 So you're a few months back into your first term of university. The pace is picking up pretty quick and now you're starting to fall behind. We've all been there, but what can you do to make sure that you get back on track? Thanks to Wondrium for sponsoring a portion of this video. More on that later. What is up guys? Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. It's about that time of the year where content at uni feels relentless and you start to feel like you're falling behind with the endless amount of work. We've all been there and it can sometimes feel impossible to catch up. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how I've been able to catch up in the past when I felt like I've been falling behind on my work or other commitments in my life. Please don't be yourself up. There are lots of reasons why people fall behind. So it's important for you to understand why you have ended up in this situation. It could be due to not managing your time very well, which is fair enough and something that can be worked on in the future. But it could also be for family reasons. It could be your health or it could be anything that at that time was prioritized over your studies. I think it's important not to be yourself up about it because the only thing you can do at this point is move forward. The worst thing you can do is spend more time feeling rubbish about being behind because it's only going to set you further back. The first step to my plan of getting back on track if I was behind would be to assess the damage. You need to know exactly how far behind you are, how much you need to catch up on and how long it's going to take you to do so. You should write this down with a pen and paper or on any app that you want. Just write it down somewhere and this should ideally be a comprehensive list. Now, you might be tempted to write down something like study for exam, but this is not going to be helpful. Breaking it down into smaller steps like watch lectures one and two, read chapter three and review notes on lecture 10 is going to give you a clearer understanding of the work that's in front of you and how much time you need to put into that task. Now, this time component is essential. If you write down a rough estimate of how long you think it's going to take you to catch up on or complete each task, then you can tally up those hours and you can see just how much work is ahead of you and it can put it into perspective and make it easier to tackle moving forward. This means that you can tally up all the hours that it's going to take for you to catch up and then you can divide them over a manageable period of time moving forward. Once you've got the list of all the things you need to complete with an estimate of the time it'll take you to do it, it's now time to prioritize those tasks. It doesn't make any sense for you to watch that lecture on psychiatry when you know that you have a huge rheumatology exam the next day. The tasks that have been left on our list for the longest aren't necessarily the ones that we need to do first. Our priorities change over time for a variety of reasons. The reasons that you might choose to do one piece of work over another could be because you want to review something, it could be because you have an upcoming exam, it could be because you just really don't want to forget this important thing. It's up to you depending on your situation and you will know this best. Prioritizing your task is really important because you want to make sure that you do the right things first, the most important things first. I think it's important that you're good at prioritizing for any university course. You want to take the list of tasks that you've written down and you want to rearrange it with the most important task at the top and the least important task at the bottom. Splitting your time evenly between all the tasks is probably not going to be the best idea. Treat your time as one of your most valuable assets and you have to remember that it's essentially a non-renewable resource. Once you've spent that time, you're never going to get it back. And so this means that we should value our time and make sure that any investment of our time into work gives us the highest return. What this means is that it's a relatively good use of your time to spend two hours really understanding a concept that underpins the whole module that you're currently learning because the result of that is going to mean that you can apply that understanding to a ton of questions that you might have in your exams and your future learning for the module. And hopefully this means that you'll get a good grade in the end. But spending two hours making flashcards for a subject that you already know quite well or that you know has pre-made flashcards already on the internet or maybe by one of your friends isn't going to be the best use of your time. One caveat to all of this, which I think is a pretty valid argument and something that I do all the time, is that if you have a couple of smaller or shorter tasks that you can just do quickly and bang them out and get them out of the way, I usually tend to do that because I can find it really motivating. When I start to tick things off my to-do list, I can see it growing shorter and I feel accomplished and like I'm already doing something. And it can sort of help me tackle and feel better about the bigger tasks that are still to come. But generally prioritizing your time and making sure that you do the most important things earliest on is probably the right way to go. It's important that you don't continue to fall behind with your current content whilst making up for the previous content that you've missed. Don't take off a whole day of uni to catch up with the previous day's work because you'll continue to just fall further and further behind over time. It's better to stick with the schedule that the university has given you and then carve out extra time in your evenings or on your weekends for that catching up work. That way you're slowly chipping away at both so you don't have this huge anxiety about the work that you need to catch up on and you're still on track of what's going on now and hopefully eventually you'll be caught up again. But at the end of the day, when you choose to catch up and how you choose to catch up depends on you. Do what feels right for you. Make a realistic calendar. Please, please, please make a calendar that you can actually manage and you can actually follow moving forward. Let's say for example, you know that you have 10 hours worth of work to catch up on. You can slot in one hour blocks of catching up on that work each day for the next 10 days and that's pretty manageable. That's pretty doable with everything else you've got going on and it gives you this good visual representation of the work to come over the coming week. Now please don't do that thing that I see so many people do where they put on their calendar. Tomorrow I'm gonna do 10 days of work and catch up on everything. It's unrealistic. It doesn't happen the vast majority of the time and it just puts you in a worse position than you started off with. I personally think it's really important to be realistic so that you don't overwhelm yourself with being unrealistic and telling yourself you're gonna do all these things that most people just can't do. I find that setting these huge goals and promising yourself you're gonna be caught up and complete with everything in a short period of time kind of sets yourself up for failure and makes you more likely to burn out because you feel like, oh, I'm still behind. I couldn't do what I told myself I was gonna do on the calendar. It's never ending, blah, blah, blah. I think if from the beginning you're as realistic as possible, as reasonable as possible and you spread out that work over a period of time where you know you're gonna be capable of doing it then you're more likely to do and you're more likely to feel good about having done it when it's done. Now, if you're 10 lectures behind and your exam is in a couple of days, then yeah, you need to cover those 10 lectures in the next couple of days. You don't really have a choice but hopefully you're not in that position and you've