 Hey guys, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician. And here on this channel, I help you succeed on your journey doing it with less stress. And today specifically, we're going to talk about how to minimize your stress by improving your study. And I'm going to walk you through each and every phase and show you exactly what you should be doing or considering to really help you boost your performance, your efficiency, and also minimize that time. Now, before we get into the actual steps, remember, there's really three parts of your learning process that you really need to know. The first is information gathering. The second is actually learning material. And third is reviewing. Now that may seem obvious, but what may not seem obvious is the amount of time that we spend in these different three phases. Every time I work with students one-on-one, most of the time, majority of the students spend way too much time on the information gathering phase and too little time in the learning and reviewing phase. And if you don't believe me as a very simple exercise, count how many hours you use to study for an upcoming quiz or exam, and then ask yourself how many hours were spent on doing things like reading material, highlighting versus actually doing something that will help your long-term retention like quizzing or flashcards. And usually when I make my one-on-one coaching students or students in the Medellin Academy do this, they have this epiphany moment because they realize they're wasting way too much time on the earlier phases and not giving enough time to the things that will really improve their grades. And if you want a more personalized one-on-one experience and check out our MediGnight program down below as well as all the reviews that our students have had in the past. But let's get into the very first phase of studying, which is information gathering. Now, I'm going to be very blunt here. Most of the classes' ways of studying just absolutely suck. This usually means that you're taking notes on the side, you're highlighting your material on things that you think are important. And perhaps you already know that maybe that's not the best way to study, so you take it one step better and you use an online resource that maybe you recommended for whatever class you're studying for. But regardless of how you're doing this, if you're taking notes in the information gathering phase that cannot be used easily to get into that learning and review phase, this process is absolutely a waste of time for you. A lot of the students that I work with will tell me that they're writing notes on the side, they're highlighting, and then I ask them, like, how do you use your notes? Like, what do you do after that? Then I come back on a week or two before the exam and I look over them. That, again, is a waste of time because you're basically just creating the lecture again in the shorter form and hoping that suddenly it retains in your brain. And usually most of us know from experience that's not the case. And so the real question is during this phase, can you go from information being presented to you as a new topic to information then you can then convert in some kind of format that you can easily use to learn and then review. Now, I've made a full step-by-step video on how I would recommend students kind of take notes for their class, whether it be a medical school or anything. So check out this Q and E video to really understand step-by-step how I do this, but really the kind of the brief version is instead of taking your notes and highlighting what you think it's important, actually ask yourself what question would possibly come out from these few paragraphs? What would come out of this section? And then write those on the side, create those as flashcards. Now you've essentially created your notes in the form of a question and answer. If you can answer the questions, then you know the answer. But in summary, during this information gathering phase, you have to go as quickly as possible from an information being presented to you to learn and convert it in a way where you can say, I can easily come back to this, quiz myself and ask myself, do I notice or not? The typical way that we study where we try to rewrite what the professor is saying or the lecture is saying in our own words and then hope that we can come back and read your highlights and really make sense of everything, that's just not the best use of your time. Now, we're still in the information gathering phase, but the next step is to really make the most of your individual lectures. Now again, to really understand how to improve your setting, you have to ask yourself what you and other students typically do at this phase. What do all students do when they're in a lecture? They basically rewrite the notes in some form or another. So they may write it on notebook, they may write it on Evernote or Notion or a Word document and something again, that they can come back to later to refer. But as we've learned about earlier in this video, that's not the most useful use of your time because half the time your notes are just another format of what the lecture said. And after you look at it, you're like, I still don't understand what they were saying and just wrote it in a different way. And then sometimes you have like an epiphany where you write something to help you remember a future, but still it's stuck in this very rigid format that's very hard to question and quiz yourself in the future. So instead, you can use methods like the Q and E method. Again, that video will be linked down below to really go into lecture and say, okay, I heard the professor say this. How can I turn what they just said into the form of a question and then write that in my notes? And then if they move on to the next topic, I'm like, okay, here's what question possibly would come out from that statement. Let me just put the answers about answer that statement and then move on to the next thing. So your whole notes become a question and answer question and answer something again, then the next phase you can easily come back to and review. So as an example, the default way of studying when you're in lecture, if your professor was talking about high blood pressure or hypertension, and they were telling you the different ways to treat it, most of us would typically just say, treatments for hypertension is one bullet point and then kind of like indent and and write all the different forms of treatment and that's it. But a very small yet effective change would say, okay, what are the treatments for hypertension? Put that as a bullet point as a question mark. And then each and every other bullet point underneath that would be the different answers. So that way, if you ask yourself that question in a week or two from now, if you answer all the bullet points below it, then you know the answer. If you don't, then that means you need to go back and review. Now the critical point to remember here is that the most important thing about reviewing is to doing it as quickly as possible as soon as the information has been presented to you. So typically for a lot of my one on one students, we try to make time and they're scheduled that way. They always have dedicated