EFFICIENT studying: How to ACE everything in a FRACTION of the time

wouldn't your life be so much easier if you could cut down your study time from 3 hours to 1 hour how about 30 minutes even better efficiency is the key to how I was able to become valadi dictorian with actually the highest GPA ever in the history of my district all while playing Varsity Sports sleeping 8 hours a day and actually having a social life still and I had migraines which is a neurological disorder that made me miss school sometimes I don't want to always mention this but I think it's very relevant for this video and a lot of you guys relate being efficient means achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense definitely something we want to achieve when the colleges are pressing us to do so many things in order to get into the top colleges because that's how Society is but regardless of your goals efficiency is the key to live your life and have fun so you don't have to be stuck in your books all day long cuz nobody likes that hey it's Amy a bunch of you requested how do you become efficient at studying how do you actually study effectively so today I'll share with you the real tips that I use in high school and college College I've been mulling over for about 3 weeks now which tips I should present to you that would be the most helpful in a single video and I thought you should wait no longer the last tip will have you automatically two steps ahead of all your classmates without further Ado further Ado do let's go gain awareness ASAP a lot of you guys told me that it's so overwhelming to just start your homework and to think about all the things you have to do so I'm not telling you to start your homework as soon as possible I'm just telling you to look at it so when you get homework in class just take a glance at all the questions and read through to make sure you have all the resources that you think you need to solve the problems this is really good because maybe class doesn't even end yet and then you have time to ask your teacher about a question already so you don't have to wait until the next time you see your teacher plus when I did this and I looked at the question sometimes I would see really easy ones like low hanging fruit to use those corporate lingo and I would just knock them out I would do maybe just one or two problems and I would feel a great sense of achievement looking at the problems and doing just one question gives you a much greater awareness of how long the thing is actually going to take because the more you guess about how long assignments are going to take you the more stressed it will become because as humans we tend to overestimate we tend to think that things are harder than they are this first tip will make tip number five work even better for you simply gain awareness and you are on your way to becoming very good at time management learn by doing I would not study before doing my work students might read the textbook pages or read the notes and they try to get a good understanding from that and then they start their homework so it's a one two step process what I do that saves a ton of time is I will just jump right into the homework because the homework's literally going to tell you what you need to know and typically the test tests you and typically the test tests you on the homework question type stuff anyway when I jump right into the homework I might not know how to do question one but that's okay that's when I go go into the textbook or my notes and then I read that part reference back and forth like a tennis court and I fill in the answer this way it's like studying and doing the work that you'll actually have to hand in at the same time instead of having an hour studying and an hour homework it just turns into an hour of studying plus homework mixed together why do I say an hour of both instead of you know 1 hour and 30 minutes of studying and homework this is because when you're looking at the homework you're filtering out all the crap that's in the textbook in your notes doing the homework problems is like following an outline that will Target the things you have to read this helps me remember things and understand how to solve the problems better too because only when you're doing it are those neurons in your brain firing and making those connections that much deeper I hear and I forget I see and I remember I do and I understand do the work don't study you're studying by doing the work but when you do have to study use what I call parallel recall you've all heard of active recall by now it's in those tons of YouTube videos so basically when I'm studying in parallel with reading the textbook for the very first time I'm also doing active recall but not in the way you might think other forms of active recall I do do later are flash cards doing practice problems but I'm already doing a form of active recall when I read the textbook for the first time it's not that I'm reading the textbook every page and then blurting out or writing down everything I remember but it's like I read a sentence or a paragraph then I look up and I repeat it in my own words I try to make connections on the spot with the previous things that I've read for example if I just read the mitochondria is the PowerHouse of the cell You Know cover the page internalize it really let it sink in you know how I let it sink in is that I'll repeat it it in my head the mitochondria is the PowerHouse of the cell but I'm not reciting it like I'm trying to memorize those words I'm trying to absorb the meaning and I think that means the mitochondria this part of the cell is essential to the cell's survival and its energy and any kind of function that kind of thinking would be happening in my mind as I'm reading the pages and would be much faster than how I just said it out loud to you some of you guys have the problem where you're reading but you don't feel like you're actually paying attention to what's being read the moment you feel like something is too easy or your eyes are just glossing over the words that's the moment you know that you're not actually doing anything useful that's when you know you're wasting time it should feel a little hard that feeling that it's difficult means you're learning my process of parallel recalling doing active recall in parallel of reading helps keep me engaged because I get so bored if I'm just reading the words we would love to have photographic memory I know but parallel recalling is the next best thing have an accountability partner sometimes we think that the smart people are lone wolves they're so smart that they can just do it on their own but that's a myth I cannot do nearly the amount of things that I've done nor have a good time doing it if I didn't have friends as I've talked about in a lot of my other videos collaboration is so important in school in life to make everything easier because you never want to believe that you're the smartest person you always want to think that you can learn from other people and learning from others saves you the time from learning it yourself from scratch how does an accountability partner work I like to set what are called Soft deadlines this is the act of setting a deadline like three or four days before the actual deadline before your actual test or homework is due but here's where it gets effective that soft deadline is a commitment that you make with your friend that's a time where you're going to either study and quiz together or you're going to compare your homework answers you might let yourself down but you don't want to let other people down because you don't want them to think of you in a bad way that's how our egos work so you will likely be more efficient and actually meet that soft deadline therefore completing your work more efficiently if you don't have any friends you can do this with well you need some new friends but that's another topic not only does this make you get the work done efficiently before the soft deadline but when you're working with your friend you're actually learning so much more effectively because you're teaching things to each other especially when you have to explain something to someone else that's an