 Studying for step one sucks, but today I'm going to show you exactly how to automate the entire thing in just minutes. Hey guys, welcome back to channel. If there's one thing you guys enjoy in terms of content, it's either step one studying or just tips on studying. So today I will combine both of them. Specifically we'll talk about how to prepare your study schedule for step one, but doing it very easily. And yes, you can put in the time and create a schedule manually, but if you're somebody who tends to get overwhelmed and just need a study plan that you can just get started with and start getting results, then this is going to be the episode for you. And so if you're in that ladder group and you want to study schedule created for you in an instant, then you're going to love today's tool, which is going to be Cranfighter. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Cranfighter, essentially think of it as an automated study tool for all of the board exams, particularly for step one, where you can say what resources, what time you need, when you'll study, how long you have to study, and then it makes you a schedule from a day to day basis for your board exams like step one. Now it is first important to mention that this episode is not sponsored by Cranfighter, although it would be nice. It is a resource that I love recommending throughout medical school, also through all the students that I do coach. That link, however, is an affiliate link, which means that we get a commission if you do choose to sign up using that link. But if that makes you uncomfortable, then you just go ahead and go to Cranfighter.blueprint, prep.com, and you'd be able to sign up and check out Blueprint for yourself. But if you're interested and want to say thank you to the channel, go ahead and check out the link down below. Now if you're unfamiliar with Blueprint, I'm essentially going to demo what it's like to prep for any exam, particularly step one in today's episode, using it step by step. The nice thing about Blueprint is every kind of step that you would take hours looking on Reddit or finding your own study schedule that you would create and decide what resources you'd use, it kind of does that for you in a second. So as you can see, I kind of have an old example that I've done for a student that we coach, but we're going to go ahead and create a brand new one for the episodes and the purpose of this episode. So we'll go ahead and click Edit Schedule. And once you sign up for the program, you essentially will be shown something like this on your first initial interaction. So you can say whether you want to go to your pace, which is how many questions can you do per hour, how many pages can you read from a text that you may do, what's video speed that you like watching in, which I really enjoy because I love watching videos at 2x, 2.5x, but a lot of students that I work with probably will work more or less about 1x, 1.5x max. How many flashcards can you do if you're going to do Anki, and you can adjust these as needed. So for example, if this was me doing it, I can do about 30 to 40 questions in an hour. The rest of it I think is pretty close to my average. I'm something to save and rebalance. But for now, we're going to go ahead and create a new schedule. And same thing, if you wanted to do it from your school, you can actually add your institution, particularly if you're studying for a board exam or something like a shelf exam. While you are in taking classes, you can use Blueprint and Cran Fighters together to kind of balance what you're thinks, again, as long as your institution is here. But for the purposes of this video, let's just go ahead and pretend that we're creating a brand new study schedule, particularly for step one. So I'll click here. And as I'm doing this, it's going to ask some basic questions. I'm a MDDO. Next is going to ask me if I'm studying for like a course exam or if I'm studying for a shelf exam versus a standardized exam. So for step one, we'll say standardized. And then if you have your school here, you can pick it. I'm just going to pick the first one. And then also your graduating year. Next. And here's the beauty of it is that you have a lot of choices of the exams that you can choose to prep for. So not only can you do it for step one, but in future videos, I'll talk to you about how you can use Blueprint and Cran Fighters to study for things like shelf exams on your rotations, which is amazing. Especially if you're a DO student, you can do this for Comlex, both step one or level one and level two. And you can do this for step two, CK, which is amazing. If there's other exams that are not listed in their main thing, like other shelf exams, you can do this here. But for the purpose of this video, let's just go ahead and click step one. And now this is what I really enjoy is that you can now choose where your test day is and may essentially backward creates a schedule based off of where it is. So for the example of today's episode, just imagine you're going to take a test that's three months away, you're starting in May and you want to take a test in early August. So we'll say three months. So it's going to pick up three months schedule here. But if you know your actual test day, you can put that and change it as needed. And then when you want to start studying, so let's say I'm going to create my schedule today and start studying tomorrow, or if you want to be, you know, a big baller shot caller and go ahead and plan your schedule several weeks and ahead, I can say I'm going to start studying on this weekend after like my exams are over or whatever. And I want to finish studying a week before my exam, a day before, and again, you can get very granular by choosing the date. So let's just say we