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198. The Stitch in Time: Small Habits for Academic Success

• Episode 198

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We explore five essential habits that can transform your academic performance by taking small, consistent actions throughout your studies rather than cramming at the end. Doing these little things well from the beginning will make your academic life significantly easier when exam time arrives.

• Stay organised as you go along – identify and remove your specific bottlenecks to staying organised
• Learn what excellence looks like in your subject from day one – seek examples and guidance early
• Address confusion immediately rather than postponing understanding – don't let knowledge gaps compound
• Create a "tangent list" for interesting but non-essential topics – balance core learning with exploration
• Practice memory journaling daily – spend five minutes retrieving key points to consolidate learning
• Keep your approach simple – start with one or two manageable habits rather than trying to do everything

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Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress.

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to the Exam Study Expert podcast. Today I've got a little solo episode for you, inspired by circumstances all around me here, particularly here in the UK, where students and their teachers and their parents are going back to school and the university terms are also starting just a few weeks away now. So I know this is back to school season, not just here in the UK but also for many of my listeners around the world, though I know some of you have also been back to term for a few weeks already by now. So with that backdrop of very much a sort of a season of new beginnings and a bit of a reset for so many of us around the world, I wanted to share some sage wisdom coming to you, if you want to think of it this way, from future you Some of the things that future you at the end of this year might have fervently wished you might have done all along to make your life so much easier down the line in the run-up to that. So, yeah, our big theme for today is doing those little things well throughout the academic year or throughout your programme of study, such that we set ourselves up for success in the long run. It's your grandma's old advice a stitch in time saves nine Little and often you know these kind of bits of ancient wisdom so often about doing the little things now that make things easier for us in the long run. Even the good book has some pretty clear advice on this. The proverb reading the lazy one does not plough when the planting season arrives, so that at harvest time they shall look but find nothing.

Speaker 1:

And you'll find similar thoughts in the text and teachings from religions and philosophies the world over. Chinese philosopher Confucius, for instance, writing that, faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage. Hard man to please Confucius. But how many times have we embarked on a new course, a new term or semester, a new round of studying for the next set of exams and told ourselves this time will be different. This time I'm going to do X and Y as I go along, I'll start buckling down early, I'll meditate every day, I'll exercise every day, I'll write my flashcards as I go along, I'll save myself all those problems I had before where it sort of piled up at the end.

Speaker 1:

And yet, when reality bites, the realities of football practice and orchestra and keeping up with friends, or, for many older scholars, the reality of balancing your day job or your clinical practice or even taking care of your family. When all that starts to swirl around on top of your ever-growing list of things you want to achieve in your studies, those good intentions about what you'll do to take care of the, the, the extra steps in your studies day in, day out, week in, week out, some of those just fall by the wayside and we get it, we get kind of overtaken by the just getting it all done and getting through each day, getting through each week, and the extra, extra spice on top gets, gets neglected. So I'm not sure I necessarily go with confucius in terms of a lack of courage per se always being to blame for those good intentions about the habits we want to do day in, day out getting forgotten. I think so often it's. We know we should be doing things but it just becomes hard, like often really hard, to kind of fit in the extra stuff amid everything else that you need to do. As many of you will know, I've been coaching scholars of all kinds for half a decade now and across many hundreds of students I've worked with at school level, taking professional exams, university, everything in between implementing those kind of good intentions for going the extra little steps as they go along, versus those who start out with good intentions, grand intentions, but don't last past the second week of term or the second week of your study schedule.

Speaker 1:

So the pattern I've seen is, as so often is the case with the things we teach here at Exam Study Expert the pattern is to keep it simple. The secret is to keep it simple. Don't be complex, don't be tempted to make it over elaborate, don't be tempted to be over ambitious with what you can achieve. Keep it simple, keep it doable. Complex or elaborate or overly onerous is the enemy of getting things done. We like things simple, we like things easy, we like things as close to effortless as we can possibly make them, so that we stand the best possible chance of weaving them into our messy and busy day-to-day reality.

