 So imagine just doing one thing that can help you double your free time and decrease how often you're studying. I'm going to walk you through exactly how I did it in medical school step by step. Let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lachlan here on this channel on MD journey. We help you succeed on your medical journey, but doing it with less stress. And I know one thing that was personally stressing me out as well as the main stress over a lot of the students that come in contact with me is that they are just setting way too much, not getting the grades that they want. And so today I'm going to share with you one hack that really kind of got the snowball growing and Avalanche kind of grading of somebody who became a really effective study year and always wanted to see how they could study it and doing it more efficiently. And after watching this video, if you're still interested in learning more strategies just like that one, I'll tell you where you can go to get even more information. Before we get into the step by step strategy, it's important to kind of paint the picture of what position I was in when I started medical school. Now keep in mind, I had done really well in college. I had taken a gap year, so I had enough time to start doing the research on how to study in medical school. You know, I had done research on student doctor form and Reddit and watched YouTube's and blogs. I thought I had an approach that would work, but three to four months in, I was simply way too overwhelmed. As many of you guys know, if you don't really have your study method down, medical school will give you a very rude awakening, especially when you're starting as a primary student. And so three to four months into medical school, I went from somebody who thought they were very productive to somebody whose default state was studying 10 hours a day. And to be quite honest, it wouldn't have been a big deal studying 10 hours if my grades were good, but unfortunately Cs were kind of the main average that I was starting to see. So this combination of studying my hours and actually like knocking the grades that I was used to saying it was just a recipe for disaster. And I was honestly pretty sick of it. So here's how I fixed in how you can start doing the same in your own schedule. So number one is I looked at my entire study schedule and I asked myself, you had to commit yourself to one tactic. What would it be? Now this is hard for medical students, especially brand new ones, because there's a combination of a lot of resources they want to use, maybe setting for a variety of different classes. And you may be using a variety of different study techniques, whether that's practice questions, reading your notes, going to lecture, doing flashcards, doing group studying, and all of those bring you some sort of value and you become overloaded because as soon as something starts to work, you can't really let go because you think that is going to be the difference between you making a B and making a, we've all been there. But if you really want to be on the path of dramatically cutting the time that you're spending studying, look at your entire study schedule and commit to one tactic that you're going to use for the next week. And if you're not exactly sure what study strategy would use, just kind of use a simple exercise of imagining if your professor said, no more lecture, here's a material, here's a text, here's some flashcards, here's some practice questions. You can only use one method and then the test is going to be on Friday. Good luck. See you then. Now, usually when I put a lot of my coaching students through such an exercise, most of them will say, oh, I'm going to do that first, or they can have an immediate response of saying that is the most attractive. And so I recommend you trying that exercise out and seeing what sticks out. Is it the flashcards that seems like the initial answer? Is it the practice questions? Is it writing on a whiteboard? Is it going to lecture or listening to audio lectures on YouTube, et cetera, whatever that one tactic that sticks out, try to imagine a study schedule where you're only doing that one thing. Many of you guys are probably arid of the 80-20 rule, which basically says that 80% of results come from 20% of what we actually do. And often for medical school, it's not much different where that one tactic is usually responsible for 80% of the results in the grades that we get. And so my personal example, if someone said you had one way to study for the rest of the week, what would it be? Flashcards is the first thing that came out. And that is basically how I was able to reverse engineer a technique where I was able to jump into flashcards as quickly as possible. That's my screenshot method that I've shared throughout YouTube, as well as getting a lot more in-depth in a lot of the programs that we have down below. If you guys are interested in how I use flashcards or Anki, then this video right here is going to be really big for you. Or if you just want to understand how studies step-by-step this video right here is going to walk you through just that. But once you have your one tactic, the next step is to ask yourself how can you quickly go into that tactic as quickly as possible? It's obviously not realistic to say you're only going to do flashcards or practice questions or whiteboard sessions, but if you imagine it to be your only tactic, then the next question becomes, how can I go from when the information is presented to me through either a lecture or the text to immediately jumping into that tactic that I chose? So for example, if your one tactic was to do more whiteboard sessions, then you want to ask yourself, how can you go from when the information is presented in a syllabus to doing a whiteboard session as quickly as possible? And your study strategy may be as simple as read something, create a list of everything that you're kind of learning, and then look at that list and simply go into a whiteboard and sing if you're going to recreate that lecture from that list and ideally from memory. In my personal example where I put flashcards as my kind of go-to method, initially I was going to lecture to acquire the information and writing my notes as flashcards into Anki and then doing those flashcards as soon as I got home. And by simply making that one change of going from information being presented to being you able to use my one tactic and then repeating and doing over and over every single day, I was able to go from 10 hours where I was doing a variety of different things using a variety of different resources to already going to six to seven hours using this one simple jump. And then finally you get into step number three, which is to evaluate your results before adding more on. A lot of times when I work with coaching students one-on-one, if you guys are interested by the way, they'll be linked down below, one of the struggle that most