210. Fresh Start Habits For Smarter Study: Every Day, Every Week

Today, we're turning good intentions and a long list of things you need to do or should do or would like to do into consistent action!

Key ideas today include:
• fresh start effect as useful motivation
• split goals into one-off and ongoing tasks
• schedule one-off tasks in the diary
• design daily habits with clear what, when, and why
• use weekly blocks for deep, flow-based work
• set seasonal habits around exams or deadlines
• share your habit plan for accountability
• simple homework to lock in your cadence

Your homework: take a second to drop your intention in the comments: what are you going to do, is it every day or every week, for how long, at what time, and what's your why for it?

*

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

*

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on suggested books.

Transcript

New Year Energy And Fresh Starts

William Wadsworth 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast, helping you study smarter, not harder, for a less stressful route to your best exam results this year. I'm your host, psychologist and exam success coach William Wadsworth. Thank you for tuning in to today's mini episode to help you integrate new positive habits and goals into your study routine and kind of into your life generally. If you're listening to this episode as it comes out, then a very happy new year to you. I hope January's off to a great start, and I hope the year ahead brings all that you want. If you're listening to this as an archive episode anytime in the future, then I hope the year so far has been treating you well wherever you're at with it. And please do consider taking today's episode as a little opportunity to review how things are going so far and reset to help make the rest of the year your best possible. Now, if you're anything like many of us here in the Exam Study Expert community, myself included, then you'll often find yourself fizzing with ideas and shoulds uh for all these different new habits or activities we want to integrate into our day-to-day, week-to-week lives. And the start of the calendar year is often peak season for that kind of thinking. Everyone's talking about their New Year's resolutions. And there's actually some science behind why a new week, a new month, and perhaps especially a new year, why this triggers this kind of thinking. It's called the fresh start effect in the literature. See work by psychologist Catherine Milkman and colleagues. Simply, people feel more motivated to pursue goals and make positive changes at these so-called temporal landmarks, like a new year or simply a new week. There's this idea that we're entering a clean slate and we're wiping clean what's gone before and starting afresh. Now, I don't want to suggest you should wait for a temporal landmark to start something good. Now is always the best time. Don't put off making things better. But it certainly explains why many of us feel excited to make positive changes, particularly at the start of that calendar year. So if you've got that kind of energy, let's harness it and put it to good use. Today I want to help you with that. And I want to talk about how to make those positive changes as practical as possible so that you can actually implement them and stick with them and maximize that transfer from a good intention into consistent and lasting action that you can actually stick with. So I'm going to be focusing in my example today, in particular, on study habits and examples from the academic sphere of life. That's obviously the theme of our podcast, but you could probably quite easily see how you can apply the same kind of thinking, the same kind of logic to other areas of your life too, like health and wellness habits or positive social habits. Now, in my coaching work, I often have clients come to me with long lists of intentions and to-do list items. Sometimes they can find that list of all these different things that they want to do, they want to fit in, they want to start doing. It can find it a little bit overwhelming. And a key insight I've found very helpful over the years is firstly to separate each task into two categories. So all those things you think you want to do, you need to get done, you should start doing. We firstly separate them into these two buckets. Um, bucket one is one-time tasks, and the second bucket is ongoing tasks. So the one-time tasks versus the ongoing tasks. So as an example, writing an essay is a one-time task. Whether it takes you three hours or three days, it fits into a discrete amount of time and it has an end point. You finish the essay, you can hand it in. On the other hand, doing extra reading to supplement your lecture series, or perhaps uh extra reading in preparation for a university or college application, these kind of tasks tend to be more of an ongoing thing. Once you've read the current thing you want to read, you can always read the next thing. Another good example of ongoing tasks are our big learning projects, like learning a language or learning an instrument, you're learning French, or you're learning to play the piano. Of course you won't finish learning French or learning to play the piano in a day, in a week, or even in six months. There's always this sense that there is more you could do to learn more. You can always learn to play more pieces on your instrument. You can always work on being more fluent and ever going ever deeper into your journey, learning that particular language. You're never kind of quite finished in the same way. So it's an ongoing task. It's not a one-off thing. This distinction between ongoing versus one-off tasks, um, I'll give you kind of one little analogy for this. If you happen to be conversant in business or economics parlance, I like to think of this a bit like the distinction between capital versus operating expenditure. So capital spend, uh, if you're familiar with this, is