two years ago i graduated in the top five percent of my university and i wasn't studying 15 hours a day i didn't sacrifice my social life i wasn't cramming in my revision for weeks before the exams it was all a relatively smooth and stress-free process and a lot of people have this false idea that in order to achieve incredibly high grades you need to be studying all of the time and you need to sacrifice all other areas of your life in order to achieve them but that's just not the case of course it does take a lot of hard work but something that is just as equally important is working smart because often working hard just isn't enough maybe you've been in the situation where you're studying and studying maybe 10 11 12 hours a day but you're just not getting the grades that you're aiming for and if you are in this situation i created the project heath and transform your grades in 30 days course exactly for you check the link in the description for more information but this video is going to go through the exact steps that i took that made me study smart that made me study more efficiently therefore consuming processing and retaining more information in a shorter amount of time spread out your studying now this is such a simple concept but it's so incredibly underutilized so if your exams or just your education in general is stressing you out then this is for you the vast majority of students when their semester first starts the number of hours of studying they do will be relatively low as the semester progresses and their exams get closer the number of hours of studying will steadily increase and then one or two weeks before the exam the studying will suddenly increase even more as the pressure from the exams motivate them to start cramming in preparation and that's maybe how you study it's how most students study but it's just not studying smarts it's quite a stressful way of approaching your exams and at least in my opinion there is a better and smarter way of studying so what i would do is at the beginning of the semester i would set a goal of the number of hours that i was going to study every day now that could be six hours eight hours ten hours it really is up to you but just make sure that whatever you choose you can maintain it throughout the whole semester so for me it was studying eight hours a day i treated university like a full-time job so eight hours was perfect and at the beginning of the semester i would be studying eight hours a day and this was focused intense studying and at the beginning of the semester it would often be background reading of the new material going through past papers to get an idea of what i'm going to be learning about in the lectures and watching documentaries and youtube videos about the new subject just to have a broad basic foundational understanding of the subject you see at this point no one else will be putting in as much studying there's no exam deadline for months to come so most people don't have the pressure of an exam to motivate them to study so this is where you get ahead of most of the students because there's no pressure of deadlines it's a relatively stress-free way of studying and it can be fun too watching documentaries and watching youtube videos on the subject can be an engaging way of being introduced into a new subject and is far more interesting than reading thick textbooks now this is where it gets interesting as you progress through the semester your eight hours of studying stays the same where most other students have to increase the number of hours they study because they need to catch up you don't you stick to your eight hours throughout the middle of the semester and even just before the exams there were so many exams that i had approaching where i didn't have to increase my studying in order to prepare for them and this is why university on a whole wasn't a stressful experience for me because i had exams coming because i had started preparing for them well ahead of time i wasn't panicking or rushing to cramming my studying days before the exam so if i had one tip for you to study smarter and not harder i'd suggest setting a number of hours to study at the beginning of the semester and stick to it whether it's four hours six hours eight hours ten hours whatever it is start preparing for your exams right before the beginning of the semester and then when your exams do come around you'll be completely prepared for them eliminate pseudo studying now i just mentioned that you should be spreading out your studying throughout the entire semester rather than just cramming in a few weeks before the exam but there's one big mistake that i see a lot of students make when doing this they space out their studying more which is great but because there's no pressure from deadlines or exams they begin pseudo-studying so pseudo studying is when you just sit there with your laptop and your textbook and you are studying but you're not really taking in the information you're more just studying to feel like you're being productive rather than actually studying with your exams in mind and you'll probably find that the majority of the marks you get in an exam are coming from a select few things that you're doing when you're studying the rest is studying for studying sake so for example for me past papers were absolutely essential for getting good grades in my exams and so i prioritized past papers other tasks such as reading for background information in a textbook didn't directly correlate to getting higher grades so as a result i didn't allocate much time to reading pages and pages of thick textbooks i also didn't gain much from answering unnecessarily large amounts of practice problems it wasn't like i was learning new information and getting significantly better by practicing hundreds of the same practice problems once i hit a certain number the learning curve flattened so i stopped another thing that i noticed was that