after taking two gap years i'm back to being a student i'm back to my natural state of being i
am a communications and digital media student at ie university first semester is actually almost
done we have finals in like four weeks so time is flying i'm gonna be upfront with you for this
video communications is not one of the harder programs at this school but even though things
are pretty easy right now it's still important for me to be organized and mindful about how i study
because parkinson's law states that a task expands i always forget it a task expands to fill the time
available for its completion so if i wasn't organized about how i do my homework i would
probably end up spending way more time on school work i would allow it to fill the entire day and
i have other things i want to do like filming videos for you so today i'm going to show you
how i manage my current course load and how i use calendars and scheduling and
all that good stuff to beat parkinson's law so buckle up because today we're breaking the law
first i want to show you how i'm taking notes so i started out with using a notebook because
in high school that was how i did things i took all my notes on paper i tried this for maybe a
few weeks i don't know two weeks and then i decided to switch to digital notes the tool
that i've been using for that is evernote full disclosure they did reach out to me um offering
to do a sponsored video and that deal fell through i'm currently taking this online course
called building a second brain by thiago forte so i've been thinking way too much about different
note-taking tools i'm thinking about switching to apple notes but really i don't even want you to
focus on the tool that i'm using because what is important is having just a consistent system for
how you take notes keep track of assignments etc so the way that i have this organized is i have a
notebook for every single class and communication foundations has by far the most notes so that is
the one i'm going to show you as an example on our course calendar each class has a session number
so that is how i title my notes i will write the session number and then the overall topic of the
textbook reading slash the lecture so the way that i take my notes is not any different from how i
used to do it on paper it's just bullet points um i believe this is called like the outline method
the nice thing about doing this digitally is that as you're reading the textbook it might not
be exactly clear what the relationships between concepts are like you might think okay this is
a main idea and these are supporting details but then you keep reading and then you realize oh no
actually this is also a main idea and so on paper it's hard to change that but digitally it's so
easy to move bullet points in and out add stuff before rephrase things whatever you want to do
i guess on paper what you could do um and i think some people do this is like take a draft of their
notes as they're reading or they're listening to their texture to their lecture and then they go
back and rewrite their notes in a more organized way overall whatever headings the textbook has
are the headings that i use in my notes like the development of the post-positivist effects trend
any vocabulary words i will bold and put an equal sign just for consistency and so that they stand
out when i'm reviewing that's pretty much it um i do like to use some highlighting when i did
paper notes i would use orange for vocab pink for headers and then yellow for important information
and more or less i've been trying to do that here as well why is this not changing color
it should cycle through different colors um so after i take the initial notes i will go back
one day or a few days later to do the highlighting and this is a really good opportunity to also just
reread through everything and review it evernote also has a tasks feature if you do command
t you can create a to do so what i've been doing is anytime i get a homework assignment i will
put it in the note for the session for which it is due like if i have to do a textbook reading before
session 18 i will put that task in here i can also set the due date the really nice thing
about evernote and one thing i'm going to miss if i decide to switch away from it is that you can
see all of your tasks compiled here so everything for every class i like to have it sorted by date
so that i can see what's due today tomorrow next week another nice way of keeping track of all your
homework assignments in one place and this is what i'm gonna do if i end up moving my notes
to apple notes is the stickies app i'm a big fan of stickies in all forms physical or digital so
this is a mac app and i just created one sticky note where i write the due date and then what
the assignment is and just keep a running list delete stuff as soon as i finish it and i finished
my self-portrait yesterday so i get to delete that another tool i like to use is identity so
thank you to idenaty for sponsoring this video so idenaty basically simplifies the internet for you
by organizing everything that you do online and just making your browsing experience more mindful
so this is my idenaty command center i have a lot of tiles here for all the different websites that
i use you can organize them into categories so the one i want to show you is school obviously
so when i'm working on homework i can open this up and only see stuff related to school it also works
as a password manager so when you click the tile to go to a website the password is automatically
copied for you so that logging in is really easy if you have a lot of tiles like i do you can use
the search bar to quickly find them you can integrate your google calendar and have your
events right next to your tiles you can make notes and lists so you might want to make a list of your
homework and you can even set due dates and attach different tiles for the websites that you'll need
to complete that homework assignment so if you want to give idenaty a try and organize your
stuff in beautiful tiles like this you can click the link in the description next i want to talk
about something about time management so when i do my weekly planning i like to plan out my week on
sundays any assignments that i already know about i will time block some time for them i usually try
