 So you want to use flat cars or Anki Deck in medical school, but you want to make sure you're using them effectively and quickly. How do you do it? That's exactly what we'll talk about in this video. Let's get into it. Hi guys, welcome to the MD Journey, a channel completely dedicated to helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. If you're new here, my name is Laksh. I am an internal medicine physician and resident in training, and this channel is all about putting two videos per week at least to help you succeed on your medical journey with studying, productivity, you name it. So if you're new here, hit that like button and consider hitting that subscribe button. Today, we are talking about Anki cards and flash cards and how to do them more effectively, how to do them more efficiently. And I've made a lot of videos on the channel below of my specific unique method of how I use Anki. And I'll link down below my five hour kind of study method in medical school. But I will be sharing my screen, basically what I want to show is a few different techniques that I use when I'm doing flash cards. One, how I make them and two, how I try to review them as well as think about them. So the first process is how I make them. Now really there's one or two ways. One, I just don't make them and I use pre-made Anki decks. And so we'll talk about a few of the options or two, if I'm trying to do something from class and I use a very kind of efficient method, which again, I'll link down below, but I'll kind of allude to a little bit in this video. And finally, I want to give you my recommended way of getting through flash cards quicker as well as examples of what your study schedule would look like if you chose to use Anki decks as your study method. Now, first things first, let's talk about different options that you have for Anki decks. So those I mentioned, you can either use some that other people have created. And so, for example, here I have some Anki decks. And so this is probably the biggest library as a making of this video, with different resources from Patelma, from First Aid for studying for step one, as well as your classes of essentially countless amounts of material on every different topic. So immunology, MSK, neurology, psych, you name it. But there's also other different Anki decks such as Brolin, Cephalons, Peppers, and I forget the names of all the other ones. So you guys can put in the comments if you have your own personal favorite. But essentially, what you'll see is that it's going to ask you a very kind of short one fact question that may refer to a piece of information shared on First Aid or something that's important to learn for step one. And so as you can see, they're pretty quick and easy to get through. And you can choose if you want to see them in a minute or two minutes. Now, pre-made Anki decks are great because it saves you a lot of time of not having to make them yourself as well as it's very quick and easy to actually do them just because it's either you know them or you don't in terms of information. But in terms of how to make flashcards for your classes using lecture slides or lecture material, here's the method that I like to use. And I'll link down below again, my five hour study technique. But here's a lecture or PowerPoint I have on my computer for osteomyelitis. And normally what people would do is that they would try to make multiple flashcards per slide and try to find a little bit of details they find that even for a slide deck that's 15 slides, which most lectures are much longer, they'll probably end up with 20, 30 or 40 different flashcard questions. And it just takes forever to make them. And so you never really have to time to actually do the review. So what I do is actually pull up them next to each other actually have a dual monitor so it's a little bit easier. But I create a new deck for whatever that lecture is. So you can go down here, create a deck. So we'll just call this osteomyelitis. And you can basically open this up and click add and then you can make your own flashcards that most people type in something for the front and the back of the flashcards but that's not my desired cup of tea just gonna takes forever. So here's an example of the imaging modalities that you can use to diagnose osteomyelitis. Some people may ask, you know, a question from this or they may ask a specific question for radiography for CT for MRI. What I like to do is just best imaging for diagnosis. So this is just the best way to diagnose. And then what I can do is I can go ahead and screenshot that specific slide and I can just copy that and add it in. Now, whenever I see that specific flashcard, the real question is, do I one know the best imaging for around diagnosis? But also then I can test myself on all the different elements of this specific slide like how useful as an MRI versus a CT versus, you know, a PET scan. And so it helps me understand all the information in one place has both the details as well as the big ideas and making that flashcard took, you know, 10 seconds. So before I show kind of how to review it, I'm just gonna make one more. So here's one antibiotic therapy. And if you're feeling really, really easy, then you can do just copy and paste the title of the slide itself. And then you can go ahead and just like I did in the last one, you can go ahead and just copy the whole slide. Now, everything doesn't have to be important. And if you want to add more notes, what you can do is you can open up the same slide and add