than actually studying
with your exams in mind and you'll
probably find that the majority of the
marks you get in an exam
are coming from a select few things that
you're doing when you're studying
the rest is studying for studying sake
so for example for me
past papers were absolutely essential
for getting good grades in my exams and
so i prioritized
past papers other tasks such as reading
for background information in a textbook
didn't
directly correlate to getting higher
grades so as a result i didn't allocate
much time to reading pages and pages of
thick textbooks i also didn't gain much
from answering unnecessarily large
amounts of practice problems it wasn't
like
i was learning new information and
getting significantly better
by practicing hundreds of the same
practice problems
once i hit a certain number the learning
curve flattened so i stopped
another thing that i noticed was that i
was researching for hours and hours
before writing an assignment
i mean i could research for like seven
or eight hours before i
even typed a word for the assignment and
although preparation for writing an
assignment
is important it certainly doesn't need
seven or eight hours of it
so i learned to restrict the oxygen i
gave
to the research and cut it down to two
to three hours and it saved me five
hours per assignment
and my final grade wasn't affected at
all so for all my studying for every
task that i started
i questioned myself to what extent will
this task affect my overall grade
if the answer was by a lot then i'd
increase the time i spent working on
that task if the answer was not a lot
then i'd decrease the time on that task
or even eliminate it altogether
active engagement now i see students
making this mistake
all the time they come to me and say
they've been studying all day every day
for the exams
but when their exams come around their
grades don't match with the amount of
studying they've done
and one reason for that is because a lot
of students mistake
reading and re-reading texts or notes as
studying
but it's so incredibly important that
you're not just
reading the text or notes passively but
you're actively
engaging in the material so active
engagement is the process of
constructing
meaning from the material so that
involves making connections to lectures
forming examples asking and answering
questions so
basically it's about thinking about what
you're reading
but active learning doesn't necessarily
mean highlighting
or underlining text rereading or rote
memorization which is basically just
repeating the text over and over in your
head
doing these things can help you engage
in the task but they're not generally
considered
active studying techniques however some
ideas of active studying
include create a q a so writing out
questions as you read and then once
you've finished reading
writing out answers for the questions
and you can also create your own quiz
and even give that quiz to your friends
to use
become a teacher so say the information
out loud in your own words as if you're
teaching the concepts to a class
alternatively you can teach your friends
or even your parents or siblings
create concept maps and diagrams so
things like mind maps are a great way of
processing the information and actively
engaging the brain to help with memory
retention
active recall and this is something that
i talk about quite a lot on this channel
and i talk about it quite a lot because
it is such an efficient way of studying
so
basically it's where you read a page
from a textbook then you close the
textbook
and you write down everything that you
remember from that page
you then go back and open the textbook
to see what information you missed
avoid multitasking now multitasking does
not improve efficiency so this is when
you're performing more than one task at
the same time so you might be studying
two subjects at the same time
or studying and browsing instagram or
studying and chatting to friends on
social media
a study in 2012 by raynal juncko showed
a correlation between a class's gpa
and how often they were multitasking
when they studied for their exams
and the study found that the more the
students multitasked when they studied
the lower their gpa was so consider
eliminating distractions things that
prevent you from becoming fully engaged
during your study sessions if you don't
need your laptop for your studying
then don't use it use apps such as the
focus to do app to help keep you focused
and prevent you from getting distracted
or trying to multitask because
apps like these can also lock your phone
so that it eliminates
the temptation you might get from
getting distracted from
things like notifications on your phone
and so avoiding multitasking and getting
into the zone of studying is incredibly
important
a student that studies for eight hours
and is super focused and engaged
will obviously process and retain
significantly more information
than a student that also studies for
eight hours but is procrastinating and
distracted throughout
the distributed practice technique so
this video is all about studying in the
most efficient way possible one of the
most
efficient ways of studying is called
distributed practice
so this basically means spacing out your
studying over
several short periods so say over
several days or even weeks
an example of this practice is to study
in short periods on
each class every day so this might just
be for 30 minutes on each class every
day
and what that will do is help you
process the information
on a deeper level but also help you with
information recall and this
isn't a new concept it was first
proposed in the book psychology of study
in 1932 by professor cecil mates and
he wrote perhaps the most important
discoveries are those which relate to
the appropriate distribution of the
periods of study
acts of revision should be spaced in
gradually increasing intervals
roughly intervals of one day two days
four days
eight days and so on so studying smarter
rather than harder is such an essential
concept when you're studying for your
exams
life is just too short to be studying
and studying but not getting any results
and this might be
a trap that you're stuck in where you
are studying for 8 10
even 12 hours a day but you're not
getting the grades you expect
and that's why i created the transform
your grades in 30 days course
specifically for you the whole course is
designed to show you how you can
decrease your studying by a significant
amount
but at the same time by significantly
improving your grades
and you do this by studying more
efficiently so implementing study
techniques that have been scientifically
proven to help
boost information processing and memory
retention
you can click on the link in the
description where i talk more about the
course in more detail
and if you decide to jump on board i
look forward to working with you
very shortly