to get them done at the start of the week because i just want to get things over with for example
this week i think i only had one assignment that i knew i needed to work on in advance which was
shooting my final submission for my photography class my final self-portrait the nice thing
is that as the school year moves along you kind of get an idea of how long everything takes i already
had to shoot the draft for this so i remembered how long that process took and so this time
around i was like okay i have this block of time between this mentor session for my online course
and dinner that's two hours that should be enough and having those other commitments on either side
of it are like bookends that are gonna push me to work faster and make sure that i'm shooting
efficiently so i schedule that there otherwise the thing about school is that a lot of assignments
will pop up throughout the week and they might be due the next day or in a few days and so
for that reason i also like to look at what blank spaces i have in my schedule and just schedule
homework blocks i don't think i actually scheduled any for this week so let me look at a different
week this was a friday i didn't have classes until 1 30 and so i had the whole morning to myself so
i blocked out what is this two and a half hours for homework but yeah i can go down to the study
room i know that i have this time limit i decide what is realistic for me to accomplish but what
will challenge me a little bit to work quickly these days i am pretty flexible about my time
blocking and scheduling so like if i realize that there is this urgent assignment that comes
up like especially group assignments where you really cannot drop the ball for the sake of your
teammates wow that was like a sports metaphor in that case i will just move some blocks around
so that is how i schedule my homework another time management tip that really helps me but is
very very obvious is not wasting time on busy work so i hate to say it because years ago i was
an academic perfectionist but at this point i have started to skip some readings not even because i
don't have time for them but because they're just not useful more and more i'm becoming aware that
people from school might watch my videos so i hope this video doesn't reach any professors or school
administrators where i'm literally admitting that i don't do some of the things they assign me but
i'm making this video for you not my professors so i want to be very honest so a good example
is in globalization class we were assigned a bunch of different articles to read about how
covid is affecting globalization all of these articles more or less said the same thing just
in different words they're not necessary for class discussion we're not going to be tested on them
they're not necessary for the final project or essay or whatever it's going to be and so
i just don't do them sometimes and you know what i've never regretted it you really have to decide
like what is going to be helpful for you to do better in that class or if it's not even going
to be helpful to your grade maybe it's just a class that is important to you because it is
very interesting or directly ties into like what you want to do in the future and so in that case i
also would do the readings another time management thing that helps me again do not wrap me up for
this is doing other stuff in class so in a class where we're allowed to have our computers and the
lecture is like not helpful to me i will work on other assignments or answer emails or any number
of other things to better utilize that time if the professor tells us to put our computers away
then i will pull out my notebook and start like brainstorming a video or journaling or again
anything that would be a better use of time okay next i want to talk about study techniques this is
the fun part i think because this is sort of like hacking your brain hacking the studying process so
if you want to go in depth into a bunch of study techniques i have an eighth study tips video but
for now i'm just going to talk about the ones that have been especially useful for me this school
year so the first thing is a concept you probably heard a lot about it's called active recall so
the idea of active recall is that you should be actively testing yourself to recall information
so the best way to explain this is to give an example if you have a bunch of vocabulary words
and definitions that you need to memorize one way to go about doing this is to write it out on a
piece of paper and just like read through that paper over and over again another way to do it
is to make flash cards put the vocab word on one side the definition on the other and go through
them over and over but the key here is that you attempt to answer it before you look at the answer
you're really challenging your brain to see if it can come up with the answer on its own
this is so effective for memorization it makes studying so much more efficient so really the
main place that i've used this technique so far is for my communication foundation's midterm our
professor gave us this big study guide to fill out to fill out the definitions for key terms
answer a bunch of questions about concepts come up with examples that illustrate those concepts
the temptation there was to pull out that study guide and immediately go to my notes and the
textbook and just start filling it in but i knew that the studying would be a lot more effective if
i first tried to get through as much of the study guide as i could without referencing any materials
just seeing what i could remember on my own and that is not easy it's tiring like it literally
feels more tiring to your brain to have to come up with information out of thin air but that is why
it's effective it's like exercise where if you are working harder and it's more tiring you're gonna
see better results and results faster another thing i like to do this is more about just not
getting tired and keeping your brain refreshed is working on homework in short chunks so again
that study guide is a really good example it was a really long study guide and to do it in one
sitting would have been exhausting so i think when i did it i split it into half i tried to fill out
half of it then i took a break for a day came back filled the second half took another break and then