time to make sure the information they learn that day is reviewed that day. And so there's no little gaps in their knowledge. And what I've found in the long term is that students who tend to review on the day the information is presented compared to students who wait a day or two. Students in the first group tend to do significantly better. And by the time test comes around, the information just seems like it's something they already know. But as we talk about the review phase, let's talk about what most students end up doing. Ask yourself, you're doing this yourself. Then we can talk about some changes that you make. So the default mode is to use your inefficient techniques during the information gathering phase and somehow review them. Most of us, including myself in open college and a little bit in early medical school, I would say, okay, let me look at my outline that I created and then somehow try to see if I know this maybe would be like try to recreate this on a whiteboard or create a mind map. But again, it kind of stuck with this rigid format of like, here's what I need to know. But there's no real good way of like, do I know this part of this lecture versus do I know all of it together? And worst of all, the technique that just bugs me that most students will tell me that they do is a reread their notes and saying that this counts as a passing material, which as we know, as a test gets around, not true. And so a good analogy to really understand, okay, how do you make your review phase effective is think about when you have like a manual or some piece of technology that you set up. I just set up a new Wi-Fi router as we upgraded our internet in the house. I had to read the router the first time, but I don't really actually remember all the words until I actually apply and do the function of setting the router. The same idea applies when you learn any new piece of material. We don't just keep rereading the manual or text material to say, I'm going to eventually learn this, but you actually have to put that knowledge into application. So for you, whether it's medical school or something completely different, you have to go from, okay, here are the questions that have been presented. Here's a text that I've written in my information gathering phase. Let's get into that review phase by actually applying and questioning myself to see, do I know it or not? The same way that if I had to set up my Wi-Fi router and I managed to kind of mix up the wires, I learned through a mistake that, oh, it's not working. I'm not actually retaining the information. The same thing applies when you look at your notes. The default way would be you look at your outline and say, I know that and you move along. The better way to do it is put in the form of question to say, do I know it? And then if you can't answer the question, the answer is, I thought I did, but the answer is not true. So here in this review phase is super importantly somehow quiz yourself on those questions that you created ideally and try to use other forms of technology like Anki that can use spaced repetition to better help you understand the material long-term. In case you're interested in having watched the video already, you can check out this whole step-by-step guide on how to use Anki like a pro. It's probably going to be the most popular video here on the channel. So definitely make sure you guys check that out. Now my Anki technique in that video is just one of my few of many techniques that I love sharing with students on how they can review better. But if you want to check out other study strategies, maybe Anki's not your cup of tea, check out this program down below again to level up your setting as well as the one-on-one program and we can definitely make sure we find a technique that works for you. And in case you're on the fence, I recommend at least checking out some of the testimonials and reviews on the page so you can see what kind of results you may be able to get and understand how students like Stephanie and Nicole consider this to be one of the best investments that they've made in their academic career. So all those will be linked down below. Regardless of use one of my techniques or one of your own, the most important things, how can you go from the information gathering to the notes that you created immediately into review phase as quickly as possible on the day of lecture? Now so far everything that we've done has been within a 24-hour window of a lecture. Maybe you did some of the information gathering the day of, then you went to lecture, now you've done your review. The next part is what do you do the next day? The most students that I work with and I ask, okay what do you do the next day? Don't really have a good answer because well they don't do anything the next day that's at least refers to old material. It's a very natural step in our learning process to just move on to the next lecture and saying, well I'll focus on all the old material as the quiz comes around. But really the next day is your golden opportunity of saying, okay I've learned this material, I've spent the effort the night before, let's make sure that I actually know this darn stuff. And there's really two ways to do this on the next day. You can review all the questions that you'd be creating for yourself if your time allows it and if your time is limited then I would say the day before create some kind of system whether you use it through Anki which will tell you you're good at this, you're not good at this and I'll start to show you more of your weaker techniques. So again check out that video if you're not familiar with Anki or if you want to use your own system where you say I'm going to color code all the questions or topics that I don't really know very well and then next morning I'm going to review only those difficult topics from all the lectures and make sure that I get another pass of that material. And ideally if you can try to do all of your review through those questions during your information gathering because now you've had almost two passes through review and one pass through your information gathering phase where your classmates may have just had one. So again you're already starting to get stronger with the material before the quiz or the test is ever coming around. So you're going to continue this process of reviewing Monday's lectures on Monday and then Tuesday morning then on Tuesday you're going to review Tuesday's lectures and do Tuesday's lectures again on a Wednesday morning and repeat the process. And the real next question people ask me is like what do I do on the weekend? So the weekend I recommend splitting up both of your days to one allow yourself some kind of off time because we all need it but also being able to say on this day I'm going to cover this part of the week and on this day I'm going to cover this part of the week. My ideal schedule is on Saturday I love to kind of cover material from Monday to Wednesday and I do my questions again whether again it's through Anki or a Q&E method that you guys have created yourself. And then on Sunday I'll typically do the lectures from Thursday and Friday and then use that evening to get ready for Monday's lecture. And during the weekend