224. "The Easy Button" For Exam Season Success

Got a lot on your plate at the moment? Today we're helping you thrive in a demanding exam season with the help of "the easy button": specific moves you can make to take some of the pressure off in the short-term and free up a little extra time and brainspace to focus on your studies.

Take a listen, and let us know in the comments where YOU'LL be pressing that easy button in future!

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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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Transcript

Welcome And Exam Season Context

William Wadsworth 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. I'm your host, William Wadsworth, cognitive psychologist and exam success coach, here to help you study Smarter and ACR exams at school, university, and as part of your career. At time of recording, a lot of my students and coaching clients are heading into exam season. And when we've got a lot on our plate in a demanding season like a big set of exams, and the same would apply ahead of a major academic assignment deadline, we often find we need to make smart choices about where we spend our time and energy. We've got so much on our plate, we need to be careful about where we spend our time and energy so we're not overstretching ourselves. So today I want to talk to you about a little idea that can just help take the pressure off a little bit. The idea of the easy button, as I call it. This is the idea that we might choose to make that slightly easier choice in certain areas of our life in the short term at least. And by so doing, we freeing up a little bit of valuable time and energy to focus on that primary goal at the moment, those big set of exams, or possibly for some of you, a big set of uh a big academic deadline. So, this idea of the easy button, this was a term I I remember coining myself in my own house a couple of years back. Uh, at the time my family and I were going through, I'd say, a fairly demanding time of our own. Uh, it wasn't academically demanding this time, though I've had my fair share of demanding exam seasons uh myself over the years. Um, but but in our case, this was more uh about a perfect storm of other life factors all colliding together. Uh, we were dealing with a really tricky house move. Uh, we had two wonderful but very small children in the home at the time who were not giving us a lot of sleep. Uh, we had financial stress, we had some fairly significant health stuff, and it kind of all collided at once. Um, and all of that, I'm happy to say, is in a vastly better place. We're doing really well, life's good. Um, but when we were back in the eye of that storm, uh, there were certain choices we quite intentionally made to make life easier for ourselves. Not necessarily things we'd normally have chosen to do in other seasons of our life, not kind of permanent lifestyle choices, not necessarily things that were you know normally kind of aligned with our values, perhaps, but just some of those little or sometimes not so little options that just helped give us that extra little bit of breathing space uh to get through things. Uh and then we can kind of go back to uh what we'd normally choose uh in in in other times. So as you approach any particularly demanding season, again, perhaps that big set of exams, and let's talk about some of the options that you may choose to make, some of the moves that you might choose to make, uh just to help take a bit of that pressure off. So let's walk through some examples. Number one, working towards future academic goals. You may pause on your studies for exams or classes that are not imminent so that you can focus on the imminent ones. Number two, working towards future career goals. So you may you might pause on, for example, your research into universities you want to apply for or PhD programs you want to apply for. You might pause on applying for jobs and going to interviews. Number three, extracurricular hobbies and interests. You might pause or trim back your regular commitments in your sport, music, drama, and so on. Though with the important caveat here that I do think it's very beneficial for your well-being to maintain, even through a very demanding season, at least some of those things that bring you joy, help you relax, give you social contact, and get a dose of physical exercise in. In my example, in my exam terms back at Cambridge, uh, you know, I didn't get involved with big student theatre productions in exam term, uh, but I did still sing in the college choir three times a week, which is a really nice grounding and balancing activity, and I think it's probably amazing for my stress levels and mental health at the time. Number four, chores and domestic maintenance. Where can you make life easy for yourself on the home front? In my case, again, back in my exam days at university, by the end of exam term, I'd always be overdue a haircut and I'd always have an especially large pile of laundry to catch up on. I'd paused on some of those things just while I was getting through exam season. Um, if you maintain your own home, perhaps the lawn gets a bit more scraggly than normal, perhaps there are non-urgent maintenance tasks, you just note down to take care of once the exams are done. Talk about noting down, by the way, that's a really key one throughout all of these suggestions. If your easy button choice, yeah, when you press that easy button, what you're basically doing is postponing something that ultimately still needs to be done. Make sure that you write it down somewhere, you write those things down on a list somewhere so that your brain doesn't keep obsessing about it and and distract you as you're going through life. Number five, paid work. If you are taking some part-time work alongside your studies, would you consider pausing entirely or perhaps cutting back your hours for the next few weeks while you've got exams on? Though again, do see that previous advice about maintaining at least some ways to wind down and relax. And it's possible that paid work offers that. For other listeners, perhaps you're taking exams as part of your career. You have a demanding day job. I'll often talk to my coaching clients who are professionals taking exams about whether and how much to dial back your working patterns, your shift patterns, um, either on a sort of a longer term basis ahead of an exam, a set of exams, like you know, over several months you drop down to a three or a four-day working week. Or alternatively, or perhaps as well, um, you take a few weeks' study leave completely off work uh immediately before