208. Prioritise And Save Time When Studying

Discover the three core ways to prioritise better in your studying, to get through what you need to do in much less time with as little impact as possible on the quality of your output.

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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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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Series Context
• 1:02 Who This Advice Is And Isn’t For
• 2:20 Prioritising Within A Single Task
• 5:10 Smarter Daily To-Do Choices
• 7:16 Auditing Macro Commitments
• 10:05 Wrap-Up And Listener Actions
• 11:27 Coaching Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. I'm your host, psychologist, and study strategy coach, William Balter. Today we are wrapping up a little mini series which is aimed at helping you study faster with minimal impact on the quality of the studying you do. The ideas in this series apply to all forms of studying, whatever the specific kind of task is that you've got to do. So whether it's research, writing, learning, revising, problem solving, really any kind of academic work should benefit from the ideas we've covered in this series. The first installment, uh first installment back in episode 204, saw how levelling up your to-do list strategy can really move the needle in helping you get through your study tasks for the day faster. And then in episode 206, our second instalment, we met the time boxing strategy, a really nice way to help focus the mind through setting time constraints on the amount of time you are allowing for different tasks or perhaps different subparts of the task. Today we're going to round out the trilogy with a brief 101 on the at times challenging arts of proper prioritization for scholars. There are really three main ways we should look at prioritizing our tasks, I think. And we're going to look at all three of those ways today. We're going to look first at the small and then gradually zoom out to the large. So start with the micro and zoom out to the macro. Starting firstly with talking about prioritization within the very task itself. Then we're going to zoom out a little to looking at the micro tasks, as I call them. So those specific things that are on your to-do list each day and prioritization within those. And then finally, we'll zoom all the way out to the macro task, the big rocks, the big ongoing commitments that take up the majority of your time from week to week. Just before I dive in to today's episode in particular, I'd like to add a note about who this advice is not for. So if you're someone who is bumping along, doing the bare minimum in your work to check the boxes required of you each week, you've got plenty of leisure time, you don't normally go the extra mile, then this episode is not for you. You don't need the advice herein. If anything, you want to be thinking in the opposite direction. How can I do 20% more on each task to really knock it out of the park? Rather than trying to prioritize away further. That said, I know the student I've just described tends not to be my typical exam study expert podcast listener. You're all far more likely to have the opposite problem, which is why I'm doing this series. So you want to do your best, you're juggling a whole bunch of different commitments, and it feels like there's never enough time to do all that you want to do. So if that's you, this episode and this trilogy generally is designed to help. So let's take a look at the final idea for this series, how to prioritize more sharply and win ourselves a little bit of uh a much valuable, highly valuable time back as a result. So, as I say, firstly, we'll look uh right down in the weeds, we'll look at prioritizing within the task itself. So, the big question here to ask ourselves is how can we be more disciplined or more focused in the way we're approaching each of our tasks in our studies? What subset of the work that we intend to do on a given task can give us most, if not all, of the benefits of doing the task? Here are some ideas for what this might look like in practice for different kinds of study task. So, number one, prioritizing a reading list, perhaps not doing every bit of reading, uh, but using the essay question, perhaps, uh that you'll be answering to guide us towards just doing the highest value readings. Or maybe you do uh breadth over depth and read everything, but not all the way through. For example, just looking at the making sure you've at least looked at the abstract and maybe the conclusion for all the key readings you want to do in a science subject. Number two, using my tangents list concept that we've talked about on the show before. So this is when we make a note of any interesting tangents, or as some of my coaching clients call them, uh, those rabbit holes that we're kind of wanting to go down, those things that we uh want to investigate further, but but are kind of going off on a bit of a tangent. They're not necessarily mission critical. What we want to do is we we don't want to do them there and then. We want to pop them down on a list, uh, and then we maybe make time to review that list at the end of the day or the end of the week. And then often half of the items you can just cross straight out as not being important at all when you look back on them with fresh eyes a little bit later. Number three, prioritizing uh what you write about in an essay style question to most tightly answer the question. So far from being a worse essay, often a shorter, crisper, more tightly focused essay can often earn a higher score than a big, rambling, unfocused thought that frequently deviates from answering the core question. And that shorter essay might be faster to write. Number four, prioritizing studying just a subset of topic areas ahead of a test or exam, and we deprioritise the areas that we're either already quite good at andor those that are rarely tested. Number five, or perhaps we only make flashcards on the details we don't yet know, if you don't have time to turn every detail of your course into a flashcard. Now for four and five, ideally we'd study every topic, ideally we'd be as thorough as possible in our