 Today's episode is sponsored by Kenhub. Learning is hard, but memorizing what you learn is even more challenging. Let's break down a simple method you can do in 10 to 20 minutes to drastically improve your retention and your memory. Now, every part of this 20-minute strategy that we break down today is very purposeful. Often when we're working with coaching students, we talk about something called a bottle analogy. Now, I don't have a bottle right next to me, but we do have a cup. If you imagine a cup, imagine filling it, and ideally, the more full it is before your quiz or test, the ideally, the better they'll do. There's just more information there that you can use to tackle that quiz or exam. Over time, a few things happen when we learn. They're going to be holes in the actual cup or the bottle, and you're going to essentially lose pieces of information that you've memorized, even though you fill the cup, it's no longer in there. So one of the biggest parts about learning is not just filling the cup, which is what most students do when they try to cram information, but also making sure that you're doing things effectively on a daily basis to plug in those holes, and that usually requires some repetition. So every step that we'll talk about in the 20-minute strategy is meant to fill the cup, but also repeat enough that there's very few holes, and ideally, over time, that cup or that bottle is filled, so you're ready to tackle that quiz and test with certainty and confidence. So now getting into this 20-minute strategy, it breaks down to three different techniques that you can just pair together, and ideally even do backwards to increase your retention. The first part is what we call our Q&A strategy, and we'll talk about how you can do something called a 5-3 approach to make sure your retention improves, even without doing something like flashcards. Number two, we'll talk about the memory dump, which is one of my favorite techniques that I started doing in college, and it's super effective in medical school. And then finally, arguably the most important is number three at the retention hierarchy checklist. This is how you make sure that that 20-minute session is actually improving your retention, not just today, not just tomorrow, but a week and a month from now when you have to take that quiz or test, and make sure you stay tuned for that one. So first let's start talking about the Q&A strategy. Now this is technically something that you do before learning the information before coming home, so let's break down exactly what this means. Now to understand how the Q&A strategy works, let's first talk about what most students fail to do during lectures, where typically you're spending your time doing things like outlining and highlighting, trying to convince yourself and pretending that you're actually learning, when you're actually trying to memorize something, you should be asking what's going on and how can I force myself to memorize and repeat this as multiple times is needed to make it stick. That's exactly where the Q&A strategy comes in. Instead of looking at the lectures, the combination of words and concepts between the slides and the syllabus chapters, you instead want to ask what questions could possibly come from the test maker from this slide or page. If you could gradually go through lecture through that page or that slide with questions that possibly could be a fair game, that if you repeat them multiple times over the time between now and your exam, your retention will 100% increase. So now using this Q&A strategy, you're coming home with not just a document or an outline that you've made, but actually a list of questions that if I said, Lux, if you repeat this a hundred times between now and test day, you're going to be golden. That's where the confidence comes through the Q&A strategy. That's what we teach a lot of our coaching students. Now ideally, the full depth of the Q&A strategy is spent at other times during the day and the weeks where you come home, you do your questions instead of just reviewing your notes. But this 20 minute strategy is meant to where I just need to improve my retention for these lecturers. I have a quiz coming up on Friday. How can I use that Q&A strategy and the questions that I made earlier on the weeks and the months to now make sure it's effective. So let's say for example, have a lecture with 50 questions. The first thing I'm going to do is start to go through the first five questions on my document, my flashcards, whatever method that you choose to store your questions. I'm going to do five of them and I'm going to mark basically how comfortable I feel with that answer. If there are a few questions that I don't get right, the first thing I'm going to do is do those five questions, then I'm going to come back to the first three that I need to go ahead and readdress. So if I did five questions and number one was solid, number two was a weak point, number three and four were also weak point, number five was fine, then I'm going to come back after doing those five questions to do question two, three and four. And then after that, I'm going to start questions six to 10, and then come back to the questions that I still haven't truly felt like a master. Doing this allows you to continue to move on to next questions. You're always giving attention equally behind all the concepts, but you're also coming back to those weak points that are really going to be anxiety and