204. Introducing: "S.O.C.K. To Do Lists" - My Perfect Planning Protocol for Faster Studying

Today, I'm sharing a simple way to study faster by clearing mental clutter and turning a long or disordered to‑do list into a sharp plan for today. 

There is surprising power in the right daily task list to boost focus, reduce decisions, and build momentum.

Discover how my all-new "SOCK" method for the perfect daily to-do list can transform your day. 

When you start with a list that is Specific, Ordered and Clear, you can Knock it out in no time!

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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.

BOOK 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/

Get a copy of Outsmart Your Exams, my award-winning exam technique book, at https://geni.us/exams*

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Overview

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Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. I'm your host, psychologist, and study strategy coach, William Wadsworth. We're deep into a time of year at the moment, that time of broadcast, uh deep in the fall/slash autumn, depending on where you are in the world, when just about everyone I know has their sleeves rolled up and is cracking on with the real work of the studying. There's a time in the cycle for resting, there's a time for planning and preparing, there's a time for taking the test and exam that's at the end of it all. And then there's a time in the middle for the doing, the getting on with it. And this time of year always feels like peak doing and getting on with it season to me. And when there's a lot to do, when there's a lot to get on with, it can often feel like there are never quite enough hours to get everything done. Or even if you are finding enough hours, asked about, you might be kind of wondering if there's a more efficient way to get through the studying you need to accomplish each day, each week. So to help you with that question and help you get things done faster, today we're kicking off a mini-series of solo episodes from me with a few top tips on how to study faster. So, no matter what your study comprises, how you can get it done in less time. Um, we're not going to focus on strategies for anything specific. So we're not allowed, for example, to talk about um, you know, memorization strategies to help you learn faster because in this series we're talking about something that could help with any form of studying. Uh, it could be learning, it could be research, it could be writing, it could be practicing problems, whatever. Uh, any form of studying, what are some general ideas that can actually help us get it done uh faster? So I'm going to be broadcasting this series on alternate weeks uh through this month of uh November, our time of broadcast, uh, and interspersed with our normal program of guest interviews and student stories in the alternate weeks when this series is not broadcasting. So the three big ideas we'll be looking at across the series this month are working faster through keeping a clearer mind. I'll be diving into that today, working faster by setting limits, and that's coming up in a couple of weeks' time, and then working faster through sharper prioritization. My goal is to keep each instalment pretty short, pretty bite-sized. I know I let some of my uh solo episodes run a little bit long, and I've done some pretty monster ones uh in the past earlier this year. Uh so I want to take a little bit of a uh a different format for this series and keep it really tight, keep it really short. Possibly not covering every strategy or tactic that I could possibly think of relating to this idea under the sun, maybe just focusing on one or two of the big ideas, my absolute favorites, uh, in the interests of keeping a really tight, really bite-sized uh and hopefully very practical and very useful uh installment for you. So let's start today with the power of a clearer mind and how this can help, surprisingly help with uh actually getting your work done, your studying done faster. It's true, your brain, a bit like a computer, really does run faster when it's less cluttered. The analogy is pretty good actually. So if you ever used an older computer, you may have noticed it running more slowly if you ever try and run too many programs all at once. If you try and do, for example, some video editing or some gaming, something that's quite intensive on the kind of the process of the thinking engine, um, while you've also got a whole bunch of like browser tabs, for example, open in the background, the whole computer runs slower, it stutters, it may even freeze and crash entirely. It's not too dissimilar to what's going on in the brain. So, for those of you familiar with the idea of working memory, um, essentially, this is the store for the stuff you're thinking about right now, in any instance of your life. And you'll know if you're familiar with working memory, that it's very limited in its capacity. In other words, we can only hold a relatively limited set of data or ideas in our mind at any one moment. So the more unnecessary mental clutter we've got, taking up bandwidth in our working memory, the slower the brain processes new thinking, and the slower you will end up working and getting through any form of thinking-related task, which is basically all kinds of studying, you know, every kind of studying you could think of, whether it's writing or learning or research, whatever it is, it's it involves thinking. Um, the slower you end up thinking, the more unnecessary junk you've got sitting around cluttering up your working memory. If we close down all those unnecessary browser tabs in the background and just run the one program that we want to run, uh it runs smoother and faster. And similarly, clearing out the unnecessary mental clutter from your working memory and your mind helps your brain think smoother and faster as a result. And that means we can get through things in less time. As a bonus, we may even end up being able to solve things that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to, or possibly have insights and ideas that a more cluttered mind might not have had the bandwidth to come up with. So there are various things that contribute to mental clutter. We're not going to tackle them all today. Uh, there's things like rumination, planning ahead, um, distractions, mind wandering, and more, all of which have specific tools to address them. And these are things that I work on with my coaching clients to help minimize that mental clutter and help them be as efficient as possible when they engage with their work each day. For today, I want to focus on one big idea