wanted to do not exactly a week, but close to it. So here it's kind of estimated that our test is going to be on 11, you know, so the Friday of the first week of November. So let's say I want to finish by that Monday just to give me enough time, but not a week per se. And if we want to keep it simple, just use some of their basic things, because as I'll show you later in today's episode, you can always change things and rebalance them. And you can choose to give a name for your study schedule, but ideally you won't be taking step one more than once. And so you can just go ahead and give this a basic name. So for the purpose of this episode, say we're just going to say subscribe, follow the TMJ. So if you're watching this, enjoying the content that we give for free, please just go ahead and hit a nice like down below or subscribe, follow whatever platform you're listening on, particularly on YouTube. Now you just kind of let the magic happen. Now this is really where the nitty gritty happens, and I'll talk to you at the very end of today's episode to make sure you stick around of what tips, particularly that you need to be aware of when using a resource like cram fighters to help you study and schedule. And this big step is essentially picking your resources. We want to be able to pick our resources that we're going to use. And there's a few ways you can do this. You can go ahead and pick things like the most popular, the top four. So for example, if I clicked the top four popular resources, it's going to give me what most people use, which in the setting is first aid, your old boards and beyond and sketchy. And you can change this just looking at the resources of how many pages, how many questions you do. So again, if I could do 40 questions an hour, we're just going to put 30 boards and beyond sketchy. If I choose to use it, I'm going to watch it 2x and first aid, let's say I'm not a quick reader. I can only read 15 pages an hour. I can change that. And it's going to make up some adjustments. Now, if I just do this and it continue, it would show me a schedule created for it. So let's just go ahead and do that. And I'll come back to this one to update the space off of different resources that we want to use. Now here it's going to tell me an average amount of study hours per day. Again, this is not always consistent. Again, you may be taking longer or less time. Also, depending on how much time you want to give yourself on a daily basis, if it took me a full hour to go ahead and read, let's say seven pages, then that is going to increase the overall time I spend. If it takes me an hour to do 20 questions plus my reviews, and I watch my videos at 1.5x on average, then it's going to increase. But you have to be more realistic and we'll get into the tips of how to adjust these settings to best work for you. But if we click Confirm, the magic it's happening and actually happens very quickly. Because as you can see, starting on the first or whatever day you chose to start your schedule, it will give you a calendar of what essentially is going to be done on different resources. So after taking away all those other example schedules that we had, now we're just left with the one we just created. And as we remember, we kind of scheduled things in advance because we're just amazing at preparation. And so here we say on Saturday that 20th that we had made, we're going to start our step one prep. And it's going to essentially tell us which pages we're reading, which questions we're doing, and what videos we're watching and sketchy, as well as boards and beyond. Now, a few nice things to mention here is that one, Cranfighter does a night job of essentially telling you what pages to do, how long that kind of task should take you based off of your rate. And again, things may change depending on how fast you are, how focused you are. But also in one, it's very small, but I really enjoy it is that it tells you how long your videos are. So I may say 10 minutes for the resting member and potential. But if I watch it at 1.5, it's going to take seven minutes. So it's a nice kind of predictor, particularly if you're somebody who says I can only work for an hour and a half at a time or 30 minutes at a time. I can already start to see, okay, cool, these three tasks are going to be like one part more door session or one study session. I'm going to take a break and then I'm going to do this next video in the same way. It may take me two hours to do these 40 questions. So I'm going to do them, you know, study, review, you know, take a break and then review my questions. So it's a nice way to already split your time up. But as you're going through your day as I'm going to my actual August 20th day in this example, I would just click check on the things that I've done. And maybe a video took longer because I needed to stop and pause it or understand it or I just wasn't focused. Then you can, anything that you don't check will get added to your upcoming days as you go throughout your study schedule. So hopefully you're already starting to see the power of using something like cram fighter, because now you don't have to ask yourself which day is meant for which tasks, which video it's kind of already programmed in there for you. And it's going to adjust based off of how, you know, on top of your schedule you are now obviously, and this is going to happen to most people and we'll get into that in the tips is that you are likely going to have to adjust your schedule based off of how over realistic or under realistic you are when creating this. And so you can redistribute over kind of do tasks across future days. So if I finished today and I didn't finish like three tasks, then I would possibly add those three tasks to my next three days. And