i was researching for hours and hours before writing an assignment i mean i could research for like seven or eight hours before i even typed a word for the assignment and although preparation for writing an assignment is important it certainly doesn't need seven or eight hours of it so i learned to restrict the oxygen i gave to the research and cut it down to two to three hours and it saved me five hours per assignment and my final grade wasn't affected at all so for all my studying for every task that i started i questioned myself to what extent will this task affect my overall grade if the answer was by a lot then i'd increase the time i spent working on that task if the answer was not a lot then i'd decrease the time on that task or even eliminate it altogether active engagement now i see students making this mistake all the time they come to me and say they've been studying all day every day for the exams but when their exams come around their grades don't match with the amount of studying they've done and one reason for that is because a lot of students mistake reading and re-reading texts or notes as studying but it's so incredibly important that you're not just reading the text or notes passively but you're actively engaging in the material so active engagement is the process of constructing meaning from the material so that involves making connections to lectures forming examples asking and answering questions so basically it's about thinking about what you're reading but active learning doesn't necessarily mean highlighting or underlining text rereading or rote memorization which is basically just repeating the text over and over in your head doing these things can help you engage in the task but they're not generally considered active studying techniques however some ideas of active studying include create a q a so writing out questions as you read and then once you've finished reading writing out answers for the questions and you can also create your own quiz and even give that quiz to your friends to use become a teacher so say the information out loud in your own words as if you're teaching the concepts to a class alternatively you can teach your friends or even your parents or siblings create concept maps and diagrams so things like mind maps are a great way of processing the information and actively engaging the brain to help with memory retention active recall and this is something that i talk about quite a lot on this channel and i talk about it quite a lot because it is such an efficient way of studying so basically it's where you read a page from a textbook then you close the textbook and you write down everything that you remember from that page you then go back and open the textbook to see what information you missed avoid multitasking now multitasking does not improve efficiency so this is when you're performing more than one task at the same time so you might be studying two subjects at the same time or studying and browsing instagram or studying and chatting to friends on social media a study in 2012 by raynal juncko showed a correlation between a class's gpa and how often they were multitasking when they studied for their exams and the study found that the more the students multitasked when they studied the lower their gpa was so consider eliminating distractions things that prevent you from becoming fully engaged during your study sessions if you don't need your laptop for your studying then don't use it use apps such as the focus to do app to help keep you focused and prevent you from getting distracted or trying to multitask because apps like these can also lock your phone so that it eliminates the temptation you might get from getting distracted from things like notifications on your phone and so avoiding multitasking and getting into the zone of studying is incredibly important a student that studies for eight hours and is super focused and engaged will obviously process and retain significantly more information than a student that also studies for eight hours but is procrastinating and distracted throughout the distributed practice technique so this video is all about studying in the most efficient way possible one of the most efficient ways of studying is called distributed practice so this basically means spacing out your studying over several short periods so say over several days or even weeks an example of this practice is to study in short periods on each class every day so this might just be for 30 minutes on each class every day and what that will do is help you process the information on a deeper level but also help you with information recall and this isn't a new concept it was first proposed in the book psychology of study in 1932 by professor cecil mates and he wrote perhaps the most important discoveries are those which relate to the appropriate distribution of the periods of study acts of revision should be spaced in gradually increasing intervals roughly intervals of one day two days four days eight days and so on so studying smarter rather than harder is such an essential concept when you're studying for your exams life is just too short to be studying and studying but not getting any results and this might be a trap that you're stuck in where you are studying for 8 10 even 12 hours a day but you're not getting the grades you expect and that's why i created the transform your grades in 30 days course specifically for you the whole course is designed to show you how you can decrease your studying by a significant amount but at the same time by significantly improving your grades and you do this by studying more efficiently so implementing study techniques that have been scientifically proven to help boost information processing and memory retention you can click on the link in the description where i talk more about the course in more detail and if you decide to jump on board i look forward to working with you very shortly