 Today's video is brought to you by Picmonic. The average medical student has about three hours of lecture a day, with each lecture easily having anywhere from 20 to 40 pages of reading material. And while studying for a quiz or a test, I can easily mean hundreds of pages that you have to know and remember. And today I'm going to be going through a sample lecture to essentially break down the exact process that I use when I was in medical school to remember everything I read. Hopefully you can use the same to help you do well in whatever journey you're on. Now, step number one is to focus on the process of bookmarking. Now, this is an example lecture that I have from a rotation that I have to do in residency. This is a hardball rotation, very much like a typical syllabus that you would get in college or a medical school for my situation. A typical way that most students, including myself, study in college or a medical school includes just looking at something and saying, oh, that's important. I should highlight this or annotate next to it or transfer it over to, you know, a word doc or something else that you're using. But it doesn't work really well to remember stuff, especially when you're having a lecture that's like 15, 20, 30, 40 pages per an individual lecture. And so the first transition I made in medical school is OK. You need to first identify what you actually want to remember worthy enough to take notes on later. And instead of transitioning between my reading and trying to identify what's important and no taking, I decided, OK, first step in medical school, I'm just going to go through this text and identify what I think is worthy enough to actually take notes on. For example, as I'm reading this document, I usually will go through about one or two paragraphs trying to identify what lines or paragraphs are important enough to come back to. And so, for example, here in this paragraph, they're talking about this whole concept of PI, which at the moment you don't need to know what it is, but saying, OK, later on, I may have to take notes on this. And they're breaking down bullet points, et cetera. I was like, OK, fine. If I'm doing this on an online or digital PDF, I'm just going to go ahead and usually just mark the first word of that line. If I'm doing this on a physical text, then I usually will just star right next to it. And it just gives me a note like you are going to come back to this because this is important. And then keep reading. I was like, OK, blood pressure actually talks about what the ideal blood pressure should be for one of these patients. And I'm like, fine, you should know this. And so I'm just going to go ahead and highlight that. And I'm going to keep moving and moving and moving. It's like, oh, on admission, these are the things that I have to do for these patients. And then I have a bullet point of the three to four lab values I may have to order and my actual day to day as a doctor. And just keep moving to the entirety of the text, going paragraph to paragraph and saying, like, what's important? So here, for example, we're talking about what kind of lab values these kinds of patients may need. I'm like, OK, cool. You need to know that and make sure you take notes on it. I'm just going to go ahead and highlight the first thing. And again, if you're doing on paper, you just annotate. Now, do this for the rest of the material in the syllabus because, again, my mind is focused on what is considered to be worthy enough to come back to you versus saying, let's take notes on every little thing. And then usually the things that they vary in don't get a lot of my attention because my focus and my energy are down. Because I do it this way, now I can come back to saying, these were important when I was reading my first time and I was really attentive. Let's go back and make sure I take notes effectively on these. I'm going to show you on the next step exactly how to do that. Now, step number two is transitioning your note taking from facts into questions. Now, typical scenario is for a student to come back and say, OK, let's find all of my highlights and just take notes on those relatively simple. But the problem is when I ask most students of saying, tell me how you take notes and then ask, how often do you actually come back to it? The answer is not very often because it's not really testable. I just write, for example, if I come back to this blood pressure section and saying that the ideal blood pressure should be between 65 and 80 millimeters of mercury. That's fine, but there's no guaranteed way that I'm actually being able to test myself. And so I'm likely going to use some other strategy to learn this lecture. So the first thing is if you're going to go through the time of actually reading all this, let's make sure you can remember it by making your note taking a little bit different. So often, for example, if you're using a word doc religious notion here, most students will say the ideal map is 65 to 80. They'll probably just write something or copy and paste. And then they'll have a long outline of everything that's there and hope that that is useful enough for them to remember in a week or two weeks. But instead, what we would do here, and I have an entire video on how to use the Q&A method, you guys can check it out. After you've done the first step of essentially bookmarking everything that's important, then you come back and saying, what fair questions would come out of this if I was testing in a browser professor? So if I was doing blood pressure, then I may say, what is the ideal map in LBAT patients? And then the answer right below it could be 65 to 80. Another bonus tip is that if you're using notion, for example, you can actually use the toggle function and then essentially make a big list of the same thing. But now you can essentially say, cool, if I know it, then I will be able to actually see the answers. That is just a bonus tip on the side. But now you're going to essentially come back to each of these bookmarks that you've made and send what fair questions could come from this. Often there may be multiple questions. For example, I may talk about exactly what PI is measuring, but then I also may talk about these possible causes that I talk about here. There may be different questions that I have to know, but essentially now you have, what we get into step number three, an entire hit list for this lecture. So if I'm just using my notes here, I can essentially see all of the major bullets that I have formed from these initial bookmarks that have now transitioned the questions. I know every single question that