 All right guys, welcome to another episode of the TMJ Show. And today we are talking about how to review anything. Your study material, your flashcards, your practice questions, quicker. Let's get to it. All right guys, what is going on? My name is Lux. I am a first year internal medicine resident. Welcome to the MD journey or the TMJ show. We're here, my job is to help you do one thing and that's to succeed on your medical journey with less stress. So if that message resonates with you, then make sure wherever you're listening, whether it's on your podcast, YouTube, they go ahead and like and subscribe. But let's get into today's episode, which is how do you review your study material, your test questions, your flashcards faster? I get emails from you guys all the time, which is really a concern of information overload. You may send me an email saying, I have 150 flashcards to do and I'm totally behind. I have no idea how to review them or I'm doing question banks for you world to prep for step one. And it's still taking me an insane amount of time to review them even after I do the practice question. What should I do? How do I become faster? So I'm gonna give you a couple of things that I've been doing throughout med school, things that I still do in residency when I'm studying right now and hopefully those help you out. So the first thing that you need to ask yourself is a study method that you're using while conducive for the style of learning and are you getting to the review quick enough? Sometimes I get emails from people and really it's not how long they're spending to review but how long they're spending to gather the information. A lot of times we will spend about an hour in lecture and then we'll spend some more time gathering the information, organizing it in the form of notes, outlines and flashcards. And finally we get to that review part. Now sometimes we think that we spend a little bit too much time on the review phase. We think we have too much flashcard, too much notes to review and that makes us overwhelmed. But quite honestly, it's probably the information gathering phase that we spend a little bit too much time on and if we cut on that, we can give ourselves more time to review and more time to breathe honestly. So a few things you can ask yourself is can you get that information quicker? Like if you're not an auditory learner, can you listen to your lecture a little bit more quicker? Can you pre-read your slides basically get an idea of what the lecture will talk about and then maybe speed up your lecture and focus on those high yield concepts. And if you feel like you're spending too much time making notes that are honestly verbatim of the lecture, then instead can you take a second, wait for the whole concept to be presented to you, pause the lecture or take a second during your lecture and go ahead and summarize what you just learned. Again, quicker ways to get through the information gathering phase so then you can quickly go into the review phase. Now going into number two is where the review phase is really the problem. I get emails all the time where people are telling me they're spending hours reviewing just one question block of you all the one they're studying for step one or spending hours doing just one review session for a specific lecture when they may have 20 on the test. They ask me how can I get quicker? A lot of the time is the main thing that gets in the way is the fear of imperfection or the fear of missing out on a topic. And that's something that's gonna take a while to get over but one thing that helps me mentally just get to the part where I have to say I'm gonna learn as much as I can the set amount of time and then move on is I give myself a review timer. So Anki is something that I use a lot in Med School and basically when I see a new flash card I say you have 10 seconds to basically answer the question before you present yourself the answer, give yourself another 10 seconds to look at the answers and realize what did you miss, what's the concepts and then just press again. Remember Anki and those kinds of flash card systems will present things to you multiple times. A lot of times students will tell me that they're spending 10 minutes on a flash card to try to learn everything that's there but then when it gets presented to them again a minute or 10 minutes later there's still parts that are missing and that brings up a question for you guys. Let's imagine you were doing a flash card session would you wanna focus on one topic on for about five or 10 minutes and only see it once or would you rather see it multiple times and spend a total of five minutes or a couple of seconds with multiple iterations? I argue that seeing it multiple times will help you first focus on the things that are easiest to understand on that flash card or that conceptual basis and then fill in the details every time. So when I see a flash card I ask myself what's the biggest thing I need to take away? I try to memorize that or understand it within about 10 to 20 seconds and then I press hit again cause usually there's about one or two maybe more concepts for a flash card that I have to understand. Now the next time it comes to me I have to ask myself well when do I remember what I just learned and two what's the next biggest thing on this flash card that I have to master? Again I probably spent only about 40 seconds on two iterations where other people have been spending about a couple of minutes trying to memorize everything in that flash card. I just get past the fact that I'm not gonna understand it completely on the first time and for me repetition equals better grades and so one it helps my anxiety because I don't focus on learning everything on the first time and two the repetition that comes over time can help you feel more confident because the pieces of information that would have gave you some anxiety if you had only looked at it once for a long period of time are now starting to get filled in and they're more easily memorable. I wanna leave you with one more bonus tip and that's for many of you guys who struggle with anxiety and you feel like that's really getting in your way of your review. One thing I would encourage is take a word doc and excel sheet or something of a sort and create a confidence list of all the topics you feel like you understand well. So if you do spend a lot of time on flash cards and I encourage you to go ahead and once you feel like you understand a topic for example maybe you understand heart failure or how to read an EKG you can add those different topics and then just create a running list of things you feel like you've mastered because sometimes getting over that anxiety just starts with the visual of understanding how much you've mastered and once you feel like you can say okay I feel like I understand a good amount of information then you can ask yourself can I try to do this a little bit faster and learn more topics in the future quicker? Your anxiety goes down, your confidence list increases and it's just a nice recipe for momentum but those were the major tips on how I use to review faster how I encourage students who send me emails to do their review faster. Now if you guys wanna learn how to study better or if you wanna see a different study technique totally different then just check the free video course where I show you the technique that I use in med school that really kind of transformed how much time I was using and it uses some of the principles that we talked about in this episode but again that's free. Now if you are somebody who feels like they need a little bit more help, more support and you feel like either you're spending too much time for some results or you're not getting the results you want then I encourage you to check out the level up your studying course which is a step-by-step three week course where I take you from the studying that you're doing right now and help you create a system that's more and well suited for you that's more efficient but still gives you the results that you want so that will also be linked in the description and the share notes below. Then before we close I wanna kinda use this raw format to include a little bit more about my life, my experiences and residency, different tools I've been using, different things I've been learning and gave you little bits and nuggets as we kind of depart for that episode. So today I wanna kind of share a tool that I've been using as I go into my cardiology ICU rotation and it's a free app that I found to kind of remind myself and review things like EKGs. It's called EKG Free, so obviously it's free. It's a nice kind of library of different conceptual concepts that you need to know to be able to walk yourself through very simple and complicated EKGs. So if you're somebody who is interested in cardiology or on a cardiology block on a rotation that requires reading EKGs which is a lot of them then I recommend you guys checking it out and I'll put it in the link down below. But that's gonna be it for this video, guys. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the more raw format. If you guys have any more questions, definitely drop in the comment section down below because it gives me more content and ideas to produce for you guys in the future. But hopefully I've been able to help to you guys on your journey. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.