your notes. So it's not completely limited to this one option. What I'm doing is I'm basically knowing that it's important for me to know the antibiotic therapy to treat OM, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes making multiple flashcards on this topic. So I'm going to take 20 seconds to make this. And then let's just say that I've finished all my flashcards, only two, but you know, we're going to say we have like 20 or plus more. And you go to study. The first thing that's going to show up is the best imaging for OM diagnosis. I'm going to ask myself, what's the sensitivity or specificity because I knew that I was on the slide for a CT scan versus a radiography. And let's say I remembered one piece of information, like I remember to CT scans were like, kind of 50 50 MI is a little bit better. Then I can say, okay, well, like that's the piece of information I learned. And then I need to learn all the rest of it. So I'm just going to click one minute. It's going to show it to me again. Now antibiotic therapy, you know, I know that bank is kind of your empiric choice, but I don't really remember the other ones. So I'm just going to give myself 10 seconds. And that's going to be a principle that we'll talk about to see if I know as much information, we give myself 10 seconds to say, what do I know? What do I don't know? And then I'm going to review this slide as quickly as possible and try to grasp one additional piece of information that I didn't know before, and then click one minute again. And then again, I would go, okay, I have a question again about that imaging. So CT scans was like 67% sensitivity, I believe. And then I was like almost 90% for MRI. So there you go. And now I'm going to say, okay, well, the sensitivity for radiography is like pretty terrible. So it's useful to rule out. So that's the one piece of information I'm going to take away. And I'm going to go ahead and show it again. So every time I'm doing this, my goal is to say how much of this information do I remember? And then what piece of information can I add on to my collection of knowledge for this big topic, which is antibiotic therapy in this situation? And then ask myself to do it again in one minute. So I find that this method specifically helps me get into the review phase very quickly. It does get a little overwhelming for students who do it for the first time, because they're not really sure how they can get away from having one fact for flashcards and now having a whole slide. But the big key, and this isn't going to be moving into the next portion of this video, is how do we do them faster? Now, the best tip that I have for you, regardless of you use this method to make your flashcards quicker, or if you use pre-made Anki decks, or if you use your own kind of personalized way of making flashcards, is to give yourself a timer for each Anki card that you do. And usually for me, I give myself five to 10 seconds. Basically, I say, when I see that question in five to 10 seconds, how much do I really know? And it's basically whatever comes to mind. Now, for example, in this situation, when I'm talking about imaging, I know in five to 10 seconds, I'm not going to know everything. In fact, I'm also going to know the things that felt uncomfortable about that slide. For example, I don't even remember looking anything about PET scan when I was reviewing this, but I know it's on there. So what I can say is I'm going to, five to 10 seconds, I know the sensitivity you have x-rays, I know the sensitivity of CTs and MRIs, but let's actually learn something about PET scans. It looks like PET scans are actually pretty good, but they're expensive. That's the one piece of information I'm going to take away in my 10 seconds of review. So 10 seconds to answer the question, 10 seconds to review, and then I'm going to click one minute again. And each time I'm doing this, I'm actually going to probably be saying this flashcard 10 plus times, but I'm going to be seeing it multiple times during my study session. And I'm going to be able to take away one extra piece of information and feel more comfortable with the entire slide, which is imaging modalities for osteomyelitis. So now if someone asks you a question, what are the best sources you're like, well, I know about x-rays, I know about CTs, I know about PET scans. I can tell you how all of them work together. Instead of just being able to tell you one fact about x-rays and osteomyelitis, I can tell you everything about imaging. It's going to take multiple repetitions, but since you can make your flashcards quicker, you can also get to the review part and take longer and still be able to understand it much, much more. And I want to give an example for somebody who's using Zonkidex or pre-med decks, even when the questions are short, you should still give yourself five to 10 seconds to answer them. It's either you know it or you don't. But when you're in these situations where as an image or something where you can find yourself spending a lot of time in, again, give yourself only 10 seconds to really grasp, for example, in this figure. I'm going to say, well, I know there's a lot of things that could probably try to spend a minute or two trying to rewrite or remember. I'm just going to say, OK, but in this example, as I'm trying to learn the figure, I'm going to say, OK, let's try to understand the proteins for gap junction right now and desmosomes. And then I'm going to click one minute again, and it's going to show those to me again. So not only will