Speaker 1:

And if that means we need to scale back our ambitions a little bit on day one, that's fine, let's do that. And if that's not ultimately where you want to be and you want to be taking on more and more of this kind of extra stuff, like you know, I'd always suggest starting a little bit small, starting a little bit conservative, and then we can always build up as we go along and we gain confidence. But don't make the mistake of biting off more than we can chew on. Day one it not happening and then nothing at all happening. I'd rather a little bit of it was actually happening than we were trying to aim for too much and then it didn't actually happen at all.

Speaker 1:

So today I want to talk through five big habits. Now I'll keep this episode fairly tight, but I've got five ideas for you, some of the really useful little things that we can think about doing as we go through the academic year or through your kind of course of study. To make things easy for you by the end and if you're listening to this episode at a time where it's kind of not the start of your course, not the start of an academic year, not the start of your programme of study, and you're already well underway and partway through, then why not take this episode as a moment to stop, take stock, refresh, treat today as day one, a new start, a new beginning. Let's put aside what's gone before and what might or might not have happened and give yourself the opportunity for a fresh start as of today and maybe integrating one or two or three of the ideas we talk about today. The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, but then the second best time is today.

Speaker 1:

So, even if it's not the start for you, treat this as a great opportunity, a great impetus, a great bit of inspiration to kind of adopt some of these new habits to help you out in whatever part of your course or programme is yet to come. Any one of these things, done rather than not done, can make a big, big difference to your academic performance in the long run. I will try and stay as true to my promise as I can in terms of keeping each one of these as easy as possible, giving you a really kind of easy, you know, very doable, very actionable way to apply each of these ideas, the light touch, so we have the actual best chance of actually achieving whatever of these you decide you want to integrate into your own study habits.

Speaker 1:

So, without further ado, let's dive in and take a look. So in at number five organise. Now let's tackle a simple one. First, stay organised as you go.

Speaker 1:

Some years ago on my academic journey, I fell into the trap of not really organising my stuff as I went, and so I'd hit the end of the year with a big messy jumble of sheets of notes and assignments and so forth haphazardly stuffed into different folders or my bag. I was lucky if they were all stuffed in the relevant folder for the subject that they belonged to. But even then it was quite a big task to kind of organise it all, make sense of it all and get it into a form where I could actually use that in exam time and study from that. And I guess it probably took me at least twice as long to do the organisation at the end, compared to if I'd just done it bit by bit as I went along. I think we all would prefer to be like. I don't meet many people that would say they wouldn't prefer to be organised.

Speaker 1:

So I think the key thing with this one is figuring out why it's difficult for you to stay organised, if that is indeed the case, and sometimes the bottleneck can be just quite a simple little practical thing.

Speaker 1:

So for me I realised that one of the reasons I wasn't filing stuff away and staying organised as I went along was that I didn't actually own a hole punch and many of the sheets that I wanted to file away needed little holes punching in them. So I got hold of a cheap light little hole punch mini hole punch thing that I could carry around with me and that meant that when I got new pages that I wanted to file away, new assignments, new handouts etc. I could just do that as I went along, punch the holes there and then and put them in the right place, and then I would have everything sorted and there would never be any need to do any organisation at a later point. For you it could be a different bottleneck, so you know, maybe it would be taking that extra like 15 or 20 seconds at the end of a class.

Speaker 1:

you know when the bell rings or when the lecturer dismisses you just taking that extra little bit of pride in your work and you know, even if you're feeling frustrated by it, it was a hard piece of work or a hard lesson, hard lecture, you know. File that away properly rather than just sort of sweeping everything into your bag. Just take that extra little beat at the end. You won't make it out of the classroom or the hall any quicker. There'll still be a queue out to get out the door. So just take that extra moment just to put it away neatly before you take off. Stay organized in the now and the future. You will be very glad that you did so in a number four is know now what good looks like. It's quite an interesting one for me again and, as some of you might know, if you know a little bit about my story, if we've met before, you know I did well really well in terms of my grades that I got on my academic journey.