I put here, chances are I'm going to be able to master that lecture and every lecture that I do this for. And so when the quiz or test comes around, it won't really feel like I haven't seen everything because I've got it from the syllabus itself. And the beauty of this growing hit list is that anytime you have more material for a specific lecture, whether it may be a review slide or a practice question, you can essentially come back into your word doc or however you like to collect notes and essentially add it as a new question with the answer that corresponds to it. Any images that may be important, you can put them below the toggle function if you're using Notion, but essentially you have a big list and if you know everything, then when it's time to come review for a quiz or a test saying, do I know what the ideal map is? While using Notion, I can essentially say, I'm going to go ahead and highlight everything that I know as green and anything I don't know as yellow. So then I know that anything on the hit list that is not green is something that I still need to master, but then I have essentially, when everything is green, have remembered everything for that individual lecture. Now, so far, this is just to start the tip of the iceberg on what I want to show you on how to remember everything you read. So if you're ready for those upcoming juicy tips and strategies, let's quickly first talk about today's sponsor, which is Picmonic. Now, if you're new to Picmonic and you're on your medical journey, Picmonic can be one of the best resources that you can use to help you succeed in medical school or whatever medical journey you're on, with hundreds and hundreds of videos on any topic you can think of. So for example, if you're on your cardiology block because that's what we're reading in this video, you can essentially say, let me go ahead and find the relative videos and content for an upcoming lecture. So let's just say we're going to go and learn about individual medications to help you control blood pressure. You can essentially find the videos in Picmonic that are relevant to something you're going to learn the next day. So you're going to learn about ACE inhibitors. You can say, let me just add that to my playlist for cardiology. And now you have a growing library of videos from Picmonic that are relevant to your individual classes. And the beauty of Picmonic is not only do they have so many videos, but their videos itself are very concise, but also very high yield. So for example, this video is only a minute 20, but ACE inhibitors are one of the most important things that you have to know in medicine. And so they do a nice job of putting together a minute to 20 second video on stories and different images that are helpful for you to remember ACE inhibitors for a long haul. And then you can always come back and do the individual quizzes after both the individual video, as well as coming back to them in future days, whenever you're ready to study for your quiz and test to make sure that you know all of the concepts, side effects, and uses for something like an ACE inhibitor. And Picmonic is not only useful for individual classes of cardiology, but also big board exams like USMLE Step One and Step Two, where you can follow along your favorite high yield texts, as well as find individual topics that you're learning as you're doing practice questions and make sure that you've mastered questions, such as studying for USMLE Step Two and knowing things like GI, immunology, dermatology, and so on. So if you're on your medical journey and you're looking for an all-in-one resource that can help you learn, review, and test on all of the important material that you'll have to learn throughout your journey, definitely consider checking out Picmonic. If you're interested, there'll be a link down below in the description. And if you use the code, the MD journey, our friends at Picmonic have been nice enough to also include an extra 20% discount for anyone that's interested. So as always, thanks to Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Now, step number four is to use space repetition. The first few steps in this episode allowed you to go from reading to actually converting it into something that's testable, but obviously step number four is to put it into something that's predictable and something that you can review on a consistent basis. Now, there are many different ways that you can review, especially that we discussed on the channel. So if you're interested in methods like the Anki method, I will link a video that is one of our most popular here on YouTube that you guys can check out. But since we are using Notion, I will use what I like to call the Notion method. And now this is our Notion template that's included for any of our students in the level of your studying program. So if you're interested, that'll be linked down below. But just in comparison from what we were doing, where we were taking a big hit list, now essentially are using a big database and keeping everything organized. So if we were gonna say that this was, for example, lecture number four, then I'm just gonna say what is the ideal map and then I would put my answer here, 65 to 80. And then you can call this cardiology and all of your cardiology questions would then essentially be linked to it. So for example, if we were taking notes on that lecture and that happened to be lecture four, then you can essentially, instead of putting it in a big list, you can just put it into one column that is a question, other column that is the answer. And then you can further categorize based off what topic or subtopic it may be and as well as other things that we use in our templates and what source it came from. And then you can essentially use space repetition through Notion in a very easy way where you can essentially have as many passes that you'd like to go through and then a schedule that you would like to go through. So I may say I'm gonna cover the first three lectures of the week on Thursday and then the next on Friday, Saturday, Sunday until I'm done with that week's material. And then if I click pass, that means I have now covered that individual topic from that individual lecture. And then I may say I wanna do pass two on four days before the quiz and then essentially go through the same process. And then before I take a test, make sure you know all of this information. And if you do, then perfect, that just tells you what is left to have mastered. And you may have to come back to a few things that are difficult or a little bit more in detail, but it's something like ideal map