this video is sponsored by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make it with Squarespace hey guys welcome back to the channel if you new here my name is Ali I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video we're talking about revision timetables isn't that exciting now back in the day when I was in secondary school I used to use the standard prospective revision timetable method you know where you plan out your revision in advance like 6 weeks in advance but for the last six years or so I've been using the patented retrospective revision timetable method and I've never looked back anyone else find that funny no just me nevermind this video is gonna be split up into three parts firstly I'll talk about what a standard prospective revision timetable looks like for most people and explain some of the problems that I used to have with this method when I used it back in my secondary school days secondly I'll introduce the idea of the retrospective revision timetable and explain why I think it solves all of the problems that the prospective revision timetable does this really needs in your name and finally I'll show you using Google sheets exactly how I create my own retrospective revision timetable and why I think that makes your studying more efficient by incorporating active recall and spaced repetition so yeah let's just get started okay so prospective means looking forward and retrospective means looking back and what most people think of as a revision timetable tends to be prospective so it tends to look something like this you've got your dates down one column and then you've got the topics that you're going to revise each day in your kind of rows and the idea is when you're making these you'd predict in advance what kind of topics you want to be doing but this method has some problems and I used to use this when I was kind of pre GCSE but I recognized quite early on that it was I was being quite inefficient and there's four main problems that I used to have with this method so firstly this method requires us to in a way prophesize look into the future and work out and at six weeks in advance what sort of topics we're gonna be struggling most with six weeks from now and this for me was always tricky because there were always random days where something would pop up and I'd be going out with some friends or you know sitting at home doing a raid on World of Warcraft and you know I just wouldn't follow my study timetable or if I did follow it to a tee I'd realize that actually I'm repeating subjects pointlessly or you know more often than not I just won't end up following it at all secondly I think a problem with this method is that it encourages us implicitly to think of revision as something that is a function of time rather than a funk of topics so we've got the time access down on our kind of main access and therefore every day we think okay it's a 7th of April I'd I'm gonna consult my revision timetable and I'm gonna therefore revise these three topics and that's not really how studying should be done and I realized this later that I think is better to think of it in terms of topics rather than in terms of time so instead of thinking that each day I need to get three topics done instead I'll be thinking in terms of subjects and in terms of topics and thinking by the end of the exam period I want to know everything about every topic therefore what do I need to do for that to take place and this is gonna sound a bit abstract but I explain it in more detail when we explain the retrospective timetable and you'll hopefully see that that method solves this particular problem thirdly with this standard prospective revision timetable there's no real way of seeing how much of each subject you know pondering past papers and apart from having your own separate record like if I were to the glance down this list and it's that say the 10th of April I can see that okay well I studied physics electricity on the 4th but I mean do I know the topic are there any other topics in physics there's no easy way of me seeing an overview of the subject and therefore working out exactly what I need to learn and finally there's the whole thing of actually creating one of these time tables in the first place I always used to view this as an activity in procrastination I'd be like okay I need to get some work done you know what I've not made my revision timetable for the year yet I'm gonna sit down and get all my pretty colors out back in the day before the iPad pro existed in the Apple pencil wasn't a thing yeah my pretty color to highlighters out my felt-tip pens and make this fancy big ass revision timetable and I would never follow it equally I had some friends who would regard the revision timetable as such an insurmountable thing that they had to do before they started studying that it put them off studying for like you know a period of weeks two months because they had to sit down and make this timetable it was just couldn't get around to you know overcoming the activation energy required to make one of these so those are just some problems with the prospective revision timetable these are all just my thoughts maybe it works for you but I'll explain what the retrospective revision timetable looks like now and hopefully you might be able to take something away from that to make your own studying a little bit more efficient okay so a retrospective revision timetable looks something like this so as you can see we've got the topics within physiology the six different topics we've got those down the main axis of our spreadsheet and this is the exact opposite to how it is with the prospective revision timetable where we had the dates down the front so let's say it's the fourth of April and I've arbitrarily studied the heart and the kidneys using my retrospective revision timetable I'm gonna note to the fact that I studied the heart and the kidneys on the fourth of April then let's say it's the fifth of April I look at my retrospective sheet and I