watched this video before you get to that point and you can plan out your studying properly. One thing you can do to try and figure out where you might have some extra time to do this catch up work is look at where you currently spend your free time and how much you're happy to eat into this in order to catch up. So for example, if you know you wanna catch up over the next week, you might not mind doing one hour of Netflix instead of two hours of Netflix per evening and just spend that extra hour doing the catch up work. But at the same time, try not to let this catch up eat into your time of just having fun and enjoying life and being with your friends. I think doing those things is equally as important as working and you can't have one with the other. And so manage your time wisely and do it smartly so you can still do the catch up that you need to do, but also live a normal life and hang out and have fun to prevent yourself from burning out in the long term. Finding that balance is difficult, but really important for creating this sustainability over a long period of time. NASA from the future here with a quick ad from today's sponsor, Wondrium. Now, if there's one thing I look forward to when I lay down in bed at the end of a long day, it's a documentary. 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If you're like me and always wondering about stuff, trying to learn more, then you're gonna love Wondrium. Check out Wondrium using the link, www.wondrium.com slash KarmaMedic to get a free trial now. Now back to the video. The next thing that I would suggest is to just speak to your friends. This is really important. Some of them are probably in the exact same boat as you and knowing that can help you feel a lot less alone when you're folding behind. Now very crucially, you can also help each other and share resources. You might have all the flashcards on a particular topic that they were just about to spend two hours making and they might be able to send you a YouTube video that can explain a concept really well which you just happened to be struggling with. Talking to your friends and being open about your work and your resources and your workload is incredibly powerful. It's something that I've done throughout my time at university and I can safely say I could not have done as well as I have without the help of my friends. You need to make sure that you're using all the resources available to you and this includes your friends and their knowledge. It might even be worth setting up a group study session for an upcoming exam and working on topics that you all find difficult together. It just takes one person in the friend group to suggest something like this and in the end, most people want to do it and most people will benefit from it. So be that person, suggest studying with your friends and sharing resources and working together. I promise you're not gonna regret it. Another resource that is often useful is office hours with your tutors or professors. If your profs do offer office hours, that's definitely a tongue twister, you can always go into them with any questions that you have about the content. Even if you don't have your own questions, listening to other people's questions and then their answers can often be helpful and asking the prof or the tutor to spend some time summarizing a topic that you find particularly difficult can be useful as well. After all, these are experts in their respective fields and their teachers for a reason. So they're usually pretty good at explaining concepts at the right level at your stage of learning. If your tutors don't offer office hours, then please send them an email. Don't be nervous or worried about emailing your profs or your tutors, they are there to teach you, this is their job and I'm sure they'll be really excited to see an email from one of their students, asking them to explain something that they're already very familiar with. Now, if you're really, really falling behind and you think that this might be a serious issue moving forward, you can always reach out to your personal tutors or your course directors and ask them for advice. They've definitely been in this situation before and they've helped other students through situations like this and so they're the perfect people to go to. Quite often, at least here in the UK, they tend to be quite understanding with mitigating circumstances and making sure that their students get the help that they need. So if you ever feel like you're crossing that line and moving into that territory, just remember that there's always people to talk to and there's always people who can help you through it. So the next step is future proofing. You wanna make sure that this doesn't happen again and if it does, that you have a system in place to catch up properly. Going forward, you wanna make sure that you're sticking to the university timetable as much as you can. That's usually the best way to make sure that you're not falling behind because that's what they've set for you and for all of the other students and so probably you and all the other students can follow this timetable within reason. And if you do follow the university timetable, then that way your evenings can be spent revising content that you need more help with or supplementing your lectures with other resources so you have a better understanding or just having fun, going out and living life, doing things other than academics and studying. Being on top of your schedule and not falling behind means that you can keep some of this protected time to one side and you can spend it on seeing your friends and doing other things that you enjoy in life. This is what I've done throughout almost all of my university life. I make sure that I get things done on time and that I'm not falling behind that much or not falling behind that often so that I have free time to enjoy myself outside of university and do the things that I enjoy, hang out with my friends, play sports or whatever. I don't think I'd truly be able to enjoy myself stress-free and fully relaxed if I knew that I was so far behind and I had all this work to catch up on and it was just gonna be hell to do on the weekend or I'd have a long library session or something like that and so trying to do a little bit of work every day would always save me from this terrible headache further down the line. If you do end up falling behind though, it's completely understandable, you know, we have all been there. Life happens and we can't always control being in a situation so it's probably a good idea to keep some sort of system in place to help you catch up if you ever do fall behind. You can do this by following the steps in this video but also by developing your own habits that make catching up quicker and easier for you. This might be something as simple as having a page dedicated to overdue work or catch up work on an app like Notion or on a piece of paper like I have over here or on your phone or whatever so that whenever you miss a lecture or you have a piece of work that needs to be caught up on you just write it down on this list and then every time you look at it you know exactly how much you are behind and you know exactly how long it's gonna take you to catch up on that work. I also feel that having a list that you can look at and see how much work you need to do makes the work so much more manageable and it stops it from being this sort of just big enigma floating in the ether somewhere of oh my God I have to catch up. When you take that I have to catch up and you break it down into a to-do list with little tasks and everything like that it becomes so much more manageable. It's like oh yeah I can do that task today I can do this one tomorrow and you can start working on it slowly slowly. The last bit of advice that I want to give you is to try to stick to the plan that you make. It can be tough to do that but catching up later on can be even harder. That being said if you do need to catch up I hope the tips that I've talked about in this video help you to do that. Keep going and eventually you'll get there. See you in the next one. Subscribe to my Patreon. Peace. What can you do to help yourself get back on track? It's a good blooper.