that I think is universally applicable to pretty much anybody, which is the power of a really good to-do list. I think it's the first place I'd want to start uh when it comes to reducing our mental clutter as learners, as students, as scholars. Having a specific ordered and complete to-do list for each day helps you knock it out easily and speedily. Now, ideas often spread further when they have a catchy acronym. So I've come up with the acronym SOCK to help you remember this. Um, that stands for the s series of things we want to make a really good to-do list uh uh follow. So SOCK stands for uh this the SOCK of SOC. The acronym stands for S for uh specific, O for ordered, C for clear, and K for knocking it out. You know what you'll be able to do uh when you've uh got through your items in the to-do list. So SOCK SOC. Yeah, we want to make SOC to-do lists. Um, I I always like to think that one day I might have an impact with my various ideas. So in years to come, uh perhaps I'll look forward to seeing posters on classrooms and lecture hall walls about making sock to-do lists and maybe study grammars, doing nice infographics to teach their followers about the sock to-do list. Uh, no doubt having some kind of corny stock sock graphic in the background. Try saying that with false teeth. Um they may even be kind enough to link back to this very podcast as the place the sock to-do list movement got started. Anyway, uh before I get too carried away with myself, let's break down what a sock to-do list actually is, and you'll see how useful it could potentially be for you. It's okay, so let's dive in. The S of SOC stands for specific. Your to-do list has to be specific for today, specifically. So capturing everything you intend to do today, nothing more, nothing less. That might include a mix of study tasks as well as tasks for other areas of your life, if applicable. Applications for jobs or universities or programs or internships, life admin, and all the rest. As you sit down with a clear patch of time ahead of you to work on your stuff, that could be at the start of the day in the morning, that could be at the start of the evening when you've got home. We start to write down, we start by writing down what we are going to do specifically that evening or that day. Nothing more, nothing less. A particular note I want to make is that many students, uh, particularly in at the kind of school stage, have planners or some sort of system through which they receive set assignments, might be Google Classroom or Teams, for example. That alone is not specific to tonight, uh to this evening or today, because it's gonna include things on that system, that planner, that you're not gonna work on today. Typically, you're just gonna choose a subset of whatever outstanding assignment tasks you've got on any given day to work on today. You can't always clear everything tonight, so you'd have to make choices. What are you going to have worked on today? What are you gonna leave till another day? There may also be things that aren't covered by your planner or your assignment setting system. For example, things like exam revision or ongoing work to consolidate what you've learned in class. Um, or as we've said, there may be tasks on there that fall outside of the academic domain that you also need to make progress on today. So your SOC to-do list starts with being S-specific about the exact things you're doing today. We choose what those are, we capture them all, and then we implicitly say no to the rest. So we're making a conscious choice that if it's not on our list for today, we're not gonna get to it today. Sometimes there's a little bit of uncertainty into how much you'll get done that night. You're not quite sure how some of those early tasks are gonna do. So you might separate your list out into the higher priority things that you definitely need to do. Uh, you tackle those first, and then if you have time, other ones that you'll get onto if uh time allows. Now, just capturing the things you're gonna do tonight, nothing more, nothing less, is already a big step towards decluttering the mind. So many of my students over the years tell me about how they find this experience. They kind of have this experience that they they waste a lot of brain space worrying about other tasks that they need to do while they're working on something else. So they're doing you know, beavering away on a set of you know math problems or maths problems or something, uh, and their brain is nagging them about also having to do uh an essay later on, or maybe they should be doing the essay now and they they've chosen to do the maths, but you know, actually, maybe they should have prioritized their essay. So your brain is kind of nagging you and it's worrying, oh, have I made the right choices? When we do our sock to-do list, it gets rid of all that. We make a clear choice at the start of the day or the start of the evening, you eliminate all that kind of mental back and forth of worrying, oh, am I doing the right thing, have I prioritized the right thing. Okay. So we want to start with a specific list, and the O stands for putting it in order of attack. So when you come up with your order, um, you might like to group similar tasks together. For example, if there are multiple tasks that you'll do on your laptop, do those together, then you put the laptop away and switch those to the analog tasks with your just your books. You may have um higher priority tasks at the top. So if you don't quite get to everything on your list tonight, you've already done the kind of the most urgent things. You might also choose to put your more challenging tasks first. Um earlier on in the task list, um, that's typically when your brain is going to be a bit fresher, more alert, and you save those less taxing tasks, maybe kind of if there's anything that's a bit more kind of administrative, a bit more brainless, um, you know, save those for the end when you're a bit tired. Again, when we put our list in order, we're reducing the brain space that goes on making decisions about what to work on next. So we're always super, super um clear about the order we go in. When you finish one task, you know what's coming next. We just need to execute our plan. We don't need to worry about making decisions about our plan as we go through it. One little tip here. If you have a lot of tasks to juggle today, you may even choose, you may even find it helpful, you know, if you've got like quite a lot of different things to get through, then you may choose to even brainstorm your options in rough and then transfer the list into a neat order. One, two, three, four. I like my list to be to be very clearly written out if I'm