 Now we all fall behind in school, but if you're behind right now and you're listening to this, you can either continue to fall further behind or use these next tips to catch up ASAP. Let's break it down. So number one is the 90-10 catch up rule. Now one of the biggest issues with falling behind that I had as a medical student is this avalanche of overwhelming dread and anxiety that continues to build up. But I found one of the simplest ways to overcome this dread is having 10% of my time dedicated to planning, the rest of it is meant for action. So for example, if we're in the middle of the week and I realize I'm already two days of lectures behind and I'm finding that anxiety growing, the first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and set some time. Maybe it's an hour on that day that I'm going to go ahead and create a plan to create the plan for the rest of the catch up period. So I may say, look Luxe, you are six lectures behind from those two days, and then you have three days of lectures every single day. Here is the structure you're going to set up for yourself. Often we get too ambitious on our catch up schedule where we may say I'm two days of lectures behind, I'm going to catch up in the next three days. Instead to avoid adding anxiety, I may say you're two days of lectures behind, let's try to get that done in four to five days. And so that means that during that 10% of time that it's meant for planning, I can easily say, okay, perfect, you have three lectures per day, five days to catch up on the lectures you're already behind, that's about one to one and a half lectures that you need to do in addition. Here are the hours you're going to spend specifically on the material for the day. Here's going to be the hours you're going to spend on that catch up material. And you're just going to go to the next lecture every single day. Now I can see how I go from six lectures, holy crap, I'm so far behind to the system that can say, if I get this down on a daily basis, it's completely doable. And as a bonus and pro tip plan for additional procrastination and lack of motivation, if I'm already falling behind from procrastination and a lack of focus, even though I like to get those lectures done in four days, I may have a system based as a backup plan on trying to get that done in six days. That means that I may have certain slots in my weekend that are specifically dedicated for additional catch up time in case I need it. This way, again, if I slack off or a lecture takes me a little bit too long to do, I'm not able to commit to even my plan system, I have a backup plan in place, which again, then I can use that other 90% of the time to just get to work and get through those lectures. Number two is to expedite your information gathering. Now whenever we work with coaching students one on one, and by the way, if you're interested in any of our coaching programs, those will be linked down below, no pressure otherwise. But whenever we do work with the student, the biggest thing I emphasize is that you are likely spending way too much time taking information from your syllabus, your chapters, your PowerPoints, your actual video lectures, and taking them into something you can review. If anything, most students are spending 60 to 80% of the time on just gathering that information, thus having very little time to actually go through and review it. And so not only is it important to fix that first phase of information gathering just for your future of learning, which is what we help students do, but when you're catching up, it becomes even more of an urgency to get that part nailed down. Some easy ways to do this is to collaborate with your peers or upper classmates to see if there's already pre-made notes or outlines or flashcards for those specific lectures you're falling behind on. If you have maybe three or four days of lectures you're behind on, it doesn't practically make sense to try to go through all the syllabus material. But if somebody's already done the hard work of summarizing something into an outline, it's much easier to digest that and learn that versus trying to go through your syllabus and PowerPoint, particularly when you're behind. The second technique that you can use to expedite your information gathering is something that we call reverse learning. Now most students will again go through a chapter, go through a paragraph and just read and highlight and try to digest what am I learning? But on the flip side, if I'm reading a paragraph and I'm falling behind, the first thing I'm going to ask is what questions would I need to know to be able to answer whatever's in here? So something's talking about the treatment of hypertension and maybe it's talking about the mechanism of one specific medication. I may write a question on the margin of that textbook and if you want to see example of me doing this, I break this down in our entire episode of how I remember everything that I read. So go ahead and check that out. I may add a question there or if I'm using a PowerPoint, I may add questions to the bottom of the PowerPoint slide that represents answers that the slide holds. And my goal is is to be able to go through the slides, think about the questions that I have to answer. And now I'm just growing a database of questions that if I could answer over the period between now and the quiz or the test, I feel much more comfortable about mastering that lecture. And then as soon as I'm done going through all those slides or those pages for that lecture, I may say, okay, let's go ahead and do those questions. Do I know the answer to this? If you did, perfect. Now you can move on to next thing. If you didn't, now you can go ahead and dive more into the content saying, what's the answer? How can I process this better? And then going back to that question later during your study session to say, okay, do I remember it now? This is a great way to quiz yourself, get that quick bit of learning done without having to waste your time saying, let's read this. Now let's go to review it. You just do it at the same time. And then tip number three you can do is if you're having a topic, try to see if there's already nice high yield content made on something, for example, like YouTube and watch that video a little bit quicker. Maybe you can do it at one to two X or just get the background information and then going into your lectures with that little bit of pre reading or pre watching that you've done to give more context information that you need to learn for those lectures. Number three is to have a later retention checklist. Now, in addition to the anxiety of falling behind, I know from personal experience that there's also this anxiety when you're going through a lecture that you're behind on, and then you're faced with a topic that's just difficult to master at that time, because already your brain started to think crap, I'm behind and now this topic is just taking way too much of my time. What if there's more topics like this, like I'm just going to fall further and further behind. This is where the retention checklist just works beautifully. Basically what you do is as you're going through a lecture and try to have a list of all the topics, all the concepts that you need to master. If you're doing something similar to what we talked about in the prior tip where you're collecting questions for that lecture, now you just have a database of all those questions. And then when you're reviewing that lecture, you can essentially color code those topics or those questions