Busy VS Productive Studying

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This is a concept that’s been noted time and time again through the business world but it’s rarely brought up in a studying context. Even though it’s hardly ever brought up, it’s one of the most common problems that students struggle with. By learning the difference between busy studying and productive studying, you can dramatically reduce the studying time required to get the same grades. It can also be used to seriously increase your grades with little to no extra time investment.

The average student is well trained in busy studying. It’s the kind of studying that most teachers recommend. Busy studying is studying that requires your full attention but doesn’t necessarily give you any good results. One common style of studying that fits this category is reading the textbook. Some students spend hours reading their textbook hoping that the information will stick, usually, hardly any of the information sticks. That just means they have to read the textbook more and more. That’s busy studying.

Productive studying usually requires your full attention but it actually provides you with significant results. It’s not just wasting your time repeating yourself in hopes to get something to stick, it’s actually using a sticky method to go over the information in the first place. This is the kind of studying that most students should do but unfortunately, most students don’t do.

Why Not Study Better

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From a young age, children are encouraged to study like an idiot. Studying isn’t an easy concept for a young child to get their head around. Honestly, scientists have spent careers trying to learn how people can study well. It’s a complicated subject. So… instead of trying to teach young children a complicated study session,  teachers and parents usually just teach children the good old repetition study strategies at first.

The good old repetition study strategy is one of the worst culprits of busy studying. It’s hard to memorize something. You need to be focused. You need to have motivation to learn it. You need to understand it to some extent. These all are complicated study requirements to understand at a young age. That being said, with a repetition study strategy, eventually, you will stumble into the right position to learn information. It will just take a little extra time. (Young children tend to have plenty of that time to invest.)

Good studying doesn’t require short term repetition if you’re doing it right. If you’re trained with a good study strategy, you shouldn’t need to go over the same information more than once (at least most of the information you’re studying.)

Eventually, most students are taught some effective study strategies. They’re taught things like flash cards and mnemonics. Some may be crazy enough to work with mind maps. That being said, they never learn the intimate details that actually make them effective. (Things like focus aren’t treated seriously.) That tends to make students fall back on their old repetitive study strategies.

Why Don’t Students Stay Productive

Productive studying is painful.

Yes… I used the word painful. It requires a large investment of energy. You need to invest focus, motivation, and planning into making productive studying work. It will save you a ton of time but it is not something that comes naturally for school work.

I use flash card examples a lot throughout this blog but I feel like it’s one of the few study strategies that everyone is already familiar with. That means I don’t have to re-explain simple details to make my point.

Flash cards are difficult to use correctly. If you’re working really hard with a set of flash cards, you’ll become completely exhausted mentally. By the 30 or 40th flashcard you’re going to be a little bit stressed out. That’s understandable. That’s to be expected. That’s why most students using productive study strategies quit and decide to use a more simple study strategy like repetition.

Is Productive Studying Worth It?

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Many students decide that productive studying isn’t worth the cost in energy but from my experience, I think the energy is well worth it.

You only have so much time to spend studying. Since you’re limited on the amount of time you can study, you are also limited in the grades you can get using repetitive study strategies. Since they’re so inefficient, you may not even be able to get your grades up to the level you want.

Using productive studying, you can easily reduce your required study time investment by 50%. I’ve personally been able to cut my study time by 80-90% (depending on how you wanted to calculate it.) Since it requires less time investment, your grades aren’t as limited by the time you can invest.

More important than those two point though: You have only so much time in your life. Sure, studying can be good for you but I imagine there are much more enjoyable things you could be doing with your time. For every hour you save on studying, you get to spend an hour doing things that you actually care about.

Productive Studying In A Busy World

Sadly, one of the most common reasons students avoid productive studying is family and teacher pressures. Teachers and parents will assume you’re not studying well if you only spend 20 minutes studying every night. That means, they often pressure students (or downright force them) to study longer.

Considering how painful productive studying can be, it’s hard to blame anyone for not using it if they aren’t allowed to benefit from the extra time. That being said, I don’t think giving up is the right solution here.

There are plenty of other ways you can work with productive study strategies. With a little creativity, all restrictions can provide wonderful loopholes to enjoy. Perhaps if you’re in a really tough situation you can look up some studies done on studying and show the evidence to people restricting you. (The longer someone is studying, the less efficient they get at studying.) Of course, having to beg permission to study effectively is one of the biggest problems with education these days.

