as i've mentioned before on this channel my grades were really quite bad at high school
i struggled with procrastination and honestly it was just a really depressing time in general i
struggled with my studying i couldn't focus i was constantly procrastinating and getting distracted
and as a result i averaged a d grade in my last year at high school so fast forward a few years
and at university i graduated with an a grade in the top five percent of my university i completely
turned my studying around to the extent where not only was i getting really good grades but
i was actually enjoying my studying university was an amazing time for me which was a stark contrast
from my time at high school so in this video i'm going to go through a few specific things i did
that not only allowed me to go from struggling to study for even 30 minutes at a time to studying
for 10 11 12 hours a day relatively easily and the specific steps i took to turn my d-grade
into an a-grade in a relatively short space of time and if you get value from this video check
out my transform your grades in 30 days course where i go through everything in this video in far
more depth and where i also go through dozens of other steps i took and walk you through them and
also give you one-on-one guidance and support to permanently transform your grades the links in the
description below for more information parkinson's law parkinson's law states that work expands so as
to fill the time available for its completion so let's say you have a deadline for an assignment
the vast majority of students will wait until just before the deadline to submit their work
but most won't submit their work a few days before or week before but instead they'll submit it on
the day of the deadline and this is parkinson's law where you use the full time you have available
to write the assignment right up until the last few hours and that's something i realized just a
couple of months ago that i was falling victim to with these videos on my youtube channel
so on saturday i would prepare for one video and sunday i would prepare for another video
and so on saturday would take me the entire day to prepare a video and to film it and on sunday
it would take me another day to make another video but i realized it was parkinson's law in
action because i didn't need to spend an entire day making a video so i set myself a target i
gave myself just two hours to prepare and film a video so on saturday morning i'd spend two hours
preparing and filming a video and another two hours preparing and filming a video
and it significantly improved my productivity i managed to get done what would normally take me
two full days in just four hours but those four hours were really intense
and focused work as opposed to two days of kind of like relaxed and laid-back work it's also what i
did at university i set myself self-imposed time constraints i would almost always submit my work
to the lecturer a few days or even sometimes one or two weeks before the actual deadline
because i'd have two deadlines the first deadline was the one that the lecturer said
and the second deadline was the one that i usually set a few days before the official deadline
so that way i'd never be rushing to get my work done before the lecturer's deadline because i
set self-imposed constraints to encourage me to get my work done well before it feedback systems
the journey of transforming my grades from d grades to a grades was rocky to say the least
i made a lot of mistakes and that's completely fine i don't regret making those mistakes in fact
i'm very glad that i made those mistakes at university because i had a feedback system in
place to allow me to keep learning and growing from them so after you have a study strategy in
place you need to keep it lean you need feedback systems in place to keep those grades increasing
increasing and it's so important that just because you see your grades increase slightly you don't
just stop there and get complacent you should always be improving with your feedback systems
so there are three parts to my feedback system these were i reflected on my day's productivity
or performance at the end of every day i reflected on every exam or assignment grade i achieved
so did i get the grade i was expecting could i have done better what could i have done better
next time to improve my grade and i reflected on whether my productivity or performance
was in line with my goals so my goal at university was to graduate with an a grade so throughout
university i was regularly monitoring whether or not i was on track in achieving that goal
so each day you need to reflect on what happened that day what study strategies worked well and
need to be used for the next day but equally which ones didn't work and need to be stopped maybe you
realize that studying at 3pm is not a good idea because usually at that time you feel tired so
maybe you should bring that studying forward to early morning when you're feeling more awake and
alert or maybe you got distracted binging youtube that day you didn't get much studying done and it
happens to all of us where we get distracted sometimes so we don't study much that day
but that's where your feedback systems come into place to catch those days where you're
particularly unproductive and so the next day you implement actionable steps to stop you from
making those same mistakes again add variety to your studying a study conducted by dr judy willis
in 2008 found that studying using different forms of media stimulates different parts of
the brain and the more areas of the brain that are activated the easier it is for someone to process
and understand the information and the better memory retention is so when i was learning a
specific topic i'd make sure to vary the ways in which i consumed that information so for example
i'd read lecture slides from the lecture i'd read textbooks on the subject i'd watch youtube
videos i'd look up other online resources i'd create mind maps teach friends what i'd learn
and write out the answers to practice questions obviously i wouldn't be doing all of these methods
in just one study session but each time i'd review a topic i'd use a different resource or different
study method to learn the information faster so there have been studies that showed that varying
the ways in which you consume your material helps with information processing and retention
but the biggest thing for me the biggest advantage i found with varying my studying was that it kept
things interesting it kept my studying interesting and so i'd be more engaged and less likely to get
distracted because if you're just reading from a thick black and white heavy textbook
for hours every study session at least for me it would get boring pretty quickly but by mixing
it up and learning in more engaging ways like watching documentaries and listening to podcasts
on the subject it actually started to make my studying more enjoyable and it was a big part
of my transition from turning my d grades into a grades because i started to enjoy the studying
process so it wasn't difficult anymore to just sit down and study because i actually wanted to study
and that right there made a huge difference if you want to be good at something if you want to excel
in something you need to at least like doing it if not it's going to be an uphold struggle
and it's a really important concept this idea of making your studying fun i covered it in a
recent video 13 ways to make studying more fun so if you're struggling with that you click on
the pop-up banner above to check it out simplify and summarize the information okay so this one
is huge i didn't really understand how important this was at high school and so i wasted so much
time studying and studying but not actually remembering the information that i was studying
because i wasn't processing the information i was just reading it and not really thinking about it
therefore the information didn't stick in my head long enough for the exam so when you read some
information on the subject you're studying whether it's from a textbook or a lecture or youtube video
it's important that you don't just read it but you process that information too because
by processing the information you're moving that information from your short-term memory
over to your long-term memory and that's where simplifying and summarizing the information
comes in so after you've read about an important concept you need to simplify you so by simplifying
it you're making sure that you truly understand the concepts if you're not able to simplify it
then the chances are you don't really understand it on a deep level it's what the late theoretical
physicist richard feynman taught you should be able to break down and explain complex topics
in very simple sentences using basic terminology if you're unable to do this then there may be
gaps in your knowledge once you've simplified the concepts you then need to summarize it so
this does a couple of things firstly it makes it easier to remember for the exam obviously
the less there is of something to remember the easier it will be to remember so by summarizing
a long complicated concept into a short one or two paragraph of course it will be easy to remember
for the exam but also by putting the concept into your own words and this is really important
you're processing that information you're making sure you truly understand it and you're processing
the information and you're storing it from your short-term memory and bringing it into
your long-term memory so the number of hours i wasted at high school by just reading the material
and not really understanding it and not really processing the information was honestly it's got
to be one of the main reasons why my grades just weren't very good there's no point studying for
hours and hours but then not really understanding or remembering anything it's just not studying
smart it's not studying efficiently but i've learned a lot since then and now i'm able to study
far far more efficiently using a few more advanced study and memorization strategies i talked more
about it in a video i made about two months ago called how i study less while learning more
you can click on the card on the screen where i go through how you can decrease your study sessions
from six months a day to three months a day but still learn and retain the same information