work. But if the time constraint is such that that is not feasible, that is not practical, then we might need to make some hard choices. And what we ideally would like to do, we need to sort of scale that back a little bit. We need to cut our cloth to fit the available time. If you're generally trying to train yourself to be more strategic in how you approach each of your study tasks, one little idea to consider is setting a timer to go off at regular intervals through the day or through your study evenings. And each time the timer goes off, that's a prompt to ask yourself, am I working in a high value way? Or could I be sharper and more focused in the way I'm approaching this task right now? It's a little trigger to bring you out of the weeds and just check in high-level strategy. Am I being uh as efficient as possible in the way I'm approaching this task, or could I be even sharper, more focused? So the second area, we'll zoom out a little and we'll look at what are the tasks you've chosen to take on in a given day or a given evening of studying. As you're writing your sock to-do list, see episode 204, does everything on that list absolutely have to be there? Are there any tasks you could deprioritize for now and come back to another day? Or even cross off entirely. A useful tool to use alongside this is the someday maybe list. So there may be things that you want to get to someday, maybe, but you don't have time in the foreseeable future. So we we put those ideas on our someday maybe list. We're not necessarily saying no to them forever, but we can come back to that list maybe at the end of the term or semester or after we've got past the big deadline or the big exam when you have a little bit more time. And then thirdly, we zoom out a level even further and we look at those big macro commitments that take up the majority of our time and energy in this particular season of your life. So you probably know the big ones off the top of your head, but it's worth doing a little audit exercise sometimes just to take stock. So think back over the past week and write down all the big things that have it you've invested significant time and energy into. So this could be your different courses or classes, it could be commitments on the home front, maybe looking after family, especially if you're a mature scholar. Uh, it could be work commitments, it could be your hobbies or interests, the sport, the music, the drama, the other extracurriculars. Uh, an even more sophisticated way to do this is a proper time tracking exercise. For the next week, keep a diary of where your time went hour by hour. It can be surprisingly revealing. You often find that there are big time sucks that you didn't even really realize were happening. And or you can cross-check with the screen time data in your phone, what apps took your attention and for how long each day. From your time tracking or maybe looking at your screen time data, you might identify some low-hanging fruit. You're wasting an hour or two or three doom scrolling or on some phone game. We could uninstall that and get ourselves a lot of time back each day as a result. Beyond any low-hanging fruit, we might find there are some hard decisions to make. If your life consistently feels completely overfilled and you're stretched thin to breaking point, it may be that we need to find a way to dial back one of your macro commitments, possibly for a season, if not forever. Is there anything you could pause or scale back on until after your exams? Maybe you pause or scale back your work commitments, or maybe you get some help on the home front, or um maybe there are some extra curriculas you could stop, or perhaps pause. Again, it's not necessarily forever. Or maybe we're simply being too ambitious with our course or classload. Could you take the exam a little later? Or do you have an option to drop a course and scale back your workload each week? If those smaller shifts that we talked about earlier in the episode and earlier in this series aren't cutting it and you're still feeling completely overwhelmed, sometimes we just need that more radical pruning. Again, it doesn't have to be forever, but it could be the right move, perhaps for this current season, just to pause on something for now so that we have the space to make a proper job of the core things we're trying to get done. So prioritize how you work within each task. Prioritize the tasks you work on each day, those micro tasks that are on your to-do list each day. And even consider how you can prioritize those big macro commitments in your life at the moment. Maybe there's something we can pause and see how much lighter and more durable your workload could feel as a result. And with that, that's a wrap on this series. I promised to keep each one to about five to ten minutes, so I've just about managed that for today. Uh I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope this helps uh you save you a little bit of time and get through your work and still perform at a really high level, uh, but in a more manageable, more time-efficient way. You know, one of the things I consistently hear from Exam Study Expert listeners is there's just never enough time to fit it all in. Uh, so I hope the ideas in this series have at least helped you a little bit in that. Please do keep your comments and questions coming in uh if the platform you listen to Exam Study Expert on has that feature. If it doesn't, there's a link you can click in the episode description where you can send me a comment or a message directly. Uh, do note that I don't have your contact details if you click that link. Um so don't ask me a question because I can't reply to it. Uh, but if you do a comment in something like Spotify, for example, I do read and respond to uh all of those. Uh and finally, I want to wish you every success, as always, in your studies uh and good luck studying smarter, not necessarily harder. Very best of luck, everyone. You've got this.

SPEAKER_00: 11:26

Just before you go, did you know you can hire William as your very own coach and mentor to show you the stress free way to ace your exams by studying smarter, not harder. Find out how at examstudiexpert.com slash coaching.