 So if you feel like you're studying too much and you're constantly disappointed by grades because your hours that you put in doesn't reflect on the results you're getting, in this video I'm going to teach you three simple steps that you can use to simply use what you're already doing to get better results and less time. Let's get into it. Hey everyone, welcome to the channel. My name is Lux. I'm a doctor who gives tips to help make your life a little bit easier as a student. That includes things on studying, productivity. So if you're new to the channel, consider subscribing as well as liking this video if you enjoy the content. In this episode, I want to teach you a three simple step process that I use myself as a doctor as well as the medical students that I work with to basically use what you're doing already to cut down on your studying and get better results. That may sound too good to be true and I understand because when I first started as a medical student, I was spending excessive amount of time kind of roaming the different parts of the internet to find different study techniques and strategies to kind of help me improve my grades. And every time that I thought that I found the one, I would try the new study technique and just completely rehaul everything I was doing, hoping for better results, but sometimes my grades were exactly the same if not worse. If you can relate with that experience of spending an excessive amount of hours knocking the grades you want, and you know you start feeling the doubt, the stress, and eventually you start building up these negative emotions about yourself and your own capabilities. And so as students, our default way to deal with this is we just find ourselves overhauled with unlimited amount of work that we need to do, excessive amount of resources, and really a study system and strategy that is not really perfect for us. When I noticed that I had this problem, I basically kind of broke it down into the three simple steps that helped me get over that hump and essentially use what I was already doing to get better grades. I've constantly tinkered with this three-step process until I got to a point where it just works regardless of what your study strategy is or the kind of learner you want. So the first part of our three-step process is to identify your most effective study technique. Now you may not know what this is, and so a simple strategy that I love to use with myself and a lot of students that I work with is to create a motivation map. So if you're unfamiliar with the motivation map, put it up on the screen, but essentially you just graph where your x-axis is your motivation, your y-axis is your impact, or how effective something is, and you think about all the different study techniques that you either use or are using, and you can do this with your resources as well. You just want to plot them where they are on the respective graph. So if it's something that you are much more likely to do, it will go to the very right on your x-axis. And if it's something that is super effective and you feel like it helps with your long-term retention, your understanding of things, then that would go really high on your y-axis. And as you go through this exercise, you realize there are study techniques and strategies that you love doing and are also giving you a lot of pain for your buck. But on the flip side, you're also probably doing things where you're not motivated to actually get into it. And then when you look at the results you're getting back, it's probably a little to begin with. And so personally as a visual learner, I love using this visual representation to understand if this works, this doesn't, and maybe I should focus more on my time here. Things that are high motivation, high impact. So going forward, we're going to be using the study strategies that are high motivation and high impacts. Go ahead and try this tactic out for yourself and also comment down below with what you think is your favorite study technique that works the best for you. So step number two is to go ahead and take your favorite study technique and move it as early into your study schedule as possible. And most students find that when they map out their whole study system from point A to point C, they find that their favorite study techniques are usually ladder into their own strategy. So for example, if you're somebody who really enjoys doing flashcards or practice questions or working with classmates in a form of group studying, you realize that when you map out your study schedule and your strategies, you actually don't get to your favorite techniques until much later. It's also very common that some of those things that are very low motivation, low impact, tend to spend a good amount of our time in our initial study strategy. So a lot of the students that I work with personally, myself as well, realize that a lot of their strategies they're using are typically something that is low motivation as well as low impact. So for example, when I was a medical student, I realized I was spending excessive amount of time reading the syllabus, going to the slides, even going to lecture, and I realized that those techniques were not my favorite. They weren't the most effective for me, but yet they still took a good chunk of my study strategy if I've mapped it out. So a very simple way that you can improve this is take that study technique that you identified as step number one and move it further up into your study system. So if you're somebody who enjoys doing group studying, maybe you can see if you can move an interaction with your peers early on, or if you're somebody who enjoys doing flashcards, seeing if you can potentially do flashcards earlier on or potentially replace something that you may be doing instead. And finally step number three of this process is to constantly reevaluate what's actually needed. So if you do the exercise of listing out everything you're doing from the point that you try to gather the material, whether that be reading the syllabus, or going through your slides, or listening to your lecture, you list out everything and then you also document how many hours on average you may be spending a day or per week, you'll get a good idea of all the different things and all the different resources you're using for a specific class. Now through the first two steps, you've already found the things that work best for you and these are ideally things you should do more of to get more value. But because we don't want to be spending an excessive amount of time studying, the first thing that we should be doing is looking at this mapped out study map and ask, where can we start taking things out? So if you're somebody who realizes that a low impact task for you is reading the syllabus the night before or rewriting your notes, but it's still in your study system, ask how you can either do that process quicker or potentially even remove it completely. So as a quick example, after the lecture, I would be creating outlines of all the lecture topics, but it would take me two to three hours and then I would go into the review. But when I reflected on the outline creation process, I found that it actually wasn't very valuable to me. So I just completely removed it and where I was normally spending an extra hour to two hour each day working on my outline, now that I removed it, I can instead put in the different tactics that worked better for me. So whether that be practice questions or flashcards, often because I enjoyed doing those ladder techniques, I was able to do them faster. So my whole day actually became shorter, I was doing more of a work. So as a bonus tip, always work on micro adjustments, go through your whole study system each week and find steps that you can expedite and do quicker or continue to remove from your study system. That way, the only thing they were left with are the things that you personally enjoy on our perfect review. And this is important to remember if you're a student who keeps going back and forth between resources and study tactics, because you're always looking for the next best thing that will work for you, always keep in mind that the strategies that you find online may work perfectly for some people, but they may not be perfect for you. So instead of trying to completely rehaul your study strategies, ask yourself what type of things you enjoy doing that you're already doing and minimize the things that you aren't, and eventually you will go ahead and find a structure that is quick, efficient and efficient. So to review the process guys of the three simple steps, step number one, you want to use some kind of motivation mapping to understand your favorite techniques that are also high impact, step number two, you want to go ahead and see how you can move your favorite study technique earlier into your study schedules. And step number three, you want to constantly reevaluate what can be taken out, what can be sped up, that way you're spending less time just more effective in the long run. And my main goal and hope for you after this video is that you realize that you probably aren't too far from your ideal study system or something that works for you. So go ahead and try this strategy out. Let me know what you think down in the comments, but that's going to be it for this video. If you did enjoy the content, consider subscribing by hitting that button down below and at least consider supporting the channel and this video by hitting that like button to help myself as well as this channel grow. Let me know what any questions you guys have about being a student is studying better. I love giving those type of tips with complete dork when it comes to studying better and getting better grades. So make sure you comment those down below. And then finally, if you're a student or a medical student and you're looking for essentially a library of resources to help you on different things like studying and productivity, I've essentially created free guides for the last three years and many courses and e-books that you guys can check out. The links will be down below of something called a med ball, which is on the mbtrane.com. It's completely free and I'll link that down below in the description. If you can see you guys are interested. Thank you guys so much for watching this video and for those of you guys that have made it to the end, thank you for the support. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on your journey. Thanks for being a part of mine. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.