thought provoking points when the quiz and test come around. Now again, this Q and A strategy is meant for rapid repetition. So ideally you're doing more Q and A outside of this time, but within a 20 minute session, I recommend doing about 10 minutes of questions. Now the next part that we're going to go into is called the brain dump or the memory dump. Now this is a quick 20 minute strategy, but here's exactly how I'd use it for future review sessions. I would first look at my retention checklist and understand where the most difficult topics are that I need to make sure I address first. Then I would recommend going through this 20 minute strategy backwards. After going through your retention checklist, go ahead and do your memory dump by using a whiteboard session to see how much you remember from those hardest topics on your retention checklist. You may even surprise yourself that after some time, things that used to be difficult, just because your brain has had time to think about it actually makes sense and you actually become a strength of yours. Now this is arguably one of my favorite activities because it takes about five minutes to do a super enlightening of just slapping yourself in the face of how little you know about a topic that you feel overly confident about. Let's go ahead and demonstrate how this memory dump session works. Ideally, you've done some questions, you've convinced yourself that, hey, I'm actually pretty good at this topic, so let's go ahead and put all that information to the test. So usually on a lecture, you may understand the flow between a few pieces of information. You're like, well, I did those questions and usually in medicine, at least we talk about the diagnosis, we talk about the symptoms, we talk about how to treat them, and then we talk about maybe postcare follow-up, etc. So essentially now, if you say that I understand this flow of this lecture after doing those questions, try to recreate that lecture really quickly through scribble scrabble on this piece of paper just for memory. And by doing so, I may be able to, let's say I'm talking about a lecture on AFib, I'm about to be a future cardiologist, I'm biased. And the first thing I want to know is, let's say I want to talk about symptoms, and I want to talk about diagnosis, and I want to talk about management, and then maybe additional treatments, etc. While doing so, I may remember that there's a slide that talks about like six different symptoms, I may know three different ways to diagnose it, and maybe I know that there's at least five steps on that slide on like page five that I needed to do for management, and there's three treatments that I needed to add on. While doing so, now I need to go ahead and say, fine, Lux, you have five minutes to go ahead and quickly recreate all of the symptoms, the diagnosis, the management, and treatments that you know after doing that Q&A session that you just did. When I have to put it on a white board, almost 100% of the time, there's going to be times where I told myself, you know all six, but as soon as I tell myself to write it, I may know three out of six. And as soon as I do, I'm going to go ahead and say, like, well, somebody may have chest pain, somebody may have shortness of breath, they may have palpitations, dizziness, etc. But there's like, oh, there's two more, I can't remember them. I'm just going to go ahead and start that section of the piece of paper. And I'm going to keep moving on and do the entirety of the page. Maybe I know the treatments are things like a beta blocker, you know, maybe somebody uses like amiodarone, you can go ahead and like cardiovert them, etc. It's like, oh, maybe there's something else I can't remember. I remember there's something on the slide that I can't remember. I'm just putting all these documents and these marks on this quick five minute checkout. And what I'm now going to do is I'm going to go back to the slides. I'm going to go back to the questions that I've made and saying, what were those additional symptoms I forgot? What were those additional pieces of treatments? I'm going to just write those in. I'm going to flip this piece of paper over and do it entirely all over again. Now keep in mind that during the session, I'm not focused on writing full sentences or making it legible. The goal is that this paper is going to be recycled or I'm going to use a different part of it for a different lecture. It's really meant to highlight visibly where I feel that I know something and then saying, well, I can't put it and write it down. So I don't know it very well. Or even if I write something, if I'm not sure that that's truly how it's meant to be or the treatment or the dose, I may go ahead and make a quick star and saying, let's come back and check this. Now this by far is one of my favorite techniques. I'm supervised because it got me through all my pre-med, all my med school career. And thankfully, I did really well. It's also a method that a lot of coaching students really enjoy because again, you can visibly say, I thought I knew this, but clearly I don't. Or I thought I didn't know this, but I was able to put everything on paper. Good for you. Now ideally, you can do one to two of these during this five to seven minute block where the first one may take longer and you may have to quickly review things to your slides and your notes to say like what's meant to be there. The second one is usually quick. And again, not writing full