otherwise you can just leave them where they are. So you can choose where you want to kind of adjust things and you can essentially be balanced on a daily basis or a weekly basis to kind of move each of those videos that you haven't done quite yet. In addition, you can use their calendar view to kind of get an idea of what each day will look like as well as which days you want to give yourself off and not do any studying at all, as well as anything you're overdue on and haven't finished. And then last point here before we go back to the resources, if there was something that I saw that I knew I couldn't finish, let's say these last three videos I knew I just couldn't do on that Saturday. I can just go ahead and move them, which is their nice drag and drop feature. Or if there's something that I really didn't want, I can just go ahead and click done and completed or just go ahead and skip the task altogether. The clearly cramped fighters can do a lot for you on a very quick basis, but there are a few tips that I like to give. So let's go back to edit schedule. So first thing that you can do when you added your schedule is you can choose your time off and your workload. So for example, if I knew that there was a week or a day in the week that I wanted to give myself off, let's just say Sunday, I want to go to church or I just want to take that time off in between my exams. Now I'm not going to have anything scheduled on my calendar on Sundays. It is going to redistribute everything and particularly if you have specific days of your study prep, even though you're studying for step one, you may have your birthday, you may go on a vacation, you may have somebody else's birthday, you may want to actually pick those dates. So for example, the second was my birthday just a few days ago. So if I was studying there, I'd click here. If I wanted to give myself a day off that I knew I wasn't able to study because of an appointment or an obligation, I would click that. Finally, a few other cool things that they have is things like catch up days. So if you wanted to have a day of your week where you're mainly just kind of putting things that haven't been done that week. So let's just say Saturday is going to be your catch up day. Sunday is going to be your off day. That'd be nice. In addition, if you knew that there are certain days of the week that you have less time available or less energy available, let's give two scenarios. One is on Friday or Saturday. Maybe you don't have as much energy where you're not able to do as much. So you want to kind of tone things down as they get towards the end of the week versus on Monday, you feel on top of the world. You can do ahead of your workload. You have more free time. And then maybe on Wednesday, let's say your parent or your family member who just needs more supervision from your help. You want to lighten that day. You can now adjust your study schedule and get more granular with your schedule there too. And I can rebalance my schedule and things will look a lot different. Other quick and awesome things that you can do in Grand Fighters include just changing your test day if you need to. So if you needed to change what your test day actually is going to be because you want to reschedule it or if you wanted to study a little bit closer to your test day because we gave ourselves a few days off to just do some final review or if you wanted to study early, you can do that as well. You can also go ahead and change the resource. So if you wanted to sort by subject or system, and then you can essentially say, like, I want to do cardiology first or I want to do immunology first and prioritize these as needed. There's lots of different things you can do. And if you're confused, you can essentially click here to get more information. Finally, is your study resources. Let's say you're going through a week and you realize that a resource is not something you want to do. And this kind of gets into our tip section that we'll talk about in a second. But the main thing about Grand Fighters is why it feels very useful. It also feels very easy to overstuff your schedule with a lot of resources. But that's not the recommendation or the use for the tool. It's essentially going to give you a schedule based off of what you give it. And so you have to really control your input and your urge to try to do more. My main recommendation is to really stick to two to three main resources are really good question bank, almost 100 percent of time that's going to be you will. And then your second and or third, if you really need a third one should be something that is a video resource that you really want to use that is going to be your go to for filling in kind of details. A third one can either be another video resource that specifically focuses on one specific topic. So a lot of people love using Patelma, people like using sketchy medical or sketchy micro for microbiology. That's fine. And then if you wanted to use another resource like boards and beyond for a more broad general topics or other things. Cool. Those are your three resources. Stick to it. That third resource, if you weren't going to use boards and beyond and you were just going to use sketchy and Patelma one by one, finish the resource. That third resource could be an onky deck that you're then using on the side. So let's say I'm going to go ahead and take boards and beyond off. I'm going to take first eight off because I'm not a great reader. I don't really like using it. If you do like using first aid, there's a video and episode that we've made on the channel, as well as a block post. I'll link down below, including all of our step one material, but talks to you about exactly how to use step one like a boss. If you are somebody who really wants to