see oh I haven't revised the lungs yet why don't I do that so I do that and then on the sixth and the seventh I do the rest of the topics because I see that they're blank and I haven't done them yet so now let's say it's the 8th of April and I know that I need to revise physiology I look down my list and think huh so it's been about four days since I've done the heart and the kidneys and I vaguely reckoned that kidneys are a little bit harder so I'm gonna go for the kidneys and then I revised the kidneys on the 8th of April but because I'm a good student and I'm using effective study techniques I'm not just gonna read my notes on the kidneys cuz that would be a complete waste of time instead I'm gonna be using active recall and hopefully when I studied the kidneys on the 4th of April I wrote down a long list of questions for myself that I could answer or I got some passed papers from somewhere all right found an essay plan with essay questions there's sort of stuff either way I'm using active recall I am I've got the book closed and I'm trying to answer all the questions that I previously wrote for myself about the kidneys and then you know I get some stuff wrong so I look it up and I'd say overall I judged that I'm reasonably okay at the kidneys but not perfect so I'm gonna highlight that in yellow this is the classic traffic light method of you know color coding now let's say it's a 9th of April and I think you know what why don't I do the heart because it's been a while since I've done that it's in the heart on the 9th of April and then having answered the active recall questions that I set for myself on the previous time I studied it on the 4th I think you know what I'm actually pretty good at the heart so I'm gonna color that in green antastic and I'm just gonna fill in some random bits so hopefully you can see how I've done that here now let's say it's the 13th of April and I'm thinking you know what I should revise some physiology I look down this list and I see that ok well it's been a while since I studied the kidneys but the kidney is a yellow and actually even though I studied the lungs on the 10th of April they were red at the time so you know what I'm gonna prioritize the lungs because the question I'm gonna be asking myself each day is if the exam were tomorrow which topic would I be least happy about and currently I'm least happy about the lungs which is why I'm gonna revise them on the April the 13th and I'm gonna color code those in yellow afterwards because I think ok I'm now at a yellow level when it comes to the lungs so now let's say it's April the 14th and I'm thinking great I don't have any Reds left on this list so why don't I revise the kidneys because it's been the longest time since I've done that this is space - repetition in action and you know otherwise the kidneys that I'm pretty good at the kidneys are there then that becomes a green and as you can see over time we develop this understanding of every single topic within our subject because each day we are tackling the thing that we find most difficult we're not doing that thing with the prospect of revision timetable where we're studying a topic because we told ourselves we'd studied that topic 6 weeks ago we're studying the topic that we have decided we are weakest on and therefore every time we have a study session we are working on a weakest point and therefore getting the most bang for our buck in terms of revising efficiently and trying to maximize our marks in the exam and on knowledge for day-to-day life and the idea is that hopefully by the end of it as the exam approaches you look at physiology and you think you know what everything is a green on this I know physiology you look at anatomy and think oh I still got a few areas of yellow so I'm gonna screw physiology for today I don't care about it I'm gonna focus on anatomy because those are my weak areas this gives you a very easy way of seeing a whole overview of your subject without having to predict anything in advance because we are terribly bad at predicting the future and finally one great thing about this is that it doesn't really take any effort to get started beyond initially scoping the subject and just writing down the list of every single topic in your spreadsheet and I think that in itself is an incredibly valuable exercise because a subject can often seem very daunting until you write down all the topics that are in it and then you think oh wow you know physiology seems complicated but actually there's only really six topics so great I can do six topics that's like one topic a day I've got eight weeks until my exams I can repeat every single topic eight times that's pretty incredible I can learn all of human geology and that's a nice attitude to have rather than kind of being in the dark could be like oh I need to revise some chemistry but I'm not really sure what to revise cuz I don't really know what's in it and the specification has 85 different points of it and yeah whatever so this is the retrospective revision timetable now let's jump into Google sheets and I will show you how that works in real life by using an example from my third year of university all right so this here is the retrospective revision timetable that I used in my third year of university that was the year that I did by far the best in I won the prize for the best example formance that year when I was studying psychology which was pretty awesome and I think the reason that that happened was because I very aggressively used all of the most efficient study techniques active recall spaced repetition spider diagrams flashcards I'll be making a video at a later date about exactly how I mer eyes 250 different essays too you know absolutely smash those exams if I can say so myself anyway this is the Google sheet and as you can see I've got it split up into section a section B section C which corresponds to our three papers within psychology and as you can see I've got a list of all the topics down one end and the dates in the