sentences, making a very quick notations just allows you to get the goal of this method, which is visibly identify where your weaknesses and your gaps are. And then you can get into step number three, which is again, it's the most important and it's called the retention hierarchy checklist. Now before we get back to the rest of the episode, let's talk about today's sponsor, which is Ken. Now on my medical journey, easily one of the hardest classes, but arguably the most important course to master was anatomy. It's essential to master for any future doctor and medical professional. But with the sheer amount of information, plus the practical connections that you need to make to understand the functions, relationships and pathology, it easily becomes one of the hardest courses to nail down on your medical journey. And that's where today's sponsor Ken Hub comes in to make that whole lot easier. Now think of Ken Hub as a high power search engine plus a learning tool for anatomy all in one place. Through their high quality modules, you can go through any topic you're currently learning about or about to learn about an anatomy and dive right into their high yield material. One of my favorite parts about their modules is that it's targeted to every type of learner. You can read through the outlines in the modules. You can watch the high quality videos even at 2x. You can learn through their mnemonics or flip through the atlas to visually see the structures you're about to see in lab, or you can get right into quizzing and practical learning. You pick. Now because it's set to comprehensive tool, I wish I knew about Ken Hub when I was in medical school because if I was going to go through anatomy again, I would easily go through one of their modules relating to an upcoming lab and do one of their basic ID quizzes to practice identifying structures that I may see in lab the next day. Then I would come back and do more of their advanced quizzes and multiple choice questions to nail down that material before my practicals and my tests. One of the biggest benefits of Ken Hub is that regardless of what type of learner you are, all that information is there for you to master. So you don't have to alternate between resources to learn location, functions, and relationship anatomy. It's all there ready for you. Now if you're on your medical journey and you know that you want to absolutely crush it on a class as hard as anatomy, then definitely consider checking out Ken Hub. To learn more, go ahead and click the link down below in description or check out their Instagram page at kenhub underscore English. And if you're ready to get started on master anatomy, then go ahead and check out the link down below and get a sweet discount thanks to our friends at Ken Hub. So thanks again to Ken Hub for being today's sponsor. Now the retention hierarchy checklist is a five minute activity and it's less about learning and more so creating a safety net. So that way the next time you come back to studying, you can say like, I know what I need to work on. And it's also amazing because often when we're trying to memorize something, the parts that make learning so stressful and takes so long is that you feel like you have to master everything perfectly the first time, otherwise you're going to miss out. And while you're learning new information, so it's great to create a safety net that says I don't have the time to learn everything with a hundred percent focus and attention because there's more information meant to be learned right now. How can I tell myself, hey, in two or three days' lecture in a week or on the weekend, come back to this and in these topics particularly are going to need your biggest attention at that time. So using a retention hierarchy checklist, and I'll show you an example of one that I like to use, you can essentially say after every question, after every topic and concept, let's give it a grade. And I can basically say how difficult it is. And so if it is something difficult, next time that I need to go ahead and review it, I'm going to start with the difficult ones first. Now there's plenty of ways of how you can create a retention hierarchy checklist. One of my favorites is to use Notion because it's just an awesome tool. Now if you're not comfortable using Notion, there are tons of free videos. If you want to use the templates that we give to a lot of our students that we work with, you guys can actually check out the Notion template that we have. And part of the Notion template will actually include what we call the Notion method. This is basically just a big retention checklist you have. So imagine as you're going through the lectures, you'll be able to go ahead and collect all the questions and answers for all your variety of lectures. It will even be able to go through your questions and be able to tag them saying is this from a renal, is this rheumatology, is this endocrine, depending on what you're learning. Maybe if you're doing cardiology, you can mark them as this is just a fib, this is arrhythmia, this is heart failure. But that gives you tons of options because you can sort them what we'll talk about in a second. Now my favorite part about using Notion as my hierarchy checklist is let's imagine that I'm using Notion to collect all my questions from lectures. So as I'm going through lecture, I'm just making these questions and then maybe I'm writing the answers down or I'm usually using the slide as the answers and