How to Study Effectively: 8 Advanced Tips - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

a really huge portion of these study tips you'll get from professors and other people who want you to be better in school and maybe that you'll find here on YouTube are really basic they'll tell you to sit up front in class scan your textbooks instead of reading every single chapter uh bring your cat to class to reduce stress and so you get to meet the nights Folks at animal control and these tips you know while they're they're good they're really really useful they are basic and maybe you're like me you're a classical detail driven nerd um like when I play fighting games I want to learn all the Frame data and every single move set and all the matchups instead of just playing the game and having fun quote unquote so applying to study uh I'm the same way and I want to find really Advanced tips ways to sort of hack my learning uh things that usually don't come up when you get your basic study tips So to that end maybe you're like me and want to get some Advanced study tips and I am happy to oblige and in this video I'm going to give you eight of those Advanced study tips so let's get started so the first tip is to use the Corson technique when asking professors for help now Dale Corson was the eth president of Cornell University yes the same Cornell University that spawned the famous Cornell notetaking system and he was also a chemistry professor and he said that students in chemistry and other science and math programs often have to really work to crack problems one sentence at a time as they go through their textbooks or problem sets um but sometimes eventually you get to a point where you just can't crack the problem on your own and you need to ask for help right so you go to your professor and what Dale Corson wants you to think about before you actually talk to your professor is pause and ask yourself what is it that I don't understand like truly what is it that I don't understand and what he wants you to get away from is this thing that a lot of students do where they go to their professor and with a general wave of the hand as he says they say I don't understand what I'm looking at like this is just confusing to me I don't get it and what he wants you to do is avoid that rather pick apart the problem one sentence at a time and figure F out the exact point at which you don't get what's going on so right here I understand this this process makes sense to me but here is where I'm getting a little shaky and I just don't get this after that I'm cool when you can pinpoint that you're going to impress your professor with your preparation and the amount of effort you put into the problem so you get some brownie points there but you're also working to practice the art of recognizing confusion and and following it down to its actual source and this will help you immensely in all of your learning going forward tip number two is to learn facts quickly with a technique called space repetition now space repetition is the art of studying things at increasingly bigger and bigger intervals of time and it's a very efficient way to study but it's also uh it takes advantage of the way your brain works and uh basically space repetition is a system where you'll study something and if you know that individual fact very well you will not see it for quite a while but the facts that you don't know well you're going to see them more and more frequently and uh the way that this works on a on a brain level is that you are trying to recall information you're forcing your brain to pull it out at the closest time possible to when you are about to forget it so your brain actually has to work as hard as it possibly can to recall this information and it encodes it better so it's more efficient and you can actually learn a lot faster now the best way to take advantage of this is to use an SRS or space repetition software to uh do your studying for you instead of using index cards or something now when I was studying Japanese and I will be doing this again soon I used one called Wan Kani that was very very efficient and helped me learn hundreds of kanji and um Japanese vocab words but there is actually a free and generalized one called Anki and you can find it enys ss.net where you can actually create your own card sets for any type of data that you think you would want to study with SRS or you can actually find shared card decks from people who have already made things so definitely check that out I think the preparation aspect of making your own card decks is very useful but simply going through and studying them using space repetition is usually going to be more efficient than using just typical linear flashcard study methods on paper all right tip number three and we are getting a little bit more advanced here so this one is to try out the method of Loki for memorization now the method of Loki goes back to the Greek and Roman times and it is a memor memorization technique rather that has been used by memory champs for a long time and it essentially takes advantage of your brain's ability to remember spatial information very well well it's all about visualization and the classic way to do it is to associate certain sets of the thing the set of data you're trying to memorize certain groups of that with different rooms of a house so let me give you an example this is the kanji for King in Japanese and the pronunciation the way that you say King in Japanese is O and O is kind of a it's really simple uh pronunciation it doesn't really lend itself too well to pneumonics which is a shame because pneumonic is a great way to learn kanji now what if I wanted to adapt the method of Loki to learning this kanji along with lots of others uh what is a king sit on a throne or as we could say the toilet and I am not averse to using 5-year-old humor here and what do you say when you smell the toilet oh yeah work with me here also the uh kanji for King kind of looks like a tow rack so I could associate King with the bathroom in a house and if I really wanted to um make this study technique useful for me I would go into the bathroom and I would put up flash cards on the walls and then I'd walk through my house and study this now the method of lokai is kind of difficult or Loki is kind of difficult to use it's a sort of an advanced technique and usually you're going to be better off with SRS or pneumonics if you have a smaller set of data but if you've got a lot to work with and nothing else has worked for you it's something that you can try tip number four is to hack Acasia so Acasia is a term that has been written about for centuries and it goes back to Plato and it's essentially a lack of command hand over oneself and there's another even more complex term called picoeconomics which talks about this hyperbolic discounting that we do essentially we discount the value of a task the more it is delayed the more the reward is pushed off into the future which in uh in short means that we tend to procrastinate and do sort of fun things that don't really align with our values in the short term and we avoid doing things that really do line up with our values because the reward is delayed so the way you can hack a c or sort of avoid becoming a victim to it is uh twofold one use a commitment device bind yourself to getting your task done on time and the way I do this is by using a app called beinder which I've talked about before I absolutely love beinder and I've been using it to ensure that I publish three things a week for quite a while now and if you look at my graph here which I'll throw up you can see that I have actually been publishing much much much more frequently than I was before and it's largely because I use a commitment device to bind myself to do this now another way that you can sort of