a time allows I usually like to put a specific part in my Google calendar that's saying okay I'm going to spend this amount of time doing practice questions if you have some practice questions for your class or I'm going to use this amount of time to do a brain dump when if you're not familiar with the brain dump I made a few videos about that in the past as well as some level of your studying course that you guys can check out. And then other things you can do is saying oh I'm going to do a whiteboard session or a group study session but having those kind of locked off on your weekends so not only are you reviewing your notes but then you're trying to really put all the information together after you learned a few related topics throughout the week that's the best time to do it but make sure you put that in a Google calendar saying I'm going to do whatever activity it is practice questions flashcards whiteboard session group session a brain dump and feel free to adjust this based on your schedule so if you want a really free Sunday because you want to go to church or you want that day off maybe you do more lectures on Saturday and you make your Sundays more open. Now if you use that system by itself I promise you that you've already gone through more repetitions that your classmates probably will by the time it's test day but now talk about what to do prior to your test. Now I've made a full video on how you can effectively study for an exam so I'll link it over here as well as put it down below in the description but it's a full video on kind of giving you the plan on how to look at all of your exams and quizzes and when to start your reviews and how many repetitions there's a lot to get into in this video so make sure you check out that video after this just open up a bunch of tabs of all the videos and programs that we talk about I'm sure you'll get a full kind of in-depth of how to study better but the main question to ask yourself in case you're limited on time is to ask yourself okay when is test day and when do I want to start reviewing usually my rule of thumb is that if it's an exam like a big final and I want to give myself at least 10 days to study for it so the test is next Friday then I'm going to start covering it this Wednesday and then I look at how many lectures I have and split amongst the days on the weekends I give myself a little bit more lectures to do and I try to get through at least two repetitions of each lecture but again you've already created all your old notes and new notes in the form of questions so you can either go back to your notes and do all of your Q and E methods or you can go through a resource like Anki in case that's how you created your information but you would just do that on those specific days and again that video walks you full detail of how to do that step by step but the main takeaway that I want you guys to have after you watch this video guys is that the three phases of learning, information gathering, learning as well as review you really want to spend as much time on the latter phases so the learning and then review and then review and review and review that's really how you're going to make the best grade as possible and feel more confident going to the exam and honestly not have to spend as much time leading up to an exam because you've just done so many repetitions naturally as part of your study schedule. Now I know I've covered a lot in this video hopefully it's been helpful but I'm sure you guys have more questions so make sure you check out some of those videos that we talked about below that may be able to help you whether it be the Anki video or videos on how to study for your test effectively as well checking out our full study playlist that I'll link down below in the description as well and you can definitely use the videos on YouTube to really help you get a leg up in your class performance but in case you just want that expedited result you can check out our three programs that I'll link down below that really will help you do that one is the Rapid Study Accelerator so if you already kind of have a study system but you're like I want to make this more efficient I want to understand how to keep making it more efficient that is going to be something that you can just do in one weekend and get the results and really know what to do from here on out every time you get better grades or worse grades and really make efforts forward if you're like most students and saying I just don't have a study technique I don't know how to make it better I don't know what's wrong with it I just want my perfect study technique and I've been spending way too much time trying to figure it out the level of your studying program is exactly who I created for so if you're in that boat then definitely check out that program down below it's meant to be three weeks but it's completely DIY with step by step study strategies like we talked about in this video but really gets more in depth over my shoulders so again check out the reviews if you're on the fence and if you're really in a crunching I'm like man I just need somebody to just walk me through and hold my hand and really help me go from a C to an A student and make me feel more confident as I get better grades but definitely check out our one-on-one programs down below where you can work with people like me to help you get better grades and again check out some of the testimonials that we have from past students I'm sure you'll be excited it is the application base so if we're a good fit together we'll work together if not I'll recommend other things you can try out but definitely consider checking out some of those three programs down below in case you're interested but with that being said guys hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did drop your questions and comments down below I'd love to answer them and help you on your personalized journey and if you did enjoy it all I really ask is one you take something from this video and try to apply it into your study technique and let me know in the comments how it worked for you or a DM on Instagram and two hit that like button hit it again third time not only selfishly because it helps the channel which it does but also because there may be a student like you who's saying oh I really want to learn how to study and maybe something in this video may help them so if you hit that like button and maybe a little to help pass the buck forward and just kind of help a bunch of students get better grades without the excess stress so super appreciative all you guys always hit the like button smash the like button you know destroy the like button but in case you haven't just go ahead and do it and in case you're either new here or looking here on the channel and you haven't done so hit that subscribe button to get more videos like this on a weekly basis both that being said guys thank you so much for watching to the very end hopefully it was a little help to you guys on your journey as always thank you for being a part of mine I'll see you guys in the next one again if you enjoyed this video then check out this video on how you can study for anki like a pro step by step but until then guys I'll see you guys in the next one peace