I'll just say like page or slide 12 in the answer section. Well as I'm coming back and doing my Q and A strategies and doing my 20 minute strategy, I'll be able to give all these questions a grade saying do I know it or do I not? If it's something very difficult, I'm going to grade it as a five. It's something that's really easy. I'm going to grade it as like a two or a one. And so when I do this, even if it's something that is a five, I know I need to move on and give attention to all these other questions that haven't had a chance to come to you. By doing so, now I'm essentially telling Notion, Hey, I want you to be able to sort all of these questions based off the difficulty. So just like how I've done here, I've basically gone ahead and created a difficulty kind of sorting and it's showing it to me in descending order. So next time that I come back and saying, let's go ahead and review on the weekend, I'm going to come back to my retention checklist saying, what are my biggest questions? Where are the fives and the fours that I need to focus on first? And we'll talk about in a second the method that you use to actually address this. And you can use Notion for a lot more than just sorting and keeping your questions, but also marking how many times you reviewed a specific question. Maybe you want to make a goal that all the questions are reviewed at least twice. I use this checkbox through our Notion template to be able to provide that for all of our students. You can do a lot more with Notion than just having a difficulty score and sorting it. I really like to know how many times I've covered each piece of question and material and having at least a minimum of how many reps that I do. So let's say I want to review everything twice. I can just have a checkbox with all the questions that I need to make sure before the quiz and test, every question is at least hit twice, if not more. And on a similar note, maybe something that you thought was actually very easy. You just forgot because yeah, it's been like three weeks since you reviewed it, you may make say that this is actually a four now. So next time you review it, you want to make sure that you address that first. Again, having the safety net allows you to avoid that FOMO of saying, should I learn this 100% now? Or should I get equal attention to all of the questions that I need to know that may be fair game before the quiz or test? Now this 20 minute strategy is meant to repeat as many times as possible. If you're somebody who's a big planner, I would recommend looking at your calendar asking where your normal study sessions will be doing something like the Q&A strategy and then ask yourself like, where do I get tired very often? That'd be a great time to include a 20 minute or 10 minute strategy version of what we talked about today to really get the biggest bang for your buck. It may be a great way to start and end your day to feel like I got my studying down. I feel like I'm learning and making some progress. I still got more work to do, but that's where the retention of hierarchy checklist comes in. And that's where I'll start the next time I have to study. Now if you enjoyed this breakdown, this is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we have to teach and be able to help you out. One of my favorite places to point new viewers and new audience members is through our Med School Success Handbook. Absolutely free document, basically what I wish somebody had given to me in my first day of medical school with study tips, productivity, motivation, mindset, you name it, I put it in there. I'm updating it and my team is updating it on a weekly basis. So go ahead and check it out if you're interested. And after listening to this episode, if you feel like you're really struggling in school, especially through your studying and you enjoy this episode, but you need a lot more handholding than just what we provided in this quick video, then go ahead and check out how you can work with us one on one through any of our protein programs where we basically tell you the study system that will work perfectly for you and then have a coach work with you on a week to week basis to make those minor and big adjustments to make sure it's optimized, efficient, and most importantly, you have time for yourself. And maybe you're in a situation where you have a great foundation, you just want to do better, or you may be not quite ready for a one-on-one coach, definitely recommend at least checking out the reviews and results from our level up your studying course. This is basically the same six-step process that I put myself through medical school to get a 3.9 GPA. Ideally, you guys can benefit too. And again, if you're just interested, just check out the link down below. No pressure whatsoever. But the biggest thing that I hope for you, friend, is that hopefully this episode was helpful. Hopefully you can see how you can insert this easy 20-minute strategy into your study session. And if you enjoyed this episode, check out this episode right here on how you can use Anki like a pro, most important and most popular episode that we have here on YouTube and on the podcast, as well as this episode right here on how I basically got a 3.9 GPA with all the study strategies that really helped me get there. As always, I really, really am thankful for you to be part of my journey. Hopefully I was able to help you guys on yours. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.