Speaker 1:

But the thing is I tended not to land those grades. I tended not to get good grades on day one, far from it. I tended not to get good grades on day one, far from it. Often those initial weeks I was performing at a fairly mediocre level in the class. You know, when the term was starting, when I was embarking on a new course, I didn't do so well. I was kind of average at first, sometimes not even average, sometimes not really good, very good at all.

Speaker 1:

Now, over time, over the course of the year or multiple years, whatever it was, I would learn what it took to be successful in that subject and I would catch up and I'd eventually be able to do well. But I wasn't doing super well at first. So I think the lesson from this is taking the time to learn what good looks like for your course, for your subject, for your programme of study, as early as you can, particularly if it's a new subject for you or you've moved. So carve out a little bit of time at the outset, in those early weeks, to ask questions, to listen, to, plan, to refine your approach.

Speaker 1:

Ask your teacher or your course leader for guidance on what kind of work scores. Well, have them. Show some examples of students' work from previous years. Perhaps that really shone. You know, if you have an exam board that publishes examples of what kind of okay versus really good looks like. Study those. Go into detail on those. Seek out examples of what kind of okay versus really good looks like. Study those. Go into detail on those. Seek out examples of excellence in your subject. Another way to do this is befriending peers who've gone through the same course as you in the previous year, particularly those that were successful, and find out what they did. Just beware with that, though, that not all peer advice is good advice, even if they performed well. Try not to rely on guessing or instinct. Be great on purpose, not by accident. Learn what good looks like now so you can work towards delivering that from the outset, not six months in. In at. Number three is understand now.

Speaker 1:

So this one's all about taking the time to really understand what's going on and kind of get your head around the course material as you go along, rather than burying your head in the sand if you find things hard or confusing at points. If you're starting to take more stretching academic courses, you'll inevitably come across material that you don't fully understand at first. For me this was especially true on some of the harder courses I took at university level when I was at Cambridge, particularly in my first year of university, before I sort of got my act together a little bit more. So I'd sit in those 9am lectures often half asleep which was probably a big part of the problem in hindsight and I wouldn't really follow all the explanations while I was sitting there in the lecture. But I'd tell myself that I'd study it all later and I'd get my head around it in my own time and I could take my time and do that on my own and really, you know, really dig into it and figure out what was going on. And so then I'd get around to attempting the weekly essay or the weekly problem sheet based on the lectures that week, and inevitably I wouldn't have enough time for that assignment. So I wouldn't really have the time I needed to really wrestle with the stuff I wasn't understanding. So I'd end up leaving holes or guessing my way to get through things and I'd go to those supervisions at the end of the week and the tutor would walk through how to solve the problem or you know kind of the core ideas, the core concepts that I should have got and should have included in the essay. And I kind of nod along and I'd say to myself, yeah, you know, I'd definitely study up on that, so I know how to do it on my own. But then it would be into next week's lectures and next week's problem sheets and next week's essays and that would all land. And I think you know I have a great idea. You know what I'll do for that previous week, that stuff that I didn't quite get from last week.

Speaker 1:

I'll have tons of time when it comes to the holidays at the end of term, plenty of time over Christmas to catch up on all these bits that I haven't quite got as I've gone along and of course it never quite works out like that, does it? When you're in a busy academic term, the prospect of a multi-week holiday can virtually seem like infinite time that you have access to at the end of it all, time enough to do anything that you need, and it's just not. Holidays can be a good time to catch up, to consolidate, to fill in the blanks, but only up to a point. The time goes far quicker in a holiday than I mean, certainly for me, than I ever predicted. There's never enough time to do even half of what I dreamed I'd get done in a holiday, and besides that the problem of falling behind compounds. So if you don't grasp a lecture or two worth of material or a lesson or two worth of material, the problem then compounds as you work through the rest of that topic or maybe even go on to further topics that build on that previous topic. You know you don't have those foundations to build on, to access the later material in the course. So you get further and further from the pace and it gets harder and harder to understand those later courses, those later lessons or lectures, if you haven't understood the prerequisite material that is being built on.

