 I guess I'll try to finally do some Anki cars today and nope, not today. Definitely dropping out of med school. If you've had similar experiences with Anki where you know it's an effective tool, but at some times it's so difficult to use, then this episode we're going to talk about some of the best tips and tricks to make Anki super effective for your studying. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician, and here on the MD journey, we make content and videos to help people like you succeed on whatever journey you're on, but doing it with less stress. And so in today's episode, I'm going to share with you the same strategies I personally use as well as the ones that pass along to students like you, as well as some ones in some of our programs, which you can find out down below. Now tip number one has to be the screenshot method. Now if you're unfamiliar with our screenshot method is something that's really popular here on YouTube, I'll link it on the video that goes into it in full detail and I'll show it to you really quickly. But if you're not familiar with Anki at all, I definitely recommend that video and I'll link it down below in case you're interested. But essentially what the screenshot method is, is as we make flash cars, often the idea is to put a question and answer, but sometimes the answers we need are typically in our learning resources and the professors don't really go above and beyond, including what's on there. So for example, if this is a slide that you're covering, often times a professor may just more and less in many different words say what's on the slide and not really add more information yet. We spent a lot of time trying to type out what they're saying, even though it's right here. And so if we go ahead and create a new deck, we're just going to call this YouTube tutorial and then we will put it under our other YouTube tutorial from our last video. So again, I'll link that down below. But if you click here and you click on add card, then instead of just typing a question to answer, what I could do is I could go ahead and use a snipping tool or as some of you guys have called me out for, you can use some shortcuts to go ahead, like control N in this situation to go ahead and take a quick screenshot of the slide itself. Now here's the slide. There you go. That's my answers. Now I could ask any question that I want to know. And if the slide has the answers from that specific lecture or from that specific slide, I can just put in the form of a question. That saves me a lot of time when I'm making flashcards so I can go into lecture and saying, let me think about what the professor is saying, put in the form of a question that the slide answers it. Perfect. So here could be like, what is the workup for a fit? And if the professor does add something while I'm listening, I can put it here or I can do it while I'm listening to lecture and I can add extra notes as needed. I can also tag, but the screenshot method has been super, super effective because it saves me about 50% of the time. And really what I'm forcing myself to do is think about the question and the answer is already there. So now if I click add and I go ahead and just say we're done with our flashcards for the day because we just needed to make one because we're bosses. Then go ahead and show my answers. Then as you can see, there's a flashcard right here with our slides as well as any additional notes that we've written, but the slide usually does the majority of the work. Anything that's not there or anything that we want to be a little bit clearer is added at the very end. But again, the screenshot method expedites this process entirely. And if you're interested in an advanced strategy that we teach some of our students, then you can actually use Anki to do something actually pretty cool, which is to create multiple questions per something. So you can actually make the screenshot method even more effective. So if I go ahead and did another screenshot of this, and I wanted to ask myself multiple different questions from this, I can put them in question one, two, three, and four. And then Anki will treat each of them like their individual flashcard and still show me the screenshots as well as any notes that I add to it. This is a quick way of using your PowerPoints as a reference material, but then saying, okay, what's the main questions I want to ask? I may want to know the workout for AFib and we want to know the basic stuff for AFib. I may want to know the EKG findings. I may also want to know the Echo findings, but each individual thing can be a question. And the slide can always still be your answer. Now, the screenshot method is something that you think can help you. And this multi-question approach may be a game changer for you and you're interested in trying it. You go down below, you'll find a link to the level of your studying program. It's actually included as one of our many different videos in the 10x study methods. So not only you'll learn this one, as well as other strategies that may help you totally level up your game in terms of getting better grades and less time. That'll be linked down below in case you guys are interested. Without having to actually code or just any non-key settings, you can still use the basic functionality and use the screenshot method to still be able to really improve your studying and do it in less time. And if you want to see this entire approach of how I look at a lecture, how I create the screenshots, how I do the reviews, how I prepare for a test, all of those are included for free in our eight step study program. That will also be linked down below. Now, tip number two is something I didn't do enough in medical school, but it's actually to use the edit function while I'm doing my flashcards. Oftentimes I'd see a card and saying that kind of makes sense, but I have to do some review to actually make the most of it or to be able to answer a question, especially if I'm using the screenshot method. And sometimes I would just give up on the card and then it'll show up to me again in a few days and I wouldn't really know what to do with it. So instead, if you have an epiphany or if you're like, oh, this is a good way to help make sense of the question, then you can actually just press E or go to edit and actually just pull up the immediate card that you're working on at the moment. And then you can add any type of notes that you want