does the amount of hours that you study every single day directly impact the results that you'll get at the end of the year when your all your exams are done probably however speaking to a lot of high achieving students what i tend to see for those scoring in the top you know five percent of students is that they're studying anywhere from one to eight hours plus a day and so that poses the question you know what is the perfect amount of time that you should be studying in a day for you so that you can achieve the grades that you want to get into your dream career and so we're going to be answering that question in this video hey guys archer here a second year medical student and on this channel we learn how to learn so we can spend more time with the things and people that matter the most to us today we're going to be answering the age-old question how many hours should i be studying a day and this has just been asked so many times on this channel in my dms you know on the street even it's just a question that we all have i remember when i was even asking this question myself when i was in year 11 and 12 and now after a few years of thinking about this and experimenting i think i finally have the answer however like most things in life there is not one size that fits all it's gonna really depend on what type of person you are how you learn all these sort of factors that are unique to you and so the amount of time that you need will also be unique but we're going to figure out how to get that actual number for you so let's get into it the first thing that we're going to look at is you know the correlation between learning and how important that is in answering the question at hand so then we'll look at the simple answer to this question and then how you can go about actually about finding the right answer for you and along the way i'm going to be dropping tangible study techniques throughout this video that's going to help you out even more timestamps are on the screen now so feel free to jump through wherever you'd like the main thing to establish from a start is that there's a pretty strong correlation with how much you need to study with your competency of how you learn at the moment how good you are at learning obviously there are many different layers and levels to what learning really means so the definition that we're going to go for here is if you have learned something it means that you're able to retain it for a very long amount of time and you're able to apply it in unfamiliar and unknown scenarios at a very well capacity as well so just how there's a relationship between the competency your ability to learn and how much you need to study this is also you know correlational to the study techniques that you're using i mean the quality of those and how much that produces units of learning so to get better at learning and to reduce the amount of time that we need to study for the certain grades that we want we have to take a step back and actually assess the study techniques that we're using and the real efficacy of them lucky for you this whole youtube channel is about this and decoding this so you're in the right place at the right time so to do this we're going to need some data for a few things the first one being how long can you focus for in one sitting how much time you actually need to learn one whole new topic of information and again this can vary can you still remember it after a week of learning and how strong that retention actually is and how long is it taking you to do other tasks that are relevant um to being a better student so this may be like time management um getting onto something and not procrastinating anymore these sorts of things so you need to start trying to figure out your answer to these sort of data points and there's a lot more that you can be calculating depending on your scenario but the first step is becoming extremely self-aware about where you are at the moment even with all the cognitive biases that we have so if you're very strong and proficient at studying at the moment it may feel like that with the current things that you know but you have to be open as well that there's a lot more out there that could potentially take you to the next level and if you're someone who's not so confident with your studying then that's a good thing to notice now because it means that there's an opportunity for you to improve if you start looking in the right area tracking everything and how long it takes is a really great way of doing this i mostly do this on an app called amazing marvin and i do this as much as i can until there's certain days i'm just so packed that i can't even track this uh you might like in this to some people who track their calories right you want to do this as well with your task because we're going to be focusing a lot on how our energy changes and how efficient we actually are and you'll see how a lot of time can be misused or could be used better now if you don't have amazing marvin yet there is a referral code that i have that gives you an extended 30-day trial on top of what you already get so you can get 60 days for free and after that it's really cheap anyway so you might as well but um if you want if you're not up for this yet then you can just use like a stopwatch and then record this in notion or in like apple notes or something like that now the simple answer to this age-old question how much do you need to study every day it just completely depends on how good you are how efficient how effective your study techniques are at producing learning right so we can spend tens of hours studying but if this is not producing learning it was all wasted anyway so studying is the action that we try and do to produce the outcome of learning now before moving on i want to talk about some myths that hold students back including high achievers and the first one is that the amount of hours that you're studying is definitely not a one-to-one ratio a direct relationship with the amount of hours of learning that you've got out of it so if you're studying six hours a day that does not necessarily mean that you are learning for six hours and we know this we have procrastination and these sort of things but actually from what i've seen working with a lot of students collecting data of my own but also you know looking at the research the study efficiency of people around our age is actually on average around 30 and for high achievers it doesn't even go that far beyond uh we're also looking you know underneath 50 of our learning capacity and this makes sense especially with university being far more challenging than things in year 11 and year 12. so this probably means that you're only getting around two to three hours of efficient learning if you're studying for six hours so if we can reduce and get rid of all of this extraneous time that is not being used as productive as possible we can make sure that studying is producing learning much more this is super important because you may have a threshold of how much learning you need to actually get done and then knowing how efficient you are you're able to you know estimate how much hours you actually need of studying to produce that much learning for example for a particular subject it may take a really proficient learner uh maybe one hour to study it and someone who's not so proficient may need to study for six hours and someone who's average may study for three hours this is something that's going to be unique to you this leads nicely onto the second biggest myth that there is around the sort of space is that when you feel good about how much studying you've done that is a reliable predictor of how much learning has occurred and how well you go in your test literally you know these people that i'm talking about they'll tell you that they've studied for 10 hours they study for 12 hours a day and they're so proud of this that it becomes essentially their identity their personality and they still don't do that great on the test so we should feel really proud about being able to study less but still get good grades instead of the opposite and this is really what i see a lot of it's just like people are so proud about how much they're studying because they're showing how committed they are to their grades and their studies and all this but it isn't what actually produces the actual results so let's think about this logically if you are able to get an a-plus in two hours would you prefer to do that over studying for four hours and getting the same grade of course you're going to want to do it for two hours but as much as i say this there are going to be students out there who will completely ignore this they don't feel that they're prepared to do something like this and make changes for this they'll wait for