Leah here from leah4sci.com/MCAT.
In this video I'm going to show you how to improve your productivity using a timing app
like toggl to track your actual study time.
I personally use toggl to track my work because I like to know the difference between my actual
versus perceived work, what I think I'm doing, and also within my working hours, I like to
know how it's broken up in terms of the time it takes me to work on videos, writing tutorials,
sessions with students, emails, things like that.
I'll be demonstrating a full time MCAT student approach, but you can use this for anything.
MCAT plus classes, no MCAT only classes or any type of long term project where you can
benefit from increased productivity.
The setup is a bit tedious, but once you are good to go, it is so easy to use.
So let's get started.
Toggl is free and I have no affiliation with them.
It's just something that I use and love.
So go to toggl.com and then on the top right, go to sign up, select your country, agree
to the terms of use and then choose how you want to sign up.
I'm going to use an email address.
There's nothing here right now, but if you're in a hurry and you need to start studying,
you can just type in MCAT physics, hit play and you're already tracking.
I want to show you a much better way to get properly set up, so let's delete this by clicking
the trash icon right here and jump over to projects on the left.
Toggl is meant for work tracking so they have it set up with clients and teams and projects
before my students.
I keep it simple.
Every project is a subject that you're working on for the MCAT or another class that you're
taking alongside MCAT studying.
Go to the top right and click the new project and one by one you're going to add in the
different things that you want to track within your studying.
As an MCAT student, we want to start with the sciences.
I like to change the color for each project because I have ADHD and I need things as exciting
and visually appealing as possible.
Randomly grab a color right here where it says MCAT students workspace that just means
me cuz I signed up with the name kid student, no client.
We're keeping this simple where it says private project, it doesn't matter cause you're keeping
it to yourself unless you're a study hall member and this is something we're working
on together.
I'll give you separate instructions for that.
Great project.
Now let's repeat for the other subjects.
Choose red for orgo.
My favorite subject, my favorite color for the psych soc section.
A lot of students like to put them together because the books are together and the studying
is one unit.
If you're studying separately, just create a psych project and a social project.
We have our sciences.
Let's not forget cars.
Don't forget a project for your full length exams and another one for full length review.
Now that you have all your projects created, you're ready to go.
When you log in to toggl.
This is the homepage that you're going to see.
Right now there's nothing but as you time you're studying day by day, you're going to
see a log here just working from today all the way back.
So you're about to start your day, you turn on toggl either on your phone or computer
you want to put in your first subject.
I recommend being as specific as possible without going crazy.
This way, when you go back to see what you've studied and what you've done, you don't have
miles and miles of notes, but it's not as vague as physics.
Gen Chem.
Say are going to start with a fluids chapter in physics.
You can type the subject, select it and then type what you're doing.
For example, fluids or you can start with what you're doing in this case fluids.
Then click on this button here to select the project, find physics or type so that it shows
up quickly and you are good to go.
The reason I prefer the first method is, as you can see right now, I said you're good
to go, but the timer isn't running.
I cannot tell you how many times I've done it this way and I forgot to hit start.
But going back to the first method, if I typed physics, even though I haven't yet typed the
subject, the timer already started, I quickly add fluids and yes, the five seconds it takes
you to set up toggl for the day is gonna count against your study time, but it's productivity.
So I wouldn't stress the five seconds.
Notice the timer is already going.
When you're done, when you're taking a break, when there's distraction, anything that takes
you out of strict studying, just hit stop and notice that it gave me a log.
So for today, I have fluids from 3:52 to 3:53 PM for a total of 32 seconds.
Let's talk about that stop again.
The purpose of tracking your time is to know how much time you're actually studying.
This means if something comes up, you have to have to stop.
If your phone is not on airplane mode and you get a text message, you got to stop.
If you decided to check social media, middle of studying, you have to stop, but if something
pops into your mind that wants to distract you and you use my ADHD focus trick, the distraction
list which I have linked below, then you're good to go because the point of the distraction
list is to keep you from getting distracted.