other one so taking a look at this we can see that on the 20th of April I did these four topics I did implicit versus explicit memory recollection versus familiarity semantics with episodic memory memory and short-term memory versus long-term memory and these are kind of essay based things but I'll talk more about exactly how I studied these particular topics in that video that I mentioned a little bit earlier anyway the point is I've done all these on the 20th of April and then I repeated the top one implicit versus explicit on the 22nd and then I had a bit of a gap and then on the 12th of May I repeated it again and then I started color coding it because I was like right I'm getting close to the exam now I should start color coding my stuff and you can see that over time everything has become green and Saturday was like the Saturday before the exam Tuesday was the Tuesday before I think the examples on a Wednesday or a Thursday something like that and yeah over time I've repeated this topic so like the top essay one two three four five six seven I'd repeated it seven times this was all active recall based repetition it was me drawing out my spider diagram over and over again until I could do it from memory until I could basically write out any essay you gave me on implicit versus explicit memory could cite ten papers in that essay and all because I used active recall in spaced repetition to repeat it seven times until the point where it was green before the exam and we can see I've done the same thing for Section B this was all about animal cognition comparative cognition how the thinking of animals defers to the thinking of humans it's a theory of mind future planning metacognition do animals navigate using cognitive maps do animals understand causality do animal like what's the difference between human and animal language and finally Section C which is my personal favorite was all the various things about intelligence and IQ and for example sex differences in IQ very controversial even race differences in IQ even more controversial very exciting topic and then a little bit of stuff about personality whether there are any genes that influence personality but you know who cares that's all psychology the point is you know 21st of April 2nd of May 12th of May 13th of May the Saturday before the Friday before that sort of stuff and over time the stuff has become green because it means I know all of it so this is the retrospective revision timetable created in Google sheets it's very straightforward list of topics down the a column and then the date that you revise the topic ideally color coded based on how well you knew it before you looked at your book on along the rows and that's really all the rest to it so hopefully this video has explained why I think that the retrospective revision timetable is a better in my opinion more effective more efficient way of studying than the prospective revision timetable the book standard revision timetable that we all implicitly get taught from a young age just to summarize the main reasons why I think it's good are firstly it means you don't have to prophesize into the future because that is impossible secondly it means that you see an overview of all your topics thirdly it encourages you to think of your studying in terms of topics rather than in terms of time because it doesn't really matter how long something takes all that matters is that by the end you know everything rather than you know I'm gonna do my three topics a day for 20 days and it doesn't matter what what happens by the end of it you know focusing on it in terms of topics helps understand stuff and fourthly it's so easy to make one of these spreadsheets you don't have to spend the cognitive effort of thinking six weeks into the future and trying to imagine yourself at that point and how many subjects you need to do instead all you have to do is to write down the topics and you can just get cracking with your revision so thank you very much for watching before we go I just want to say a massive thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video Squarespace are absolutely fantastic website design a hosting content platform that you can use to make a website a blog an ecommerce store anything like that they've got really nice designer templates to choose from so you know if you don't know anything about web design or even if you do you can just get one of those template to get started with them and then you can customize them and listening if you want they've got 24/7 customer support and actually I'm redesigning my own personal website ali abdul comm using Squarespace and it makes it so easy to do and because I know a little bit about coding I'm also able to tweak it to my liking and if I run into any problems I'll just message there to support team and they just get back to you practically immediately and if you want you can even hop on a phone call with them and they'll like talk you through stuff and explain how stuff works so if you fancy giving Squarespace a try you can sign up for a free trial by following the link in the video description and then if you do decide to upgrade to a paid subscription like I've done you can also get 10% off by using my special code so thank you very much Squarespace for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching the video I hope you gained something from me I hope you've you know gleamed some kind of insight as to my personal method for the retrospective revision timetable if you can think of a better name for that please let me know in the comments down below equally if you have any questions about it or any questions about anything else study related drop a comment down below and I'll be more than happy to make videos about this sort of stuff in the upcoming exam season if people are following them helpful so thanks for watching if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to the channel then please consider doing so have a lovely day and I'll see you in the next video goodbye