the exam. Now, obviously, there can be a financial trade-off here, everybody's circumstances will be different, this option may not be open to you because of financial constraints. But if you do have the flexibility, this can potentially be a very powerful move to make if you're able to make it. Number six, buyback time. Again, subject to your financial situation, allowing this. And again, I realize that's not going to be the case for everyone. Particularly if you're uh again, a slightly older listener professional, are there any places you can spend a little money in the short term to get you some help in and free up some of your time? So, for example, there may be opportunities for you to get a little bit of help around the home. You might temporarily take on a cleaner or gardener, maybe even treat yourself to a done-for-you laundry service. And a choice I made myself in my student days was to eat in the college canteen for three meals a day leading up to exams. I didn't do that year-round, partly as even though it was subsidized, it was still a shade more expensive than feeding myself. But for a few weeks it was okay. Um and it meant I ate well, and it just took a little bit of uh daily chores out of my hair in terms of cooking and doing the dishes each day. Number seven, use social barriers wisely. I'm conscious this final option uh in particular, uh, I could come across a little bit like the fun police. Um, so I'll emphasize again what we're saying here are not forever choices, they're just moves that you might consider making in the short term while you've got a big set of exams or deadlines on, particularly if you're feeling there's like just that awful lot on your plate, and you just really appreciate freeing up a little bit of breathing space in your schedule. And again, I'm not necessarily saying cut this out entirely for this one. It may well be a case of moderating rather than eliminating. So when it comes to social contact, I think social contact is incredibly healthy for us as humans. I absolutely would not advocate becoming a recluse and locking yourself away without seeing another soul for two months when you have exams on. Please don't do that. Please still see your friends, talk to your friends. But some of us, possibly without really being aware of quite the extent to which is the case, this is the case, can easily find we spend huge amounts of time and energy staying in contact with our social circles every single day, via our preferred social media platforms, chatting in real life or by voice call or messaging back and forth and so on. Now, what you want to do is be really conscious that this activity isn't to the detriment of your long-term success. So consider whether it might be helpful to draw uh at least a temporary boundary in terms of your time, either with just with yourself, do it privately, a private boundary if you like, or actually having that conversation with others and just sort of letting them know, you know, look, I'm not gonna be at the end of my phone throughout the evening, my phone's gonna be off until eight o'clock or whatever time you decide, uh, and I'll I'll catch up and I'll catch up with things then. Um, in particular, what I really want you to watch out for is avoid the trap of being constantly available to answer calls and respond to messages while you are actually studying. That kind of distraction hugely increases the time it takes to complete study tasks and also makes it really harder to access your brain's full potential to do really high-quality thinking and learning. So I'd love to hear in the comments, in the chat, so to speak, for this episode, what easy buttons are are you going to consider pressing this exam season? How can you dial down or pause on something just to make life that much easier? Free up an extra little bit of time and energy for studying. So, just to summarize those options again, you might choose to uh press the easy button in terms of pausing or dialing back. You're working towards future academic goals that aren't imminent, working towards future career goals, extracurricular hobbies and interests, chores and domestic maintenance, paid work, buying back time, and considering setting social barriers. So, you know the drill, if you're a regular listener. Pop your thoughts in the chat. What resonates with you? Where do you think uh you will find some helpful easy button options this season? Uh I'd love to hear what you're thinking, and I do read every single comment. Uh and if this has helped you, why not consider sharing this with a friend who perhaps might be feeling overwhelmed right now and could do with hearing this? Uh pretty much all platforms we go out on have a button you can click to copy the episode link to share with a friend. We always love welcoming new listeners to the Exam Study Expert family so we can reach and help more people in our mission to help people study smarter and ace their exams. Uh, and I'd also just give a little shout out at this time of year to our um my my first ever little book, Out Smart Your Exams. Really helpful if you're heading into a set of exams yourself. If you don't already have a copy, uh this is my handy little guide to lots of tips and tricks you can use in exam week and and actually in the exam hall itself to give you that all-important edge on test day and essentially make sure that you're scoring all the marks you deserve. It's a really powerful set of ideas. Do check that out via the link in the episode description and grab your copy of Outsmart Your Exams today. Make sure you give yourself that valuable edge on exam day. So I will look forward to seeing you next time. Uh we've got a cracking episode lined up next time, uh, which will be really helpful again if you're you're facing exam season. Uh, we've got a uh stunt man, military advisor and high performance expert coming to join us. Uh, he's one of the kind of go-to sources uh for tactics to help people thrive in high pressure situations. Uh, and we we have a fantastic conversation about how you can apply some of those tactics to handling the pressure of exam day. It's gonna be a really fun one, really practical one. Uh, people ask me all the time about how do I handle the pressure in exam season. Uh, so that'll be a really useful episode for that. I hope you'll be able to join us then. For now, I just want to say thanks as ever for tuning in today, and I want to wish you every success with your studies and especially any exams you've got coming up soon. Very best of luck, everyone. You've got this.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

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