as like your epiphanies, or if you have like a metaphor that you're using to help memorize something, you can add it there. And that way, the next time I see this card, not only will I see a screenshot or whatever you put for the answer section, but you also find your additional epiphanies. So this way, you can do your reviews, put something that helps you and then use that in the future to be able to reference. Pretty simple, but also very effective because essentially can help you stack your retention as you do your space repetition. Now, on a similar note, tip number three is to make the use of keyboard shortcuts. So for example, if I'm doing questions that can already just say that space is going to show me the answer, and then if I press one, it's going to be related to again. If I press space again, then if I press two, it's going to be associated with the good. So two, if I press space again and I press three, it's going to be actually associated with my four day option. And that's a very easy way of making your flashcard review happen super rapidly, because you're not dependent on your mouse clicking and moving things around. Your fingers are already on those three buttons that you need to do and to say, boom, I don't know this. We're going to press two. Or I know this really well. I'm going to press three. And on a similar note, there's ever a question that you answer. You're like, let's just say I call this easy and actually it wasn't. If you press control Z, or whatever it is for Mac, it'll actually show you the question again. So then you can really sort of saying, no, I actually don't understand that at all or it needs to be a good kind of card and show it to me again in two days. But having control Z, one, two, three and space for super effective for me to use the most important functionalities of Anki, including the edit function that we talked about in tip number two. If you're interested in learning other important shortcuts, just go ahead and click here and more. You can find the button or the functionality that Anki they're using the most often, something that I talked about in that initial Anki video again, which I'll link down below is how to flag cards for future reference. So if you can go up here and saying I'm going to say every card that is difficult, I'm going to mark as a red. So as I get closer to test day, I can just do all my red cards. And so if you understand that it's control one, then if I go ahead and do this flashcard, for example, then I can actually press control one and it's already marked as a red card. And so if I ever go to browse, I can see this in addition to all of my other red cards. And if I do control two, then it's going to move it to yellow. And if I think it's something super easy, then green. This is a great functionality. If you're doing a lot of cards, you can say, OK, I'm just going to go and use one, two, three, like I would shoot. I actually don't know this answer. So before I should say, show it to me again in 10 minutes, I'm going to actually mark us as a red card. So I can do it again closer to my review. Tip number four is to use your custom study option to help you on your weaknesses. So for example, if you go to custom study, typically what I would do is I would end up using it to help me cram. But if you can actually tag your cards as you're doing them and I'll go through an example, you can actually go base off of a card is easy, hard or base off an individual topic. So let's just go through our review, for example, and let's just study these next two flash cards. So let's just say I'm going to use my edit function. I'm going to say this is a card about if it which I've already actually written down here, and I'm actually going to call this a hard card in addition. Every time you want to tag something, you want to put comments next to it, but it basically is a descriptor. So you can come back to later and use in those custom study options. And then we're going to move on and then we're going to go ahead and edit this card as well. And we're going to call this a fib and hard perfect. And then let's see if there's one more left. And we're gonna call this one, but a comma. Now, if I got a close, and I come back and saying I'm done with my session, if I actually ever want to just do my hard cards and go to custom study, I'm going to study by cards, I can do all cards in a random order. And then I can choose the tags that I want. So I'm to say, I'll just do the cards that I've marked as hard and don't show me anything that are easy. And now it's going to show me about the three or four cards that we just did. And it's going to show me just those cards. And so this is a great option if you're getting closer to a test prep and you're like, I just want to do my hard cards or I just want to do cards on a fifth. That's the topic I'm struggling with the most. You can have a lot of functionality using your custom study options and using tagging. And if you press E as you're reviewing, you can add or remove tags as you need to really quickly. Tip number five actually has nothing to do with an Anki setting itself, but actually how you use it is the reminder that you don't have to always use Anki's recommendations on a daily basis. Anki is designed to use its algorithm to help you learn something better. But that doesn't mean it's the only or the right way to do something for every piece of information. Anki uses an own algorithm to decide when you should see an information in the second or third time. And that's pretty much it. But it doesn't necessarily take an account of what you're learning, whether it's a language, whether it's a medical school or something else. And so a lot of times, in addition to somebody saying it takes me too long to make them, which hopefully the screenshot method helps. I also have students that just say it takes you way too long and you have too many cards that are in the back burner that I left to do. And so my recommendation for students like you is to switch from using Anki's recommendations and instead go to a time basis. If it's hard for you to say I'm going to do 500 flash cards today or 400 yesterday and 300 today and then a thousand on next Monday, because that's just how many I'll be recommended, that's overwhelming. On the flip side saying I can commit to doing 30 minutes of flashcards or 40 minute flashcards or an hour of flashcards, something that's super simple and easy for you to