a perfect time later on to make this happen it's never going to cut and it's never going to come in fact because things will always keep getting more busy and more busy so regardless of all these warning signs that it's so important to focus on this there are still people who watch us who will watch this video who will just ignore it the majority of your ability to learn is completely within your control and how you spend all of your time studying and that's literally the clear mission statement of this whole channel which is why you know i'm i love study techniques a lot i actually even have a whole video that explains my study techniques and how they've changed over time i just realized that this was off so i just put it back on now we're moving on to a very important topic regarding this which is your ability to focus and how long you can keep this up within a session the basic idea is that we will only want to be working when we're completely focused solely on a task so we can use as much of our brain resources to focus on this and that speeds up the efficiency so you know as i mentioned all the time on this channel you know cognitive switching penalty is a real thing where if you have lots of things that keep grabbing your attention that's going to make it harder to get back onto the task that you're meant to be focusing at hand and there's also this thing you know sort of called like residue where you know you keep thinking about that other tasks that you were just reminded about as you're trying to focus on that one thing so you know it adds this thing called extraneous load which just makes it harder for us to focus and when we're collecting the data like we've already spoken about we can start to even create our own energy map and figure out where our energy spikes and where it dips the most this means that you can even allocate your tasks accordingly so you're not you know for example i don't record these youtube videos you know around like three to five p.m because i'm always in a slump during that time this is the popular reason that study techniques like pomodoro can be ineffective in some cases where for example you know your focus doesn't completely align with the 20 minute timer and even if you you know you have your own time like 40 minutes you're not always going to have 40 minutes of focus productivity sometimes you're going to be only able to focus for like 10 minutes this is why things like flowmadora are so powerful if you're able to have the discipline to use something like this so i have a video on that if you want to check that out so you can think about flamindoria as a shoe that comes in many many many different sizes so it can fit the individual whereas the pomodoro only has a few selections of sizes and so that means it's quite limited in you know the cases that can be used using the flow madora will not mean you're only more efficient in your specific study sessions but we're collecting more data here about how many cycles is best for you before you become worn out you'll figure out when are the best times for you in the day and also you know your peak focus how long that can really last equipped with this information you can start to take your scheduling to a completely different level now taking in consideration your energy map where your energy spikes and decreases so in theory this means that you can spend less time on studying if you're scheduling around this another thing that we should consider here is that a lot of people take study quite aimlessly like okay i'll just get some methods done we want to have a clear idea and a clear intention of what we expect we should be able to get done within one hour of focused productivity when we set these smart goals in place we can actually assess if we're able to hit these this allows us not only to be more efficient because we're setting a goal for ourselves but we're going to be able to collect more data yet again so in order to do this we can do two things the first one being intention setting this is what i just mentioned then setting your smart goals giving yourself a direction and you'll know how to allocate your time within this one hour the other thing is reverse goal setting and this is extremely important and it's part of the reason that we can become you know quite demotivated at times and procrastinate on things because we don't understand practically the sheer importance of missing out on that one day of going to the gym or for example when we just don't do this study session we lose sight of these things and our brain is really not quite good at delayed gratification because we always are just primed for you know those quick dopamine hits and so it's very hard for us to assess you know the importance of things long term so what is reverse goal setting it's basically what it sounds like you have the goal in mind and then you need to keep taking steps backwards to figure out what you need to achieve in order to get that goal so why reverse goal setting because thinking about the outcome itself is not really going to change much things it's all about the processes that you are building in order to get to that point and this is because outcomes are a mere symptom of following a certain process so reverse goal settings allows us to split these outcome-based goals into smaller performance-based goals this allows you to focus on the process of learning instead of just being fixated on the results and i talk about this a lot we want to be really enjoying the process and not just waiting and enjoying the outcome because it can usually be quite far away and also you know there's other factors that are in play about outcomes we can't really control that but we can control the processes and the journey up until that point now let me show an example let's say your goal was to get a hundred percent on your end-of-year exams if you were traditionally setting your goals you'd be setting that and that would be pretty much it however the main problem is that there's a huge gap between where you are right now and being that sort of person who's able to get 100 in all their exams and i could be unclear by this point to see what are the things that you specifically should be focusing on most to be able to get that sort of result so basically there's these two points here we need to figure out everything that happens between the finish and the start point instead of just saying like okay so for example like uh if i want 100 well then that probably means that i need to get better at studying well i mean where does that fit in this sort of process here are you going to focus on that now or later down the process so reverse goal setting allows us just to work backwards and that makes it very linear and quite systematic so if you're kind of doing this process this is the thing that you might see this is just a basic example to show you the idea but this can become far more effective if you're using even smaller performance goals and as well beginning to use you know kob's experiential cycle along with the law of marginal gains which is going to be massive in this as well so this lays out that very clear path to where you are right now to the ultimate person that you want to become using this path and seeing where you are right now you can figure out with the time that you have left before getting that sort of outcome what are the goals that you need to be hitting and when so these smaller performance goals when do you need to be hitting these and then then you need then you can ultimately figure out how much should you be studying each day when you have this all planned out if you're that sort of person who really wants a concrete number that is the extent that you need to go to figure that out to a reasonable degree and remember there are levels of uncertainty so we want to make sure that we're studying a little bit more than we need to when we can during this whole process you need to be collecting data and keeping track of how long it's taking you to get to the certain point and did you overshoot that and we always overshoot how long something's gonna take so we should take that into account as well so to break this down as much as possible if we're able to figure out how much we're going to need to improve and how long we think each step is going to take with how much time we have we can start to divide that time up into hitting these performance goals and that will allow you to figure out how much you need to study every day and if you want to get really good at saving your time and studying more efficiently where you know one hour of effective study is going to save you 10 hours of studying later on make sure to check out my video on how to pre-study it's a perfect place to begin and i'll see you guys in the next one bye