based off of your comfort level. So if there's a topic that's given you a tough time, you can say, for example, HIV mechanism, I had never made sense to me in medical school, I could easily just color code that read in my word document. And I could see that in lecture one, there are 20 topics that are 10 that you really need to come back to, five that you've done like really well on a few that you just want to review. You can see which lectures are going to need your attention a little bit better. And it allows you the comfort to be able to say, I can come back to this, I'm going to move to the next lecture I'm behind on. But when I do come back to the lecture here is the order of significance that I need to go ahead and address these. And one question you may be asking understandably is Luxe, when do I have time to go back to these lectures when I'm already behind? Similarly, as we talked about before, try to use that 90 10% rule where you again, 10% of that time is spent on planning your catch up time, but also have some time to say, when would I review this material plus the material from all my lectures to get that second pass in? I love using the weekends for this where I may say from nine to 12, you're going to review the lectures that you haven't, but maybe from one to 230, you're going to go ahead and go to the difficult topics of each lecture from the week. So on Saturdays, I may do the first half of the week and on Sundays, I may do the second half. And so if you're keeping a retention checklist of all the lectures, all the phrases and concepts and tables and questions that you need to know to better be able to master it. And I can easily say it get cool on Saturday from 12 to 130, we're going to start from lectures from Monday. And I'm going to go and do those things that are highlighted red in my word doc and then go to the yellows and ideally go to the greens. Once I'm done with that, we're moved to lecture two, you can see how having that time, that safety net to be able to come back to a difficult topic, allows you to surpass that anxiety of saying, shoot, this is hard in the moment, it's supposed to be it's the first time you're learning it. But now if you have a part in your schedule that says, this is why I'm going to review this the second time for any that's difficult. Now you feel a lot better of just moving forward. And thus continuing with that plan that you wanted to execute. Now number four is the chunking method. Now this is one of my favorite productivity hacks where you have a ton of work to do a ton of concepts. And it feels overwhelming, especially for example, if you do something like flashcards, a lot of the students that we work with in our coaching programs may say, Luxe, I have no idea how to go through these 700 flashcards, like what the hell should I do? Instead of focusing on trying to get 700 flashcards or fourth lectures done in a day, think about various many appointments that you need to attend, each of them counting in success as you go through them. So instead of saying I need to study from five o'clock to 10 o'clock, maybe say I'm going to study from five to six 15 from 630 to seven o'clock and just continuing to make little personal appointments, each of those having a goal of what should be done during that time. Doing this, you can say that first chunk is going to be doing lecture one, the second chunk is going to be finishing lecture one and starting lecture two and going so forth. Now you can start to see that momentum build and also be able to look at your schedule and say, how realistic this is, as well as identifying the momentum once you get going. Now, in addition to just building momentum and breaking things up, the real benefit of the chunking method is when you miss an appointment. Because the worst thing you can do for yourself when you fall behind is again, having that anxiety take over and fall further behind. But if I, for example, wanted to get four lectures done today, but the first three just took way much more time than I thought, now instead of thinking about that one lecture being something I'm further behind on, I can just move that topic to the next chunk that I have. Maybe I'm studying on a Monday evening and the next few mini appointments that I have for myself start on Tuesday morning as well as Tuesday evening. I can say, fine, lecture four was meant to be done today, but because I couldn't get to it, I'm going to move it to the appointment that I had for myself on Tuesday morning to get through it. You can now comfortably be able to move your schedule and specific lectures and syllabus chapters to another kind of time zone, another appointment without feeling guilty about falling behind. As long as you have enough of these chunks within your week, you can say cool, even by Saturday. Again, this is why it's important to have that backup plan. I'll be done with these lectures plus the lectures that I'm currently having to learn. And hopefully, friends, you can see how using just these four principles by itself are going to help you go ahead and get through your material. The most important thing is once you create a plan, once you watch a video or an episode like this, it's to actually execute on what you want and get past that anxiety. It is normal to feel stressed when you fall behind, but to avoid adding more stress, create that plan saying, I'm going to execute this to my best of my knowledge. If you want an extra bonus tip, find kind of a midway checkpoint. So for example, if I'm creating my catch up schedule on a Sunday morning, I may say Wednesday evening, go ahead and check in with yourself on how your schedule is going. Are you on pace? Are you falling behind? Do you need to make any adjustments? The rest of that time, go ahead and execute the plan you dedicated for yourself. Now, the strategies that we talked about today are just one of the few that include in our free med school success handbook. Again, this is a document that has 40 plus tips. I'm updating this on a weekly basis of something that I wish somebody would have given to me on my first day of medical school on how to study better, how to manage your time better, like we talked about today, among many other things. So if you guys are interested, again, it's absolutely free, go ahead and check out down below. Now, if you're interested in working with us and allowing us to just handhold you through the process of getting a study system that works for you on a schedule that works for you, then just go ahead and check out really just the feedback and the results that our students have gotten. I really like to have that do the talking for us. And if you're interested in working with us, you'll learn how to apply and join our program. So again, if you want to access to that free success handbook or are interested in learning what it looks like to work with us and what we do, go ahead and check out those links down below. And as always, if you have any questions and you're watching this on YouTube, go ahead and hit the comments down below. Love to answer them. And if you enjoyed this episode right here, then check out this episode right here on all the study strategies that I use to get a 3.9 GPA medical school that can help you out, as well as this episode right here on how I remember everything I read from a textbook or a syllabus chapter. Go ahead and enjoy these episodes. And as always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was just a little help to you guys on yours. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.