i filled out the parts that i could not remember on my own and then a side benefit of doing it that
way in like three separate sessions is that you're also sort of accidentally implementing space
repetition so spaced repetition is again i'll use the example of memorizing vocabulary instead of
just studying your vocabulary for hours the day before the test or just hours the day after the
class and never again the best way to structure your studying is to review it right after class
then review it like the next day in a few days in a week in a month so there's this thing called
the forgetting curve after you learn something in class that knowledge is going to very quickly drop
downwards and so what you're doing the next day is you're reviewing to bring yourself back up to that
um level of knowledge that you have in class that forgetting curve is gonna be less steep so in a
few days you bring it back up in a week you bring it back up and basically you're just maintaining
that level of memorization the more separate occasions you're engaging with that material
the more reinforced it's gonna be in your brain and then finally i don't think this is something
i talked about in my eight study tips video so this is an exclusive that you get so for example
someone in the group chat asked if anyone could explain the difference between conglomeration
and concentration in the media industry and this was also something that was tricky for me
when i was doing the reading so i was like why don't i go and answer it and check to see if i
understand it so i ended up spending like 20 minutes i thought it would be a really quick
thing to write out but as i was writing my answer i realized my understanding was not complete so i
was like reviewing and going to different websites to find examples i wrote multiple paragraphs for
them and i hope that that helped them but also more selfishly it really helped me because by
the end of that i had like a solid understanding of the difference so just any chance that you have
to explain something to someone like sometimes i'll be calling my family and they're like what
are you doing in your classes and i start to sort of like review the concepts and the theories that
we're learning by trying to explain it or just talking to my friends who are in other degrees
and we're talking about what we're learning so one thing that i've sort of noticed as i've been
taking these classes and seeing what college is like is that my classes sort of fall on
this let's call it a matrix there are classes that are very structured they remind me a lot of like
certain ap classes that i took in high school like ap world or ap psychology where it was like
you go home you do a textbook from the reading you listen to the lecture you memorize the concepts in
the vocabulary you take an exam you write an essay on the other end of the continuum are classes that
are just very different like i would put most of the art classes that i've ever taken here it is
a very different like mental mode to be working on a artistic creative assignment than to be
taking notes and memorizing stuff and then in the other direction i have the classes that are
personally very important to me because they are interesting because they are what i expected to
learn in a media degree because they're useful for my future career and then on the other end of the
spectrum we have just the classes that i label as a waste of time i mean no offense but like
if it doesn't fit any of those criteria it's not interesting it's not useful it's hardly related to
media i'm just trying to get by on as little effort as i can and so where the class falls
on the continuum i feel like sort of determines the techniques that i use for it how i approach
that class right now i have to remember where i placed all of these continuums okay so for example
communication foundations is all the way up here i freaking love this class it's also very structured
very academic and so this is where i mean all of my examples for space repetition active recall
were for this class for a reason that's where that comes in most handy two other classes i have
are globalization and writing skills and these are gonna go those are pretty academic but not
useful at all so these are classes where i'm just really critical about everything that's assigned
to us i'm really trying to decide is this going to be useful for me or should i just skip it and
also setting time limits for myself to make sure that i'm not spending too much time on
any assignment so i'm just not going to get that much academic value out of it writing for media is
an interesting class i would say it falls more on this end because all we do is write there are no
exams no readings it's just writing and then editing that writing and also like going out
and reporting and stuff like that it is pretty interesting to me so i place it kind of here
for such a writing heavy class um one of my main strategies is to take advantage of any
opportunities that the professor provides to get feedback photography and videography i
think i put in pretty much the same place this is a class where i'm already familiar with a lot of
the concepts so if it's just like a photoshop exercise i try to get that done as quickly as
possible send it out but if it is a more creative project like the self-portrait that we did
or we are now working on a video as a group that's a really good opportunity for me to stretch myself
creatively that definitely brings it further up in the matrix where it's personally useful to me
so i'm gonna invest more time into that so that i can actually get a really good photo that i'm
proud of so i hope you enjoyed this video i'm definitely looking forward to making an update
video next semester when i have more classes and these were classes that we got to choose ourselves
so for example for the lab which is like the internship class i chose an economics lab which
i'm pretty excited about because i like math and my degree doesn't have any math so that's why i
try to supplement but i hope you found this video helpful again check out that eight study tips
video if you want more advice on that good luck with school if you're in school good luck with
life if you're not i hope you have a great rest of your week and i will see you next week bye you