If you always remember to start and end the timer when you're studying, you're good to
go.
But let's face it, life happens, mistakes happen.
So what do you do if you didn't start it exactly on time?
Here's a couple issues that I run into and how to fix them.
You forgot to set the timer.
You finish your studying, you look at the clock, you realize, wow, I've been studying
for two hours, but I forgot to hit start.
You can add something after the fact.
So notice here we have the time, the play button, and it's the clock is highlighted
in green that says timer mode.
If you go under that, that's manual mode.
Let's say you realize, you know I forgot toggl this morning or I was studying somewhere else
and I didn't have internet access to log into the app.
I'm going to add it up to the fact.
Let's say you've studied the immune system in the Kaplan bio book, which is what I happened
to have in front of me.
So you would put immune system pages 271 to 303.
I recommend being specific here because that way you can always track how much you got
done in how much time the immune system is part of MCAT biology, so we'll find biology
here.
If you're tracking MCAT bio versus a bio class then obviously put Mcat into the projects
and then just put your start and end time.
So let's say you were studying from 9:55AM until 11:45 when you took your break.
If the first one is am, then the second one usually tends to go auto in something that
makes sense, but you can type am then click the check mark and look at that, your delayed
entry was added.
Let's say you're reviewing for the day and you realize you have fluids in here, but it's
only 32 seconds and you did end the 3:43 but you actually started at 3:00 PM but forgot
to start the timer, just do the same thing.
Click on the time and you can change everything from the date to the time.
So we'll set this as a 3:00 PM start time, the end time is when we hit stop, hit enter,
and boom.
Physics is now 53 minutes based on editing after the clock.
Say you're done with your studying for the day, but you have a bonus block where you
want to work on MCAT math because even though it's not an MCAT science, you do need to know
math without a calculator.
But wait, we're in manual mode.
So click the timer mode.
That gets you back to the timer and you want to study Math, but you don't have a project.
Instead of going here to create a project like we did in the setup, you can manually
create the project right here first.
Let's do MCAT Math active writing because I highly, highly recommend that you dedicate
time to go through my MCAT Math video series and cheat sheet and memorize it with active
writing, all of which is explained and linked below.
Then you go to the find project, but there is no project for MCAT Math, so we add one.
Just go here to the plus, create a new project and you'll see the same exact setup as we
had before.
MCAT math, pick a color, create project and then just play to be tracking your MCAT math.
So you started on MCAT Math, but there's a distraction of family member knocks on the
door and you don't know what they want.
Quickly hit pause, figure out what they want, tell them to go away, tell them please, I
need an hour of uninterrupted study time and then instead of typing it out all over again,
just go to the entry that you have.
Because if what you're doing is exactly the same, all you have to do is press the play
button and it picks up exactly where you left off.
Now say this goes for a few seconds.
You're studying, you're studying, you finish, you hit stop and look.
It just tells you that you had two time entries for MCAT Math.
It gives you your total time and if you click on the number, you can see each individual
time entry.
Stopping when you have an interruption is critical because for most students, the discrepancy
of how much they get done versus what they think they got done is taking into account
stops even when they're not studying.
Now let's say you are working on MCAT math and you're studying, you have a distraction
that you either don't realize it's gonna take more than a few seconds or it's one of those
hurry up and take care of this thing.
Like the doorbell is ringing and ringing and ringing.
No one else is getting it to the point where you get up and you didn't pause the timer.
So you come back, you realize the timer's been going for 12 minutes and 30 something
seconds where the start time was 3:50 so you're thinking 3:50 start time but I know I was
away for at least five minutes.
Just pause the time right there.
Go into that most recent entry, which is this one that we let run for 12 minutes and 50
seconds and if you're saying I was gone for five minutes, well that means instead of a
4:02 end time there should be a 3:57 end time.
Just change the time, hit enter and now you accounted for that distraction after the fact.
Now that you know how to use the timer and they're hopeful using it day after day, week
after week, you want to take the time for an end of day and end of week evaluation.
What I look for in these assessments are comparing what you hoped for, what you expected and
what is actually there.