say yes to. And saying at least I'm doing some flashcards every single day and moving the needle forward. I'm good with that every single day. I'm just going to do the next thing that Anki recommends. And yes, you may be behind on Anki's recommended schedule when you should review something, but if you're not going to review it at all due to being overwhelmed in stress, you might as well review some of it over a small periods of time versus trying to get through all of it. One of the phrases I actually really enjoy from a creator here on YouTube named Nick Barrett is that it's better to be good consistently than great occasionally. So it's the same thing for your Anki. If you're finding that you're becoming too overwhelmed because there's too many flash cards where you're spending way too much time doing and retention definitely dips as you get past 100, 200, 300 cards because I know there's students out there that are trying that instead transition to I'm going to spend this amount of time every single day. If there's something left in the tank, that's fine. We'll move it to tomorrow and get to it. Now, the next tip I want to give is great for students who are struggling of spending way too much time on one individual flash card. So if you have like 40 flash cards to review and you're spending a good proportion of your review on the first 20 of them and not so much in the latter 20, then you're probably a student that's going to benefit from this add on. I'll link it down below. It's the speed focus app. But I'd also talk about it more in detail in the best add on to add to Anki, which I'll link that video down below. But essentially once you download it and that video will show you how if you click down below it'll add this general section where essentially we'll be able to give you a timer to when to remind you to answer questions led to say five seconds when to show the answer by we'll just say 10 to keep this video easy and then when to actually move on from the question. We'll say 12 for the purposes of this video. Obviously your numbers are going to vary, but just so you can actually see what it looks like. I click OK. And I click study now. We're not going to do anything. But we're going to wait about five seconds. You'll see a little bit of a trigger on the side. What do you think my face is covering? Now to see it in action, I'm going to go ahead and move myself to the corner and then we're going to go ahead and click study now. Now we're going to not actually do anything. But in the bottom left hand corner, you'll be able to see a notification that says, oh, look, you have five seconds. It makes a beep on my side. And then after 10 seconds, again, I'm not doing anything shows me the question. And then after 12 seconds, it's actually going to move on from the question. So I have a chance to review this and then boom, next one. And then in about three to four to five seconds, it's going to show that notification again in the corner and then so forth and so on. The speed focus add on is really effective for any student who tends to perseverate on information, can't really move forward. And usually the way I recommend it is try to figure out what your average time if you're doing a flash card or question is, if it's a minute and you want to do it faster or if you're spending a minute 30, then change the timer to where you're actually force yourself to move past that question about 75% quicker. So if you're doing a minute, do it in 45 seconds. If you're doing a minute 30, do it in about a minute and then go forward and you can always get faster and faster because remember the effectiveness of Anki comes from the repetition. So if I had two options, one where I'm spending three minutes on one individual flash card compared to the other option where I'm spending one minute chunks three times over the flash card, I'm going to remember better in option number two. Now some of these tips seem like something you can quickly incorporate into your day to day. It actually started to see some results and you want to see more results and two things I recommend. One, definitely check out our study rehab course. It's absolutely free. Three steps on how to improve your studying. It's our overall concept that we teach our coaching students as well as how to guarantee yourself free time and make sure that you always have a higher score every single day before your quiz and exam. Now option number two is great for somebody who's saying I want better grades. I need an ASAP and I simply don't have more hours to dedicate. I need to figure out a way to do it better, quicker and just do it with less stress. Definitely consider checking out our level up your studying program. I completely recall the program as a making of this video. So not only do we show you how to improve your studying in six steps, we show you what's wrong with your studying, what top students are doing that you're not, but essentially how to put it together to create a perfect system for you. So if you want better grades but doing it at less time and less stress and you need those results as soon as possible, definitely consider checking out the level up your studying program if you guys are interested. But those guys are some of my favorite tips and tricks on how to use Anki and make it more effective. Always remember when you're using any type of tool, but the biggest thing is that you're using it as much as possible to improve your retention. So whether it's any of the tips or techniques that I talked about or something you're doing in your own study methods, ask if there's anything in between when you actually get the retention part or benefit from the individual method and what you can do to expedite it. If you enjoy the content from today, you felt like you got some value. Definitely hit that like button down below if you're new to the channel or if you're just haven't joined the community quite yet and you feel like you're getting some value. Definitely consider hitting that subscribe button and notification bell to get two videos like this on a weekly basis. But with that being said, friends, if you enjoy this video and enjoy this video on how to use Anki step-by-step like a pro, definitely recommend checking that out as well as this video right here on how to pass step one. Guarantee now that it's past fail. Enjoy those videos and thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care, my friends. Peace.