use first aid, don't sweat it. I definitely did. I'll go ahead and link down below a video, episode and a block post that we put on exactly how to use first aid like a pro. I'll link that down below in addition to all of our step one prep material that we have here on YouTube and on the podcast. But let's go ahead and decide that we're going to go ahead and adjust our study schedules based off of just using you old and sketchy. And then I'm going to go ahead and kind of use onky. So let's go ahead and find an onky deck. A lot of people like the onking deck. So we'll go ahead and put that. And I'm going to say daily number of cards, total number of cards. You can either go ahead and click onking and find out how many cards they have, which is by the way a lot. Or you can say every day I'm going to do, let's just say a hundred or seventy five and you can change that as needed. And in addition, let's go ahead and say that instead of using all of sketchy medical, we're just going to use the sketchy micro deck. And now you can see that we can get even more granular if there's videos you've already watched during the semester, you can unclick those. So that way they don't show up on your schedule to watch again. You can definitely watch them later, but obviously watch the ones you haven't seen first. But let's just imagine we haven't started sketchy medical or sketchy micro at all. So now I add all of them and then they're good. So this is a good start. If I wanted to add a resource like Patelma, I could go ahead and try to finish my sketchy ahead of time and then add my Patelma to the very end. Or I can essentially just increase my speed of sketchy micro still watched at 1.5. But my schedule was essentially forced me to finish sketchy micro a little bit quicker. And now I can use those extra bits of days I have at the very end to do Patelma instead. And to round off today's episode, I want to give you two more tips. Number one is severely under planned. The biggest issues I have when I work with students one on one in step one is that they over plan. And then I ask them, how much of that were you able to do? They're like maybe 30%. And for these students who have a big difference between how much they want to do and how much they're actually getting done, their main question is how can I force myself to do more, but they don't really ask myself how can I just expect myself to do less and do those with high quality. So sometimes I'll have students who want to use four to five resources, but can't even find the time to consistently commit to the first two or three. So create a schedule that's very easy to say yes to and severely under plan. So even if you want to do boards and beyond and Patelma and sketchy and onking decks and you world, ask yourself if the test was in a month, which one was going to be the first one or two resources you would use. You'd likely say something like I'll just do questions. Now do the flash cards on top of it. And then if I really needed to go watch videos on things that keep missing. Perfect. That means that if you were going to study with all five of those, now you only have two or three of those available. Make those the first things you schedule in to your cram fighter. And if there's still time in your day because you're able to nail everything down, go ahead and add your Patelma videos or schedule or whatever comes in your priority list of usefulness to your step one success. And tip number two is while cram fighter does a really good job of helping you understand what to do on an individual day. It doesn't quite yet do an amazing job of telling you what to do within the day. So as we kind of talked about it doesn't tell you take a break now, go ahead and do this during the morning, do this during the evening, take a lunch break. That's still going to be on you. And using that, sometimes students still have an issue even when they're making them schedule themselves. My biggest tip here is to separate your question time from your content review time. So oftentimes students will feel like they're falling behind on their sketchy micro videos. And they will use that as an excuse to do less questions when they realize that questions are energy wise, more draining, but they're the most useful. Think of your time slots. So I may say 10 to 1230 is going to be my question time to do questions and review questions. Then my 230 to 430 may be the time that I go ahead and watch the next video that cramfighter is going to tell me. And so that means that even if you're falling behind on videos that you need to watch, you just move to the next one that is due once it's time to get into the videos. But you don't use the excuse of being behind to sacrifice the most important thing, which is to do as many questions as to review them as much as possible. Now, if that entire breakdown of how to create a step one schedule automatically through cramfighter seems very interesting, go ahead and check out the link down below description. I also put a blog post of kind of our overall review on cramfighters and breakdown everything in this video step by step for you. In addition, if you need more step by step help for step one, then go ahead and check out our entire library, a podcast episode in YouTube videos that we have for you here on the channel to help you do just that. And on that note, if you do want to do well on the test and past confidence, you'll enjoy this video of my top tips on students on exactly how to do this, as well as all the study strategies that I use in medical school to get a 3.9 GPA right here. Hopefully you guys enjoy them. As always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I would just a little help to you guys on yours, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.