So ask yourself, how many hours did I plan to study this week?
What do I think I actually got done?
And now take a look.
Do the numbers match up?
Before going into your evaluation?
I want to point out the bar at the top, notice how we color coded the different subjects
and the colors are showing as hot so we're not spending a lot of time on cars spending
about as much time on math.
Look how much on biology.
Now between you and me in order to demonstrate the next step I invented, don't worry about
how I put these in terms of the time, the schedule because my point here is the demonstration
rather than an accurate study schedule where you have a break somewhat not.
Hop over to the left and click on reports.
Notice that we have a bar graph for this week starting with Monday, but you can change it.
So let's go to where it says this week and go to today.
Today based on our fictional studying, we have two hours, 50 minutes and 27 seconds
broken down by the following biology for 1:50 math for 7:27 and physics for 53 you also
have a visual representation, which is why I like the colors and look at that.
Biology is taking up a huge chunk of your pie physics, a little bit and math a tiny
bit.
If you want to see exactly what you did, just click on the subject and here we go.
We did the immune system page 271 to 303 for biology, but let's go back and say we want
to evaluate more than just a day.
I put in quite a few entries for this month, so if I click on this month now it gives me
all the days including days that haven't happened yet.
So for the days that have happened, we have entries for Friday, Saturday, Sunday off Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday.
Let's scroll down and see what we get.
Notice on this colorful chart that we have a large chunk of time for Biochem 6:45, Physics
6:23 ,Biology 6:05 and Gen Chem 4:45 then we have a couple of smaller ones.
You also get a list of all the subjects and how much time you spent on each one.
You can sort it by duration or you can sort it by title however you want.
I don't mess with these.
I'm just looking for the very basics.
And then if you want to see where my 6 hours and 45 minutes, go for biochem.
Click into it.
Ah, I spent 3 hours and 15 minutes on amino acids, another three and a half hours on proteins.
Okay, that doesn't look bad.
And if you want to back out, either click the back button or click up here where it's
a summary.
Notice that we're missing days, we have Friday, we have Tuesday, but what happened all the
other studying?
Well if you scroll down you realize, uh huh.
We're only looking at Biochem and these are the days that we studied Biochem.
So this is another way to evaluate how one specific subject is progressing.
If you wanna go back to the complete overview, either click all or just uncheck Biochem and
here we go.
Everything came back.
Let's take a look at this week, which is ideally what you do at the end of each week and assess,
am I happy with 16:35 27?
How many hours was I expecting to study this week?
If I was expecting 20 hours, how do I feel about 16 and a half?
If I was expecting 40 how do I feel about 16 and a half and then ask yourself if my
time is significantly under, where is my time going?
If I sat down for 25 hours of study blocks, why do I only have 16:35 how many times did
I pause for distractions to talk to people, social media and how do I minimize those distractions
and if I'm a distraction to myself, how do I get more effective at not getting distracted?
One highly recommended method is gamifying your studying with strategic breaks.
Using the Pomodoro method, which I teach in the link below.
If you think this is a waste of time to track and evaluate your studying, I'm going to challenge
you the exact opposite.
Once you have it set up, this will take you less than 10 minutes for the entire week between
log again, starting, stopping and evaluating and in fact this is what I used with Ricky
to help increase his study time from 15 to 40 hours a week without really changing his
schedule.
And you can read the full interview of how he did it below.
Now, here's my question to you.
Even though this looks a little scary and sounds a little tedious, are you willing to
challenge yourself to try this even for just one to two weeks so that you have an idea
of what you're actually doing compared to what you think you're doing?
And then use that to figure out what you're going to do differently moving forward to
make the most use of your time.
If you accept the challenge first, make sure to give this video a thumbs up, then let me
know any other productivity tricks you use to help you stay focused and on track even
when your motivation isn't that high.
Also, let me know what other types of videos you want me to create to help you become an
even better, more efficient, focused student to make sure that nothing stands in the way
of you hitting your MCAT goals and getting into medical school.