 If you're tired of always being behind in school and want to learn how to make your setting faster while still being effective, let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman here. At the MD journey, we make content to help people like you succeed on whatever journey you're on, but doing it with less stress. Today, I want to talk about some small but effective strategies you can use to make your setting faster while still remaining effective in terms of retention. If at any point during this episode, if you feel like you're getting some value and you want more where that came from, make sure you check out our free resource, our med school success handbook. It's an absolutely free guy that I'm constantly updating with new lessons of things that I learned when I was a medical student, as well as things that I've learned after working with hundreds and hundreds of students over the past six to seven years. So if you guys are interested, I'll be linked down below. The principal number one is transitioning from task planning to time planning. Often the biggest reason students will fall on a slump when it comes to productivity is that you just fall behind because you tend to over promise and under deliver, and it's usually because it's just hard to predict how long freaking activities will take. Sometimes you may say, I'm going to do an hour and a half to do this lecture, but it'll make you take you two hours and that causes you to fall behind or say no to a task you originally planned on doing. And as that happens more and more, it starts to snowball into a schedule that no longer is sustainable and likely you're about two to three days behind. So if that feels familiar, let me know in the comments down below. And so whenever I'm helping a student through our one-on-one programs, if you guys are interested, I'll be linked down below. Sometimes their biggest issues is that they just can't keep up and they don't have a predictable schedule. And so sometimes the first thing that we do is we actually completely just erase their calendar and say, you need to stop planning for activities instead plan for a task. So for example, if a student is doing flashcards for part of the study system, instead of saying, you need to finish all of your flashcards and do 100 flashcards a day, I'm just like, how much time can you easily devote to flashcards and easily say yes to every single day? They may say 20 minutes, they may say 30 minutes, they may say an hour and a half, but whatever the easy yes is, like perfect. That means that now you're going to design your schedule to where you're going to do 30 minutes of flashcards a few times a day. And if that means that you get 20 cards done instead of the 30 you originally planned, that's okay. Once the 30 minutes is over, you move on to the next task. That switch from amount of time versus amount of tasks done really helps you say, during this time, I'm going to try my best to get as much done as possible. But if it's one of those situations where a lecture takes me more time or a flashcard takes me more time to get down, that is okay. You don't take a failure just because now you under predicted instead using a time block says that 30 minutes was spent as effectively as possible. Yes, I didn't do as many flashcards as possible. I was able to get more attention to a topic that was a little bit harder for me. And you can do this hack with literally anything. So if you're feeling overwhelmed by how many videos you have to watch from a certain resource, instead of saying I'm going to try to get through six videos today, just say I'm going to do an hour and a half of video review from this resource. That may mean that on some days you get three videos on some days you may get seven depending on the length or how easy it is to retain. But the hour and a half is going to be your easy yes. And then once the hour and a half is over, you move on to next task. Now principle number two is to work backwards to perfect your study system. Whenever we work with students one on one, one of the biggest principles that we work on is to hammer in this idea of working backwards to make sure your entire flow is dedicated to the end goal, which for a majority of students is to do well on ultimate quiz or test. And so if you start backwards, you're going to say this is how the test and quizzes for my institution, for this class are organized. How is the rest of my study schedule and rest of my study system going to help me get there? Most students will do this typical flow of going to class, taking notes, reviewing the material and eventually doing some kind of quizzing for the test. But if you ask yourself during that entire flow, how much of it was actually designed to help you do all the tests? It's probably that last bit where you do questions or you're quizzing yourself or you're doing flashcards and the majority of that 60 to 70% that you're spending at the start is really not that helpful. A quick test is ask yourself how much do you remember when you walk at a lecture? Most of the students that I'll work with will say about 20 to 30%. That means a majority of that time was absolutely wasted. So instead, I'll have students design their study schedule backwards. I'm saying perfect. You know what your quizzes and tests look like, what resource, how can you design your notes in a way where you're forcing yourself to think in that way. So if it's been yet, are you doing practice questions from other resources that start to look like your institutions? If their questions are very detailed, in fact, heavy, am I perfect? Are your notes designed in a way where instead of just writing things, you're actually making questions and then having answers below them. If you guys are interested in learning more of how to