Get creative and solve your study problems. It’s difficult at first but it’s well worth it in the long run.

Do you want to study in less than 15 minutes a night while still killing on the tests? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for all the details. Oh… and have a kindle? Be sure to check out the books in the sidebar.

How To Pass Any Test (Easily)

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Taking tests can be terrifying. You never know exactly what's going to be on any particular test and most of the study habits people are taught as children are downright wrong. 

Teachers have been telling struggling students to study more, try harder, and pay more attention for years but that advice is bull. Really... This is a teacher's way of saying they don't care enough to find the real problem. 

Studying more doesn't always improve grades. Trying harder, when you're already making an effort, can often lead to excess stress which just kills the grade more. A teacher telling a student to pay more attention is just an admission that they don't know how to stay interesting in class.

Learning how to pass any test is not a difficult thing to do. It's not taught in school because it doesn't fit the traditional education narrative. You might even get the impression that these are a set of secret strategies employed by all the highly successful slackers out there.

Too many students are getting suckered into a culture that encourages work without considering results. When you learn to get more done in less time, you get to do more. You can tutor yourself into making test taking time easy. Many times, you don't even have to study for exams. All you have to do is keep a close eye on the test requirements and know your own limitations.

Scouting A Test

At least a week before any test, you need to be looking at all the information you can find on the test. If it's a standardized test then look it up online. If you have study guides then look them over. If the teacher ever starts to talk about the test, you clean your ears and listen close.

Teachers have a bias in this situation. Teachers look bad when students fail their tests. That means that teachers regularly give away all the information required to pass the test. They may give you multiple chapters worth of dense textbook to read but after you scout the specific information you can narrow it down to pages.

Your first goal in preparing for any test should be elimination. Studying can be stressful. The more information you're able to eliminate from your study session, the better you're going to perform on the test. Students that just sit down with their textbooks to study everything usually struggle the most with the test. It's better to figure out what you know you need to know and focus on that.

Sometimes, this will lead you to missing one test answer that comes out of the blue. That's okay. You're sacrificing one hard point for tons and tons of easy ones. Unless you're looking for a perfect score, you don't need to worry about the information that you couldn't have predicted in advance.

Study Sessions

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I absolutely hate when people say to study more.

That is the absolute worst possible advice in 9 out of 10 cases. Do you study? If you study then you're not studying too little. You're probably just studying with bad habits. First of all, you should not be studying more than an hour a day. NEVER. Don't even do it before a big test.

If you're studying right then after 20 minutes of studying you'll be worn out. Any more studying after that produces diminishing results while encouraging you to develop poor study habits. Worn out studying is a mistake. It's better to study with better habits for less time than with worse habits for longer.

One of the most effective ways of studying is creating multiple short sessions for studying instead of one long one. Your mind needs time to process the information you're trying to remember. Give it that time before loading more information in there.

During those study sessions, remember that reading is not studying. Studying requires recall of the information. Flash cards are a great example of this. Just reading information can help information stick but if you're not 100% engaged in the moment then it's wasted. You can't get away without recall on flash cards. You either remember it or you don't. The recall is the important and stressful part of studying.

Also, never study distracted. When you're studying, do not IM friends. Do not listen to music. Do not daydream. Make sure you have plenty of privacy and quiet. You need to only study. I understand that can be difficult. If you have to then cut your study times down dramatically. Focused study for less time is better than unfocused study for longer. Make it 5 minutes if you have to.

One of the most important reasons to study this way is habit. At first you might not get much out of it but over time you're going to train your brain to study faster. When you concentrate 100% on studying, your brain gets better at it with new habits. Whenever you let yourself get distracted you get out of the habits that let you study fast. Study or don't study. Don't just pretend to study.

What about that test you didn't prepare for tomorrow?

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Do not break the study habit by trying to cram. It's a waste of your time. You

may gain a few points but it's just going to encourage you to make the same mistake in the future.
Study less than an hour in multiple sessions during that period of time. Take enough breaks to know you're not stressing. After that accept that is all you can do. 
The real problem isn't the few points you lose by not studying enough tonight. The real problem is that boatload of points you already lost by not starting your studying a week ago.

What if you don't think you need to study for a test?