of, you know, for Elbad, I may say 65 to 80 done. I've already mastered it. I'm just gonna come over and saying I've done pass two and ready for the test. So you can see how you can use the concepts of space repetition, whether it be through Notion or Ponky. Again, if you guys are interested to level up your setting program this link down below. But essentially you have all of your information, you create a predictable schedule to come to it. All of these will be in the form of questions like this last one that we've made. And then if you know all the answers and you have checked off everything here or if you've done all your flashcards in Anki and boom, you're ready for the quiz and test and you've essentially memorized everything for that individual lecture. And so far, all the steps that we've covered really are more than enough to essentially remember any lecture that you wanna go through. The last step is probably the most important in terms of long-term retention, not just for the quiz or the test, but essentially being able to say several months or years from now, especially in medicine, I know how to use that material or how to use that concept. And so step five is to create a second brain connection. Now this is nicely illustrated in a note-taking technique such as Notion because everything is a one database but because it allows me to sort, I can say to show me all the renal questions or show me all the cardiology questions. But we have to remember that whenever you learn something, you don't always understand it 100% even if your note-taking technique was perfect. You just have to have enough experience and exposure through other scenarios, whether that be practice questions, patient care, analogies that people give you that make things so much simpler. And so if you have a way of collecting it, so for example, let's just say I went back to that individual question of the ideal map and somebody explained to me, why does it have to be 65 to 80? Remembering 65 to 80 is helpful but maybe somebody gave me a diagram or a reason why somebody's map has to be from 65 to 80. Quick answer is that usually your brain needs a blood pressure above a map of 65 to refuse and so we always try to make sure that we can don't cause somebody a stroke in medicine. So we always keep their blood pressure above 65. So if somebody gave you that tidbit of information, you can come back to your database of note-taking whether it be in a flashcard or a Notion or your Word doc and say map rate in the 65 and needed per brain. That's simply enough to say it. I'm gonna remember this now because I know the purpose of that individual piece of information. On the same standpoint, somebody may tell you that a blood pressure of a map greater than 80 may increase the risk of plots and so now I know 65 to 80 on one side I'm protecting the brain on the other side I'm reducing the risk of clots. Now I understand why it has to be in that specific piece of information and while those pieces of information may not have been including your syllabus, one of the easiest ways to remember those tidbits is as you're exposed to more things through analogies, through patient care through practice questions, come back to the place that you took your notes in which is why I love Notion so much and saying I'm gonna add more information that is going to make this a long-term retention. Thinking of your note-taking of essentially being a second brain where you don't try to memorize everything, I'm gonna say I'm gonna collect everything here, I'm going to have a system where I can question myself and quiz myself but extra things that are going to make this a little bit more memorable, I'm gonna add those to my notes section so in the future I can say oh 65 to 80 now I know why has to be each perfect. You're making connections in future experiences and coming back to things and now I'm definitely gonna remember this part of the lecture, hopefully you do too. And so quickly let's review. First step is to bookmark and make sure that you identify what's important to actually come back to take notes on. Step number two is transitioning from just facts and to actually questions that you can then use to review yourself. Step number three is to actually think about the entire lecture as a hit list. If you know everything from your hit list or if you add extra information and you know all of that before a quiz or test you're likely prepared for the individual lecture. Step number four is to actually incorporate space repetition, whether it's through using Notion, your Word doc or Anki and again all those are feeling down below. Step number five is to actually think of everything as second-brain connections and to come back to your notes and add little bits of tidbits that you can actually use for long-term retention. All of those five steps definitely helped me remember everything that I read in medical school I obviously do well on my quiz and test but also make things practical and purposeful for long-term care of my patients. Now if you got any value out of that I promise you there's more where that came from. If you go in the description you will find tons of free resources including free recourses on how I studied the medical school to our free Med School success handbook, something I'm always updating with tips and lessons that you should know on how to become a top Med student. These are failures that I had on my part that hopefully you avoid and you can increase your chances of succeeding. And so all of those free resources will be linked down below in the description. And again if you're interested in the level of your setting course that is essentially a six-step process on how to identify what you're doing wrong, what you need to do better and how to get the grades you want with last time using a strategy personalized to you then go ahead and click the link down below especially to just see the type of results past students have had and then essentially decide for yourself is this program something that I actually could benefit from. If so definitely consider giving it a shot. But with that being said my friends if you did find some value out of this just let me know really quickly through the like, subscribe and notification bell if you're watching this on YouTube. And if you found this video helpful then you'll enjoy these advanced strategies that include and how to use Anki like a pro as well as this video right here on how to use the Q and E method to make your note taking more effective. Definitely check out these two videos and as always thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.