make your notes more effective, you can check out this episode on how to use a Q&A or Q&A method to make your notes effective from the start. So then again, you can complement the end goal, which is to do well on the quizzes and tests. But as you start to think about your study system backwards, you'll start to realize this resource or this technique that I'm doing is not really helping my end goal. It's not really helping my retention. It's not helping my confidence. It's not really helping at all. Sometimes you can take those away, or you can say, I'm going to design my note system all the way from start to finish where I can just go ahead and do them and then review. That's where the Q&A method comes. Or you can do something like Anki and make it very effective. That's where my screenshot method comes in. If you guys are interested, you guys can check out this episode right here on how to use Anki like a pro. It's easily our most viewed video here on YouTube. So if you guys are interested, you guys can check those out. Now principle number three is stick and pick to your favorite all in one resource. Now full disclaimer, there's no such thing as a perfect resource. And if you were to jump from one resource to another, you find that most of them will tend to give you what you need in terms of content review, in terms of learning, in terms of actually quizzing and testing. But it is important that you kind of jump around to find the one resource that is going to be the best design for yourself. So that's a good time to talk about today's sponsor, which is Picmonic. And it is one of my favorite productivity hacks to help study faster because if you have a resource like Picmonic in your corner, you can say perfect. We're currently learning about GI in school. I'm going to go ahead and say, okay, tomorrow we are learning about the anatomy of GI and I can find the best videos that correspond to the classes I'm going to learn about and go ahead and watch these videos ahead of time and go through their quizzes and tests. Now the beauty of Picmonic is that it's both effective and super quick. As you guys can see, learning about the foregut structures only takes me about two minutes of actually watching the videos. And then I can actually go through and do these quizzes. Now if you're not familiar with Picmonic, the reason that they're so effective is that they combine these very short, very effective stories with interesting images that correspond to important lessons and concepts for an individual topic. So if we're learning about the mid-gut, these images will correspond to different things that you'll learn about the mid-gut. And then after watching the video, which again is very short, this one is just a minute and 27 seconds, you can actually then go ahead and practice reviewing what were the different items and structures within the video and what did they represent. And then you can do individual quizzes that help you answer questions specifically here about the foregut. Now in addition to having videos and essentially any topic you'll need on your medical journey, other functionalities that I really enjoy about Picmonic include being able to create your own playlist. So for example, if I was on my cardiology block, I could add any video that I'm going to be watching as I go through the actual blocking class itself. So in this case, because we're in GI, I can create a new one and add all these videos. And as I get closer and closer to quiz day, I can then do my quizzes for all the videos that I've now covered over the last few weeks. And so if you haven't quite yet found an all-in-one resource that works for you and you're interested in giving Picmonic a try, go ahead and use the link down below in description. Our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount if you use the code, the MD journey at checkout. So as always, thank you to our friends at Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Now in addition to Picmonic, there's tons of other all-in-one resources that we've covered on the MD journey, so feel free to go to our blog to find out resources like physio or an online meta and boards of beyond in case you guys are interested. Now principle number four is one of my favorites and that's to use the stack attack. Now the stack attack is one of my favorite principles to help you study faster while still being effective and actually focusing on what is effective. And it's essentially a two-part thing. One, it requires you to start your day by the thing that moves the needle the most in terms of retention. So that may mean I'm going to wake up instead of saying I'm going to watch my lectures, which like, let's be honest, like 20% effective. You may say I'm going to start my day by doing practice questions for the material I'm learning. I'm going to go through those videos and my high-yield resource. I'm going to do flashcards on the flashcards I've made or somebody else made, but something that's moving the needle for my retention. That means that even if the rest of the day went to absolute shreds, you did something effective to wake up and begin with high-yield retention. Now that is step one, is to begin your day with the thing that moves the needle the most and doing it every single day. Now the second part of the stack attack is to purposely end your day early. So if you're somebody who is studying until 10 p.m. 11 p.m. or 12 p.m. until the work is done, then ask yourself what would my day look like if I forced myself to stop studying at 7 p.m. This is something that I did when I was a medical student and it completely changed the game because then you can look at everything you're doing and saying, huh, if I'm going to stop studying at 6 p.m. I can't do this and I can't do that, but I'm okay with it