incredible way to encode that information and ensure that you understand it as well the student becomes the master double plus is that you're socializing at the same time homework is not the most fun thing to do but it really creates bonds when you're struggling together so this fourth tip is a win win win I don't know if that was too weird I'm going to keep it okay number five pivot when you're stuck it can be the most frustrating thing when you're staring at a problem and you literally don't know what to do next there's no cell in your body that has any clue what's going on and the more you stare at it the more you're like I'm so dumb I'm never going to get this done I'm just going to die here trying this problem forever well don't do that when I feel stuck on a problem I'll try a little bit longer but just like a few minutes right but then I will text my friend immediately hey do you know how to do this there's no shame in asking guys it's better to be dumb to your friends and your teacher instead of dumb on the actual test then when your text is whoop sent into the world you can't do anything about anymore so then you pivot and you work on something else that way you prevent frustration it's kind of like multitasking because while your friend is trying to figure it out and get back to you you're making progress on other things of course if your friend doesn't know because you're so smart so maybe your friend doesn't know it either then that's when you should bring that problem to your teacher don't feel the need to be so independent and jam yourself into that wall to solve that problem all on your own if you feel stuck literally just ask for help stop it get some help I am someone who actually talks to the teacher a lot if you saw the number of times I went up to the teacher's desk you would think I'm really confused and just don't know what's going on in class but I'm always talking to the teacher because I'm greedy you know I want all the teachers knowledge they literally can give you all the help if you just ask I may not be naturally smarter than my classmates but if I get more help from them from my friends from my teacher I'm giving myself an advantage already when you get to a dead end and you change direction and go down a different Road for a while you're actually mulling it over in your head subconsciously having that change of scenery down this new path is refreshing and then sometimes you might think of some idea that helps you go down that previously blocked Road this is why it's even more important to start early and get awareness of the problems because then you actually have time to ask your friends and to ask your teacher the next day before homework is due I would be lying to you if I did not include this tip in my efficiency study video reduce your screen time stop before you click away and be like oh no another mom lecturing me about my screen time listen up okay I am in your same shoes I like seeing what other people are doing in fact my job is partly social media right now so you can bet your butt that I'm on there a decent amount of time but I've seen firsthand how often it is to your focus like deep work is just that much harder to get into with this habit of scrolling if you got bored at this point and are like I've heard this a million times I'm going to click away you need to hear this even more think about this when you're reading and studying you need to read a paragraph and then read another paragraph and then read more paragraphs right you don't want to read paragraph one read paragraph 2 and then dump paragraph 1 into the trash like you still need to remember what's in paragraph 1 but what are you doing every single time you're scrolling do you ever remember what the previous short you washed was how about two shorts or two posts before that even less so when you're scrolling you are literally training your brain in an awful way you're training it to forget everything that came before it because it's just not important to you since I knew this when I had to take the Gat I was like bro standardized testing again my focus is way worse than before I knew I had to make a game plan so I deleted Instagram on my phone for the like 5 months before taking the exam because as sad as it was I asked myself what do I want more do I care more about sharing my life which other people probably don't care about and do I care about seeing what my friends are doing on vacation do I care about that more than my GMAT score which helped me get into MIT and Columbia a business school no so since I valued that then it turned into kind of an easy choice to just do what I had to do you just need to do what you need to do like you know what you got to do so just do it Nike just do it if when you were watching this video you got impatient and you wanted to skip through my little chapters to just find what the tips were or you go down the comments and see those people who summarize the tips then you need this more than anyone you're missing the understanding of why these tips work and you need those important explanations to even be motivated to follow the tips which will help you if when you're watching YouTube videos trying to get helpful information you feel the need to just get it and go and for the speaker me to speed things up to stop saying all this fluff then that's a red flashing warning light of the attitude and habit that you've built up honestly now that I'm saying this it's kind of ironic because if you were someone who skips things then you would have skipped what I just said anyway I don't care how you do do it app timer delete your phone oh delete your phone if you can but delete the app just do something just take some action if you know that your focus is being so drained by these social media apps I'm not going to tell you what specifically to do because you can decide for yourself how much you need and how much being a star student really matters to you it's hard because it's worth it the harder things are the more worth it you should think they are think about how many other students will watch this video and still do nothing if you do this tip and take control of your social media addiction it will automatically put you way ahead of everyone else Instagram Tik Tok YouTube shorts they don't care about you like I do all they want is their money so don't let faceless companies control you be the boss of your own life I always end up getting very preachy I wrote the script being like Oh it's going to be so concise I'm just going to do tips 1 2 3 4 and I ended up preaching again I don't know oh man I like to think that this is helpful please let me know if it's helpful or not when I followed these tips that I shared with you today I cut down my study time so much but the thing is I didn't even know how much I cut down my time to and made it more enjoyable that I didn't even know how much I studied it just feels like you Breeze through it because you're that much more focused when you're studying effectively try my tips and actually try them but start with one at a time and then accumulate them slowly so then you're actually making it your routine only then then do you have the right to say my tips suck and you can tell me that in the comments so then I can improve for you next time I read all your comments this is a good and bad thing but I'm actually getting way too many comments Now to respond to all of you so I'm sorry if you don't get a response I'll try to hard it all but just know that I love all your words thank you I get it sometimes you don't need tips you just need more motivation so you can even actually do the tips a little bit of entertainment while getting motivation never hurt anybody so if you want a combination of inspiration and fun watch this thank you sleeping six no watch this video it's a darn good time I can promise you that I always end with an accent I don't know why

Channel: Amy Wang

Views: 1,858,437

Keywords: study tips, study, study hacks, how to get straight a's, gpa, how to study, study motivation, motivation, procrastinate, how to get good grades, valedictorian, how to get straight as

Id: _xUn8kAZGOw

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2023