I be able to answer the question for gap junction, which is what the slide was asking, but also be able to remember one or two more different things from the table without spending an excess amount of time. You can see how if you're doing 40 or 50 flashcards in a session, you'll be able to get through them much quicker if you're spending only 10 to 20 seconds per flashcard, giving yourself multiple flashcards per minute versus multiple minutes per flashcard. So of course yourself to have a timer to answer the question and to move on from the question again, because Anki is so awesome, you can show yourself in a minute or 10 minutes, depending on your comfort level, you pick when you think it should be a 10 minute versus a one minute review, and you just go from there. So to give one more example, here's a flashcard talking about the different layers of the epidermis. You know, I may not be able to remember all of the different phases in this figure, but if I can remember maybe the first two and call them the corneum and granulosum, I'm going to say, OK, those are the first two that I need to remember when I'm reshown this question again. And you go from there. And so every time again, the whole idea is about grasping a little bit piece of more knowledge than you had before. So far we've talked about how to make flashcards quicker, even how to do them more quickly. But I want to finally kind of leave you with study schedule or study plan you could use to actually make flashcards, your only kind of former resource to review and study and still be able to do quite well. So the first part of your study plan is going to be creating your actual flashcards that you have to do. And after using a pre-made deck like Zanky, you actually won't have to make the flashcards. But what I do recommend is maybe creating a separate deck in Anki where you can go ahead and create it for all your class material. So for example, if you're learning cardiology, you can create cardiology here. And then as you're going through class material, if you have a class such as about VCS or about murmurs, then you can create a deck about specifically murmurs under cardiology. Now what you can do is you can go into the frow section in Anki and you can find the cardiovascular section and find any question that you think may work for the murmur section. So here we have a question specifically we're talking about F2 sound and mitral stenosis. So you actually right click on them and then change the deck and make them into your murmurs deck for your lectures. Now you have a specific Anki deck using Zanky for the lecture you're about to have the next day. You can go ahead and test yourself. Now if you were to use my method of using screenshots to make your own lectures, simply you would make yourself spend about 30 to 40 minutes doing the three lectures that you may have the next day and not really very much else. Then what I like to do is go into class and whether you're using Zanky or your own made flashcards, I again go into the browse section and then find the flashcard that I had just made. And then if I have to add any piece of detail from lecture, I'll basically add them into Anki myself. Again, the whole idea here is to only make it high yield. So if it's not very pertinent or relevant, I try not to add it. But if I do think it's high yield or they say intent, it's going to be on the test. Definitely make sure it's going to be on there. Now after lecture, I give myself roughly about 30 to 40 minutes per lecture to review the 20 to 30 or 40 flashcards for that lecture. So roughly it's going to be if I had three lectures, then it'll take me about an hour and a half to review all of them. And again, the whole goal is to give myself 10 seconds to review or answer the question and then 10 seconds to review any other piece of information on that slide or for that flashcard to make sure I can answer it even better the next time. And then the whole process repeats itself that evening, you're going to go ahead and create flashcards for your next day. And if a test is coming, then you just have to give yourself an extra session in that evening or the day or the afternoon, anytime you have free to do some more flashcards from some of the old lectures that may also show up on the exam. That's coming. But this guy's is meant to be a video to help summarize how to use on key and do a little bit more effectively. If you do enjoy and make sure you hit that like button and that subscribe button. If you want more tips on how to use on key effectively one, you can check out my five hours study technique method on YouTube here as well as a full kind of free video course and how I studied in medical school, which I'll link down below. And that's part of just one of the many resources of the free library that we call an empty journey, the med vault. And so that'll be linked down below. And if you want more of our step by step resource on how to study as well to be more productive, I'll link all of those down below, including our books and our courses, hopefully you'll find some of them helpful. But with that being said, guys, thank you so much for watching. If you did find this helpful again, please support the channel by hitting that like button, hitting that subscribe button and also dropping your comments down below so I can make sure I can answer and help you as best as possible. Thank you for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I've been a little hope to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.