Speaker 1:

So what to do about all of this? Well, I think you've basically got two major choices if you feel you're in a situation where you are not understanding significant parts of your course as you go. Option one is to seriously evaluate whether it's the right course for you. It might not be. Don't be a hero. There is no shame in switching to a course you're more suited to, you'll be happier. You'll be more successful. Option two is digging in and wrestling with the tricky material, really taking the time you need to get your head around those bits that you haven't quite understood.

Speaker 1:

There are at least a couple of keys to making this work time and energy. For me. Back to kind of first year Cambridge me not really understanding a lot of the courses I was going through I would have needed to have reined up quite a lot of the courses I was going through. I would have needed to have freed up quite a lot of time so I had both time to get a proper night's sleep, so I was actually awake in lectures and kind of had a decent energy level when I was attacking those, those problems in my own time. And I would have needed to free up time during the day as well to kind of have that time to really dig in and study and wrestle with the tricky material. And in my case that would have meant I would have needed to cut back on my extracurricular pursuits and free up time in my schedule so I could actually give myself half a chance of keeping up academically.

Speaker 1:

And the key thing here is, whichever way you go, whether you decide it's not the course for you, or whether you decide you need to take a different approach and perhaps dig in and kind of wrestle with the material a bit more, maybe adjusting other parts of your life, to give yourself the space to do that. The key thing is don't put your head in the sand. If you feel things are sliding, be real with yourself. Take the action now. The longer you leave it, the harder it gets In. At number two, say no for now. So the counterpoint to my last comment is that you don't have time to do everything you might want to do.

Speaker 1:

Once you get to a certain level of academic study, once you progress to a certain level, there's always more depth you can go to. There's always more papers you can read. There's more authors you can get relevant opinions from. There are more problems you can practice. There's always more you can do. You will never be quote unquote finished. The key, as with so many things, is to find that balance. So while it's important to really understand the core material, as I was talking about in the previous tip, the parts that you really really must know or understand or have read we might not always completely cover all the, I guess more peripheral material that we might ideally want to it's nice to have goes into more depth, more detail, but we can still perform at an acceptable level on our course without having that periphery nailed down to quite so much detail.

Speaker 1:

So one thing I talk about with my coaching clients is the tangent list idea, and this is particularly helpful when you are at those slightly more advanced levels in your academic studies. So it's a kind of university level or professional exams, and this is a simple list of the extra readings, the extra questions, the extra little points that you want to look up issues, maybe extra books or papers you want to read, extra problems you ideally want to practice. You know all these extra little things that you might ideally want to do. You're going to take the decision to actually park those for now, so you keep this list to one hand as you're studying. Anytime you come across one of these little tangents, or rabbit holes as some people call them, just write that point down on your tangents list and don't pursue it for now. And then, when we design your weekly routine together, one of the rituals we might allocate time for is some time to review your tangents list from that week and we give you at least a little time to pursue some of those points. Maybe you cherry pick a few of those most interesting points on your tangents list from the last week and go and do a little bit of research and reading on each of those. So we focus on the core and but we have a little bit of time to explore as well and do a bit of that peripheral work, with appropriate boundaries and balance.

Speaker 1:

In at number one is the idea of learn now. So, as many of you will know, probably my favourite subject of all is how to learn effectively and the science of getting stuff to stick in memory, and it's one of perhaps as a result of that, is one of the most common things that that that my kind of study strategy coaching clients bring to to our coaching sessions. You know, particularly at this time of year as new academic terms and semesters are getting underway, which is, you know, how can we do a little bit of study or revision as we go along so that there's less to do at the end. Almost everyone who's studying for a final exam of some kind can divide their work into two broad phases. So there's the initial discovery of the content and then there's the final review or revision in the last weeks or months before an exam. So kind of initial discovery, initial learning, initial presentation, initial understanding, and then the kind of final review and revision to make sure you kind of know it all and master it all ahead of the exam.