students have is despite learning what they should be doing, there's always this feeling that they should be doing more at the same time. One of the first steps to being effective is to be simple. So if you understand what your one tactic is, first focus on creating a system that just stupidly simple. So just the same way that I went from creating my notes into flashcards and then using my flashcards as review or getting your lecture and then using a whiteboard session, evaluate the results of just using that before you move on to doing more. Because here's the biggest thing that I've learned through my personal experience as well as working with other students is that if you can focus more time on creating your super simple strategy and then refining just a strategy without adding other stuff on, then you can get even more fine-tuned and get better results with less time. So in my personal example, like I mentioned, I was creating flashcards initially as notes and then I would simply go in and review them. But then I realized that half the time the lecture was useless. I was like, what if I just didn't go to lecture and use my powerpoint to create the flashcards a little bit quicker and save myself half an hour to 45 minutes of the time that I was in lecture? And when I started doing that, I realized that the majority of the powerpoint as well was being tested on. If I created my flashcards quickly to where I could jump into the review quickly as possible, I could now go from six to seven hours a day to ultimately what happened, which is anywhere from four to six hours a day, depending on if it was exam week or not. If we go back to the student with example of using the whiteboard session, instead of asking yourself what other kind of resources can you add on to that strategy, really the question is, how can you make that whiteboard strategy as simple as possible? And you can look at saying, okay, I'm using this syllabus right now. I'm creating a list of things that will become my whiteboard topics. What if I can make that strategy even faster? And you may realize that so this honestly takes me a lot of time. What if I watched videos that taught me this information and created my list even quicker, because now I'm watching videos that are high yield and I'm watching my lecture at 2x instead of trying to read this and it's taking me an hour. If you can make that process of saying normally it took me five hours to do a whiteboard session, but now it's taking me three and a half because I've cut this part off, you become more effective and you can evaluate your grades and results and saying, my grades really haven't suffered or maybe they took a dip, I need to go back to doing this. But then you can really use that save time for the last step, which is to use your last bits of hours to either do your one tactic even more or start to add the next best thing to your study strategy. So all the extra time that you'd now save can then be used to doing the next strategy that you really wanted to include in your study strategy, but I just prohibited you to do so. So if you enjoyed for example of doing flashcards, but practice questions as well, now you can use that extra time to do those practice questions you always wish you had more time for. And this, my friends, is really how you create a super powerful study strategy that requires less time, less energy from your own and gives you so much more free time because you start by stripping everything and saying, one thing at a time, require myself less hours, let's keep refining and adjusting and improving this. And then I'm going to use that for you time to say, do I want to do this refined technique even more? That would may work better. Or do I want to add something else that may actually make additional benefits? Putting it together, you become really efficient and you create this refined study strategy and system that really works for you, but with much less hours than you started with. Now I can feel myself getting pumped up and excited and a little bit warm because this technique and the strategy really just completely changed my life in medical school and it's really been the foundation of what I teach other medical students. So if you're interested, if this really kind of given you an initial look at what could be possible in your own study strategies, a few things that I recommend checking out. One, if you just want a quick win, you're like, I'm not really sure if all this is for me, but I really want to just try out one thing. The Rapid Study Accelerator is simply a program you can do like within one day and really get a bigger understanding, kind of a more step by step approach, just like this video, to really understand what you should be doing or you shouldn't. But if you're really excited and you want a big overhaul of your study strategy and just doing it within a few weeks, level up your study program has really changed the lives of a lot of students that have seen and come through the MD journey. I recommend you guys checking out some of the reviews just to see if they'll be for you. And the final option, if you want somebody to personally help you one-on-one, handhold you to a study strategy that's going to work, give you more free time, and ultimately takes that stress away and you want to work with me one-on-one, then I do take applications for upcoming coaching students. I only work with a few students every single month, so if you're interested, you're going to apply down there. But most importantly, even if you're remotely interested, check out some of the reviews of students I've seen within just their first few calls to really see what kind of results you may be able to see in your own life. But that guys is the overall approach that I took in my first semester of medical school that really just changed the game of how often I was studying and how effective I was when I was studying. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, just go ahead and hit that like button three, four, five more times and we're doing so. It really helps support the channel, helps this video, but also gets this video in front of somebody who really may need to see it. So just take the half second and if you haven't done so already, hit that subscribe button notification bell to be aware of when new videos go out live. But as always, my friends, drop your comments down below. Be happy to answer them and interact with you guys. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video as always. Thank you for making it to the very end. Thank you 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. If you did enjoy this video, then check out these two videos, this video on how to study step-by-step like a pro in medical school, and this video on how I used my on-key method, like I talked about in this video, to really just change the game. So check that one out next. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace, my friends.