doing it on paper, which I probably do about half the time. Um I flip between writing my tasks on a piece of A4 paper in my lined black and red notebook. Um, or uh sometimes I'll write my tasks out on separate lines in Excel. Um I like the paper because it's kind of clearer and more in my face, um, but I like the Excel because it's a bit more flexible and I can drag items up and down the list uh to reorder it a little bit more easily. Uh so I tend to do towards the Excel version if there are perhaps a lot of smaller items and perhaps I've got more things going on in the day. Um and I tend towards the paper version if there's maybe just a simpler list of like three, four, five big things and there isn't so much detail. There's less risk I might need to move things around as we go. So we have our specific tasks that in the order we'll attack them. The final thing we need to do is to make sure our list is clear. That's the C in our SOC acronym. So, what does a clear list mean? Well, a clear list means we can look at our list and get the right level of information about what we actually need to do for the task. So, two things I want to say on clear. And again, back to our student who has the planner or the assignment settings platform, your SOC to-do list needs to have a sensible level of detail that allows you to tackle each task without having to go off and go back to the planner or the assignment setting system and look at what you actually need to do. So, for example, item number three on your sock to-do list doesn't read maths homework, it reads maths, chapter 10, questions one through 15. Like there's the information right there on the list. You don't need to go off and hunt for it uh when you get onto the maths. You don't want to be going off and having to hunt for things that you need as you go through the list, that's just going to slow you down. So you make sure your list is crystal clear in terms of what you actually need to do. Now, there's other exception to this, you know. Obviously, you use a little bit of common sense, like if there are many, many paragraphs of detail uh in the rubric, the instructions for a particular activity, you know, don't copy that all out onto your list. You know, that would be an obvious exception where it doesn't make sense to transfer it onto your list. Uh, but if you can express the task um uh relatively simply, um then I definitely recommend putting it on your sock to-do list itself. Uh the other thing I wanted to say was make sure our list is clear by expanding out any big unstructured items into appropriate substeps. So you wouldn't, for example, write uh you know, university or job applications. Um, you would add in the detail about what you're actually going to do for that task tonight. So your tool list type your task would instead read research X or Y university, or start to brainstorm ideas to include in my application essay. Um similarly, you wouldn't just write exam revision or even exam revision on X topic, write the actual task you're going to do. So you'd write make flashcards on page one through 20 of my photosynthesis lecture, or attempt the 2023 past paper part one. So very specific. It's the actual task. Again, you're not leaving any decisions for later, you're making decisions on exactly what you're going to do at the start of the evening. Be clear in your description of the task. Again, minimizing that brain space needed to engage with the task when the time comes. Um and also to make sure that the details associated with future tasks aren't rattling around and taking up mind space when you're working on those earlier tasks in the list. So finally, K stands for knock it out or knock it off. I would have said C for cross it off, but then it wouldn't get my SOC acronym. It would have two C's at the end. Uh, and that felt a bit unsatisfying. So uh we're gonna go in for K for knock it out, uh, knock out each item in turn and then knock it off your list with a big happy tick beside it or big uh satisfying strike through as you prefer. The bonus of the sock to do list strategy goes beyond just the whole brain space conversation that we've been stressing today. It also helps with your motivation and overcoming procrastination. And it's particularly um, you know, in by by through a couple of mechanisms. And so we're much less susceptible to procrastination when we have a crystal clear list of things that we're specifically planning to do today, because that clarity is real power. What we're tapping into here is the psychology of intention setting. A clear and specific intention written down is a super powerful tool we use in lots of contexts when we want to build habits or nudge human behavior. Um, you know, the idea of intention setting is one of the most powerful tools behavior change psychologists have found. It's extensively used when we want to help someone give up smoking or change, for example, exercise or nutrition habits for the better. Um, in addition to the intention setting element and that clarity and specificity, um there's also a really nice buzz of satisfaction that contributes to your to this kind of buzz of motivation as well that comes when you do that crossing off or striking through or ticking off of each item in turn on your list. To the little moment of uh joy and satisfaction that only builds as you cross off the first and then the second and the third item all the way through to that particular joy at the end of the day, at the end of the night, when you get across of that final item, patting yourself on the back for a job well done, completely completed to-do list. So, make sure your to-do lists are specific to each day, order them sensibly, make them crystal clear by adding in necessary detail, and look forward to knocking each item off as you blast through your to-do list in record time. Give it a try tonight, and as always, please send me any questions or your feedback if you're trying a sock to-do list for yourself, especially if you're putting this in action. I'd love to know how you got on with it. And if you're listening on a platform that supports comments, uh, for example, YouTube or Spotify, do take a moment to send me your feedback and let me know how you get on. For now, I just want to say thank you as always for tuning in today. I will look forward to catching you again very soon, wishing you every success, as always, in your studies.

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If you've got exams coming up, you can now get all of William's favorite tips and tricks to save you time and get you higher grades all in one handy cheat cheat. Grab your coffee at examstudiexpert.com slash free tips. Thanks again for listening and see you soon.