Speaker 1:

So we're talking here about what to do in phase one. So while you're in school, going through your normal lessons through the term, or at university, getting your normal lectures through the term or semester, or if you're following a self-propelled course to study for professional exam, and you're kind of going through the initial chapters or the initial online classes or whatever for the first time, what can you do during this initial phase one to make life easier for yourself? You know, six months, 12 months down the line when it comes to phase two and you've got the exam a few weeks away and you're doing your final study to get ready for the exam. There are quite a lot of options for this, and the best option for different people depends on things like the different subjects you're taking, your preferred style, and a big one is how much time we've got to work with. So you know, have we got the luxury of a lot of blank canvas time to populate each day, in which case we've got more options. Or, as is perhaps more common with the students I work with, are we fitting things into an already quite full schedule each week and we have to be a little bit pragmatic about how much extra time we allocate for the stuff beyond. You know, keeping up with the week-to-week sort of homework and assignments and coursework, etc.

Speaker 1:

One of my favourite ways to approach this is memory journaling. I talked about this back in episode 23 of the podcast, my five minute a day secret to supercharge your learning. In essence, memory journaling is a daily exercise to retrieve and therefore consolidate some of the key points you've learned in your classes or lessons that day. We take a moment at the end of each day, or perhaps the following morning, to simply write down from memory some of the key points that you covered that day, and ideally we do this again. I'm a big fan of kind of you know these idea of daily rituals or weekly rituals. So we are doing good things on purpose as part of a system that's easy to keep going with. So we find a time for us that works each day to do our memory journaling and we stick to doing it at the same time as part of our daily routine.

Speaker 1:

It's a really nice way just to help lock in some of your learnings as you go through week to week, month to month, so that by the time you get to exam season you've got a bit more locked away that you've actually remembered through the rest of the year from kind of earlier in the academic year, from kind of earlier in the academic year. So if you are serious about your success in the exams you're working towards at the moment, it would be my pleasure to work with you as your study strategy coach to help you find the right day-to-day, week-to-week habits, routines and systems that not only help you set you up for great success in your final exams but also make the whole process feel lighter, feel easier, feel more enjoyable. I should say no one else does coaching an exam study expert it's me, with the exception of very niche questions like how to go about your kind of academic writing at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. So if you're working on your writing skills for a dissertation or thesis, I do bring in some external expertise. That's not me who is much better placed to talk about that, because that's not a personal sphere of expertise, but for everyone else studying for their exams at school, university or even as part of their career.

Speaker 1:

You have the opportunity to work directly with me so you can optimise your study strategy for your specific circumstances, so we can set you up to ace your exams this year the smart way I can make a difference to you, you know, even at the last minute ahead of your exams. But the earlier we start working together, the better, as the more time you'll have to benefit from having adopted the most efficient and effective version of your study system, your study habits. The whole process of working together starts with a casual chat about how you're getting on and how I might be able to help. You can book that today, your complimentary consult with me at examstudyexpertcom forward slash coaching. That's examstudyexpertcom forward slash coaching. I look forward to meeting you soon.

Speaker 1:

And with that I just wanted to say thank you, as always, for tuning in today.

Speaker 1:

It's been great to have your company as we think about some of the right habits.

Speaker 1:

You can take some of the right steps you can take here at the start perhaps, of the academic year and set you up for success in the long run. And as we wrap up this episode, I'd encourage you to reflect on the various ideas we shared today and if you were just to pick one or two of the ideas from today that you want to put into action you want to prioritise putting into action take a moment to actually write this down. So you know, grab a physical piece of paper, a notebook, or, at the very least, get the notes section of your phone out and take a moment to actually write down what's like the one or two, or maybe even three things from today that you really want to act on to make life easier and more successful for you this year. Don't just leave this being a nice set of ideas. Let's go, take some action and make a difference. It's been such a pleasure to have you with me and I sincerely wish you all every success in your studies this year.

Speaker 2:

If you've got exams coming up, you can now get all of William's favourite tips and tricks to save you time and get you higher grades all in one handy cheat sheet. Grab your copy at examstudyexpertcom. Slash free tips. Thanks again for listening and see you soon.