The Strange Things I Do To Study Better As A Cambridge Student

There are a lot of productivity tips that I am sure you've heard before. There are also productivity tips that I don't think you've ever heard. This video is about those odd, slightly strange productivity tips that I absolutely swear by, that help me be super productive as I'm in the middle of exam season at Cambridge. I still have time to do my social media. I still have time to work on my company and everything is in balance. And it's because of these five slightly strange, slightly unusual productivity tips that are going to absolutely revolutionise your life. Hack number one is to talk out loud and to look absolutely mad whilst you are doing it. If I really need to understand something, whether this is I need to understand a concept for an exam, or whether this is I need to understand how I'm going to solve a problem in my own life, or plan something properly, the worst thing that you can do is have everything swimming around in your head. Because when things are in your brain, your brain tends to over-report feelings. So you'll feel more stressed than you actually are, more anxious than you actually are. And this just compounds into you becoming unable to resolve the issue or to work out what it is that you need to know. The best way of overcoming that is through speech, vocal speech. Humans have evolved to communicate through talking. It was always our first point of communication. And that's why it's so powerful. When you explain something aloud, you're forced to really confront your understanding of it, to retrieve information that you might forget if you're just sat there thinking. And bonus points if you can do this with somebody back and forth, so they can really challenge you. So if you're learning for an exam, they can ask you questions. If you're trying to sort out your life, they can just prompt and make sure that you're actually making the best decisions. Hack two is to use the 30 minutes before you go to bed as one of your primary memorization windows. So most people will sort of use that evening, wind down to journal, to listen to some music, to lie in bed and to go to sleep. And that is absolutely brilliant. You should be doing all of those things. But prior to going to sleep, you get this boost in memory capacity. Because of the fact that your brain is processing memories overnight whilst you are sleeping, this makes that time before you go to bed really critical for getting in last minute information that you really want to remember. Because that's what's going to be processed and consolidated first as you're sleeping. I'm not saying that this is about cramming before you go to bed, but if you have a cheat sheet or you have some key mistakes or things that you really want to remember, just reviewing these for half an hour before you go to bed is going to make them so fresh and front and center in your brain the next day, which is especially useful if this is the night before an exam, for example. The third hack is to always give your worst answer first. Always. Because the worst possible thing is for you to have a blank sheet of paper in front of you, for you to have nothing. And the barrier to starting is really significant if your condition for entry is your highest possible piece of work, your final draft. You're never going to go from nothing to final draft immediately. And if you have that mental pressure that that's what you should be doing, it's no wonder you're procrastinating all the time. And I know it's cliche and you will have heard it before, but starting with the worst possible option is the best thing you can do. If I have an essay due and I can sense that I'm going to be putting it off or I feel like I need to do really well, I will force myself to write a rubbish essay. Like really bad. Like the sentences hardly connect and hardly make sense, but it's got the structure and it says what I want to include in the essay. And because I have that, I've now overcome the initial inertia of not having started. I'm going to have momentum that's going to carry me through and allow me to now transform that into a good piece of work. This really helps you bypass any perfectionist tendencies you have through what is known as the Zaganic effect, which is where you start when you start something, your brain has sort of has this open loop and it wants to finish that thing. So it's much harder for you to procrastinate the task. Hack four is to throw some degree of consistency out of the window. So there's a really interesting concept in neuropsychology called desirable difficulty. Basically, you want something that makes what you're doing hard. Because if it's not hard, then it's too easy and your mind is going to wander, you're going to get distracted. And a lot of the time, that is the root cause of why you're getting distracted doing the things that you do. In order to prevent that, one thing that I do very frequently is I mix up my study environments quite ad hoc. So one day I might be studying in my room, another day I might be in the library, then I might be in a cafe, then I might be outside. And I tend not to have significant correlation between my study space and what it is that I'm studying. Beyond that, that I try to keep my study space quite refined and not too cluttered whatsoever, regardless of where it is. But having this change of environment, change of scenery, it just adds that level of desirable difficulty that makes it easier for me to focus. It also prevents me getting into a routine where if I'm studying in one place and I've checked my phone a couple of times, the next time I study in that place, my brain sort of has this thing, and your brain does too, where because you've given yourself permission to be distracted previously, it's more likely that because you're in that same location, you're going to get distracted in future. So changing up those locations and sort of giving yourself a bit of difference in your study sessions, a bit of variety, something that stimulates your brain is going to prevent you getting too stuck in negative habits or negative routines. It also helps me just look forward to my study sessions because I know I'm going somewhere new. Hack five is to have a shutdown ritual. The worst possible thing that you can do is sit down and work and not have an end point because this makes it really hard for your brain to know when should I stop. And then you feel guilty about stopping and work's constantly in your mind, so you're not able to rest properly. And then because you're not able to rest properly, you're not able to do work to the best of your ability. And that's just a lose-lose scenario. You want a specific end point. So once you get to the end of a particular chapter of a textbook, once you've finished an essay, a specific condition that once you hit, you stop working. Even if you have more work to do, you can move that to after the end condition. You can move that to the next day because the worst thing you can do for your brain is to have loads of these unfinished loops where you're trying to do 10,000 things at once. You want to do something, tick it off, move on to the next thing. I personally struggle with this quite a lot because I like to do a lot of things at once, then what that means is I have so many open loops in my brain that I find it hard to concentrate on any one thing. I get stressed, I get overwhelmed, and then that'll eventually lead to burnout or a crash out. That is not very fun. That is not what you want to be happening. And so the biggest solution that I found personally is to just have these end conditions and when I hit them, that's it. Most effective study habits can kind of be the ones that feel wrong at first. So those are my five odd study revision work habits that I use all the time as a second year at the University of Cambridge. And I really hope that these have been helpful for you. If they have, then please do give this little video a thumbs up. Subscribe to my channel for more content just like this one and I will see you in the next video.