hack Acasia this second part of the fold is to add a uh shorter term reward to completing a task and the classic way you've probably seen this image before is to put Gummy Bears on your textbook and as you read paragraphs you allow yourself to eat them but you can do all sorts of other things let yourself watch an episode of Game of Thrones once you finish an assignment or maybe use a tool like habit RPG and give yourself some experience and gold when you finish the study problem set or something just find a way to make sure that the only reward isn't that far off delayed one that causes aasia all right tip number five is to improve the Pomodoro Technique and you may have heard of the Pomodoro Technique everyone talks about it but in case you haven't it's simply a technique where you set a timer for about 25 minutes classically and then you work only on one task during that 25 minute session and I think a lot of people do this and it's very useful but there are some areas for improvement that I don't think a lot of people take advantage of so let me just rapid fire give them to you so number one and I talked about how much I'm a fan of the beinder app the beinder blog is also a good resource for productivity uh techniques and experiments and one of the things that they talk about is this thing they do called talks well a talk is essentially a Pomodoro session except where they use about 45 minutes and then take 15minute breaks instead of the classic 25 minute 5 minute break structure so uh the tip here is to experiment with the time intervals don't just set to 25 minutes and assume that that's the only potential uh interval that you could study at find what works for you and the other one is to put a piece of paper next to you during your promodoro session and whenever anything comes up that distracts you maybe a phone call or the urge to check Facebook or something write it down now this lets you do two things one you can remember where the distraction was and if it happened to be something urgent you can take care of it during your break time but two as you continue to do lots of Pomodoro sessions over months and months you start to see what are the common problem points what comes up a lot that distracts you and then you can take steps to prevent these things so maybe if it's your phone you forget to put it in Do Not Disturb mode well you can do that now if it's a certain website that you really want to visit because it's just so distracting and draws you in then you can use an extension like stay focused on Chrome to block it during your study sessions very useful stuff tip number six is when learning new Concepts use both focused and diffused thinking now this is a concept that I learned about in a book called thinking in numbers and look at this guy Magnus Carlson he was uh he is currently the number one chess player in the world but back in 2004 when he was just 13 years old he played Gary Kasparov who was considered the best chess player in the world um a couple of decades ago and who was often considered to be the best chess player of all time he played Gary to a draw and look at what he does from these screenshots here during the match he actually gets up and walks around looks at other tables and what he's doing what the author of this book has pointed out is he's using diffused thinking so Focus thinking really takes advantage of your prefrontal cortex to focus on one specific set of data one specific problem and it really concentrates on that one thing but it sort of doesn't let the rest of your brain become activated and a lot of ideas come from different nodes of your brain connecting different completely unrelated ideas in new different ways and that's the diffused mode of thinking so when you're learning something new you want to use diffused thinking so you can sort of grock it you can sort of tie it to other nodes in your brain and understand it if you only try to focus on the problem and do nothing else you're going to have a lot harder time solving the problem now focused thinking is very very good for problems you already understand for processes that you've gone through before and uh that's why you want to use these two modes of thinking in combination now tip number seven and I've talked about this before in terms of textbooks is to gauge your classes and uh the specific area I want you to think about here is gauge the speed at which your professor moves and at which you're able to understand so if your professor tends to go too fast and you can't really understand everything he's PR presenting maybe he writes too fast and you can't take notes fast enough or he just moves through the material too fast for you to really understand it and give it time to process in your brain then you want to take some steps to mitigate that problem and uh one thing you could do is read through the chapter before a lecture maybe if you have some material that outlines what's going to be in the lecture you can sort of use that to look at the most uh relevant parts of the textbook and sort of prime your brain for the lecture one other thing you can do if the class paced is just too fast and I can't really emphasize this enough is to Simply ask your professor for help or ask questions in the middle of class the professors are there to help you and you should take advantage of that and my eighth and final tip is to start your problem sets alone so when I was a sophomore I had a statistics class and I actually had a partner and she would come over to my dorm basically every time we had a home homework assignment to do and we would do it together and I now realize that this isn't really the best strategy now I got a pretty good grade in the class anyway but going forward I wouldn't do this again and here's the reason why when you do a problem set with a partner you're kind of robbing yourself the opportunity to really pinpoint gaps in your understanding because two people going at the same problem at the same time if one person is able to do the entire thing then the other person can sort of kind of get where where the first person's coming from so if you don't really understand problem or maybe there's one tiny little section that you wouldn't have gotten but your partner does you're going to latch on to their answer you're going to say yeah I sort of get that and you're going to move on but if you do it alone then you're going to be able to pinpoint those areas of confusion and Shore them up before you get into a group and finish the assignment so start them alone so those are my eight Advanced study tips and I know this video is a bit longer than normal but if you've got any questions about these and want to learn more about any specific ones then be sure to leave a comment below and let me know otherwise I will see you in the next video hey guys thanks so much for watching my video on Advanced study tips now if you want to get more study tips every single week and other tips on being an awesome college student then hit that big red subscribe button right there and you'll get those videos every single Thursday also if you want to find the companion blog post where I link to any resources uh for research I did or other things I mentioned in the video you can click the orange button right there to find that if you missed my last video there's a clip of it playing right there and also if you want to get better grades I wrote a 100 plus page book called 10 steps to earning awesome grades while studying less and I want to give it to you for free so if you want to get that book just click the picture of the book right there lastly if you want to connect with me or ask questions or submit new ideas for new videos you can either follow me on Twitter at tomf Frankle or simply leave a comment in the video below here and I will respond to you no matter what