because I know it's not actually helping. I'm just doing it because I feel like it needs to. And it's definitely a principle that you practice slowly. So if you're studying until 10 p.m. most days, ask yourself what would look different if you stop studying at 8 p.m. What would be taken out? How would you study more efficiently? How would the flow of your study system look differently? And again, if you guys are interested, you guys can check out the med school success handbook or go through some of our study programs like a level up your studying program or work with us one-on-one. So we can just help you ASAP and figure it out without all of the stress. But if you're in this constant cycle of like, I'm not getting the grades that I want and I simply don't have more time to add because I've pretty much filled my entire day with studying, then try the stack attack where you say, I'm going to use the first part of my day to be as effective as possible. I'm going to purposely end my day earlier than I have been and then really hone into what actually doesn't need to be here and take it out and sing. Do I make a difference if it didn't? Perfect. Continue to do so where now your study system becomes as lean as possible, personalized and effective as you need it to be. Now principle number five is to make your weekends review days instead of catch-up days. Now this is more of a retention trick but it is helps you with your productivity because a lot of times if you have Saturdays and Sundays just open for anything and not a purposeful review, most students will have tendency of procrastinating during the week and that's usually what I'll see. When I work with students one-on-one, amongst the many questions I'll ask them, one of is how do you use your weekends? And most people say, well I'm catching up on videos and lectures that I haven't watched, I'm catching up on notes, I'm preparing for the next week stuff. But there's no real plan on how to do repetition number two or repetition number one of the material that they learned so far. So if you make your weekends review days where you're saying I'm going to review everything that I've learned throughout the week, ideally for a second time now, then that time is not purposefully given to procrastination time. And that will force you internally to say, well I don't have the ability now to procrastinate because Saturday's already designated as a review day. So I need to make sure that I get my minimum amount of work done using the principles that we talked about before on Monday through Friday and Saturdays and Sundays have their own designated plan in my study schedule which is to do my second repetition of the material. Principle number three is to use the principle of time track. And so this idea of time tracking is something you could do on a weekly basis where you look at everything you wanted to do and look at essentially what you actually did and review like what happened there. What type of things can I make sure that that doesn't happen again? Do I need to extend how much time I designed to the lectures because they're all taking long or do I need to shorten something because it actually is not taking me as long to do these flashcards? Those will help you find more efficiencies in your study system that are particular and personalized to you. Those my friends are some of my favorite small yet effective productivity hacks to help you study more effectively. Now again if you want to help on your entire medical journey for absolute free and all the lessons that I've learned in my past six to seven years of working with hundreds of students to help you become a top student then definitely check out our med school success handbook. It is principles that I'm constantly updating because I just love including all the life lessons that I've learned to help you study better, be more efficient with your time and actually enjoy the freaking process of going into medicine. And if you look at the links down below, in addition to the med school success handbook, you'll also find other free resources like our study rehab course as well as our eight step study program. All of these will be linked down below absolutely free. Now if you're struggling with your studying, you know, I just need help. Somebody like hold my hand, walk me through how to get better grades without doing more time, if anything less, then the two programs that I absolutely would recommend would be the level up your studying program to six steps that helped me get my best grades possible and hundreds of students do the same. Those will be linked down below. If you just want our one-on-one help where I look at your calendar, look at your study schedule, look at your study system, and we just design something where you start to see results ASAP, definitely consider applying to work with us one-on-one. All of those will be linked down below. But if you have any questions, make sure you leave in the comments down below. If you got any value from this episode at all, make sure you hit that like button down below. If you haven't joined the community, hit that subscribe and notification bell to be notified when new videos and episodes like this go out weekly. If you're listening to this as a podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe on your favorite listening platform and leaving it on for a view on iTunes. Super helpful. If you did enjoy this episode and check out this video right here on how to use Anki at Like a Pro, the most popular one that we have here on YouTube, as well as this word right here on how to study in medical school from start to finish. Hope you guys enjoyed those. As always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully all this little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.