a one-off spend like buying a new machine or building a new shop. You spend the money once and then you've got the new machine or you've built the shop. That's capital spend, whereas operating expenditure is an ongoing spending commitment. You're committing to doing it every month or every year. For example, like hiring a new employee to whom you'll then pay a salary every month. That would be an operating expense. Okay, so we start by categorizing your current intentions, all of those things that are floating around in your head that you want to do, that you need to get done, that you feel you should be doing. Think about which are the one-off tasks, which are the ongoing tasks. Take a look at the one-off tasks, whip out your diary, and find some good times to complete those one-off tasks. Pop them in the diary. If you're struggling to find the space, then see earlier episodes in the podcast archives on prioritization andor getting your work done more quickly to help fit it in. That then leaves us with the ongoing tasks, and I'll say a few thoughts on how to think about these. I think it's very helpful to either think in terms of daily or weekly cycles. We all use the daily and the weekly cycle extensively in our thinking quite naturally, so it makes it easier and clearer to make plans if we tie our intention to either a daily or a weekly cycle and make it either a daily thing or a weekly thing. Many habits experts, see James Clear's widely referenced and researched informed writings, for instance, will encourage setting clear daily habits. So, based on the research literature on habit setting, clarity and specificity is key. We set a plan for when we do it, ideally at the same time each day, and ideally include a little link to your why, why are you doing it. So, for example, you want to learn French, you might state your habit as I will practice French for 10 minutes every morning after breakfast, so that I can surprise my bilingual girlfriend by chatting with her in French, as an example. So you've got the habit, what are you doing, for how long, and when in the day. And also your why. Why does that mean uh why is that meaningful to you? Why is that important to you? Uh, or as a second example, if you want to put in consistent work on uh on some kind of uh dissertation project, your habit might become, I will work on my dissertation for one hour per day at 5 p.m. after my other classes. Side note, your habit doesn't have to be forever, it could just be for a season of the year, for example, in the run up to a big set of exams or a big applic or a big deadline or a big application season. So the daily habit is often widely talked about. I often find a weekly cycle helpful to consider as well. Daily habits are great, not everything I think fits neatly as a daily habit. There are some things we want to push forward each week, but we don't necessarily want to engage with them every day. And it's not simply a question of shrinking down the amount of time we spend on them. Learning French can work for just 10 minutes, fine, no problem. It's very easy to chunk that down and just a little bite of it, but some other tasks, just by the nature of the task, don't lend themselves very well to little little tiny little bite-sized pieces of time. You really kind of need longer stretches of time to get your teeth into them and make meaningful progress on them. So for me personally, I find it very hard to do any meaningful progress on any kind of long form writing in such short little five, ten-minute fragments. I find it far easier if I've got like a good chunk of time, like an hour, um, for for any kind of written project. So if there's a written project I want to work on uh continuously, I'd much prefer to set it up as a one hour per week habit rather than a ten minute per day habit. Even though the one hour per week, 60 minutes, is very similar to the 10 minutes per day. That's 70 minutes. The time is kind of pretty equivalent in both ways you set it up. It's much easier for me to kind of tackle it in that one hour per week chunk. So in which case I might state that weekly habit as I will work on, say, my novel for one hour per week at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. So think about which of your tasks lend themselves better to which of your ongoing tasks lend themselves better to the daily cycle, which might fit better as a weekly uh practice. So let me set you a little bit of homework from this episode. What ongoing tasks would you like to get more consistent with at the moment? And do they fit better for you as an everyday or as an every week type thing? And once you've decided that, how long will you work on it for, either each day or each week, and at what time? And if you're listening on a platform that has comments like Spotify or YouTube, please take a second to pop your intention in the comments. What are you going to do every day, every week, for how long and at what time? I'll be cheering you on when I see those come in, as will all the other lovely souls who listen uh to the Exam Study Expert podcast, and we can all cheer each other on and win together. I'll even go ahead and uh when this comes out, uh probably the day after it comes out, the day after it broadcasts, uh, I'll go in and add my current intentions as a comment on Spotify. So you can even go in and find mine if you want. Uh, a little bit of knee strike for you if you're on Spotify. So, very best of luck to everyone in making things happen this year. I hope that's been helpful. Uh, just to give a little bit of clarity on how you're going to turn those good intentions into consistent actions. I wish every success for everyone listening, as always, in all your endeavours this year. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Coaching Invitation And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 10:36

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 examstudyexpert.com slash coaching.