Well, if you scouted the test properly then you know better than I do. If you're wrong, it's going to end up biting you but that's a risk that you need to decide you take yourself. There are many of tests that you don't ever need to study for. You probably will end up with a slightly lower grade but it can be very motivating to pass without ever picking up a textbook.

Test Taking Time

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When you're thinking about how to pass any test, the most important factor is not study habits. Yes, study habits are a massive portion of the final grade but most people don't even need to study to pass any test. The vast majority of testing points comes down to a persons ability to manage the test in their own heads.

Stress will completely destroy your final score. You can have all the answers locked up somewhere in your brain but they do absolutely no good without your brain being in shape to find them. Getting worried was intended to let you run from tigers, not to help you find answers tucked away in the nooks and crannies of your brain.

Keeping the stress down usually just requires you keep a clear perspective on every test you take. There is nothing life threatening about failing a test. If you studied enough, there is nothing else you can do anyway. If you studied too little then you're just going to stress out worse if you worry about it. When test time comes, your score has been decided before you even answer the first question.

During the test, if you don't know an answer, skip it until the end. Fighting over a difficult problem can ruin stress levels for the rest of the test.

Don't feel the need to keep stressing about a problem you don't know the answer to for the whole duration of the test. I test take by this philosophy: I either know it or I don't. Almost knowing an answer doesn't count. Every second you stress out trying to find an answer is a second you're learning to stress out during tests. You won't remember the 25 minutes of breezing through the easy answers. All you'll remember is the one answer you spent 10 minutes on to still not get right.

If you use the strategies taught in this article, your grade will surprise you. You can often get away with studying significantly less while improving your grades. You don't need a tutor. You don't need a drug. You don't even have to spend all that much time really trying. You just need to figure out the test or exam, study with the right habits for not too long, and then let yourself pass the test without pulling your hair out.

How To Remember What You Read Better

Too many people struggle to remember what they read. It's a problem that a lot of people struggle with. It doesn't matter how interested you are in the material. It doesn't matter how well you think you're focusing on it. Some people always seem to suffer from can't-remember-what-you-read-itis. It's a creeping condition that seems to be showing up more and more these days. What makes it worse is that it seems like the people who suffer from this condition once are more likely to suffer from it again in the future. If you're looking to start remembering what you read then there are things you can do to change.

This is what you need to know to remember what you read better.

Speed Up

What?!? You're probably wondering how speeding up could possibly help your ability to remember what you read but it's actually one of the most important factors that people struggle with while reading. The number one reason that people don't remember information that they read is that they get distracted.

Getting distracted is easy. Reading a certain sentence just sparks a thought, that thought sparks another thought, then another, and it goes on until you're reading the next paragraph thinking about why pirates name their parrots “Polly.” At the very least, you're not thinking about the words on the page. This absolutely devastates any hope of remembering the information you're reading.

By speeding up, you force yourself to focus more on the information on the page and less on everything else. When you don't have enough time to think too deeply around what you read, you get to go deeper into the information as the author intended.

Make Reading Serious Business

Most people treat reading like it can be a passive activity like listening to music. People think that they can read and do other things at the same time. This falls down the same path of distraction as before but it gets even worse. If you choose to listen to music while reading, your brain is consistently having to choose between listening or reading. The mind is physically incapable of doing to things at once. The closest it can do is switch between tasks really fast. Having that choice, even if you think your completely into the material, will distract you.

If you want to remember what you read better, you need to treat reading as an intense activity. You should not let yourself get distracted by anything. That means you should shut the music off. Yes, even the classical stuff. It can distract you too. Turn your phone off if you have to. No, the TV isn't going to help you think either.

Remembering what you read requires focused reading.

Think About It Afterwards

Many people pick up their textbook for studying and read through hoping the information sticks. When they're done reading, they just put away the books and move on. Do not do that. Anyone that's ever gotten deep into a mystery novel knows this secret to remembering the story. When you put the book down, your job isn't done. That is the time that you need to think about what you read.

The more time you give yourself to think about the book after reading it, the better you're going to be able to remember it.

Sure, it requires more time but if you're speeding up your reading speed then you'll make up for it. Take the time to think about the material and you'll be

amazed how fast you can remember something weeks later.

Learning how to remember what you read is a skill that needs practice. There is no magic formula but using these three factors you'll be able to start seeing massive improvements in no time at all.