How to Study With Me (Instructions)

hey everyone it's Justin here this is a instruction video for the guided study with me that I've created you can find a link to that one in the description the idea is that you watch the guided study with me video while you are studying and it's going to go through the timings and what you should do at each stage and then you can well study with me I guess uh and then this video is the one that tells you what to do during those phases the difference between normal study with MES and then the one

that I've created is that the techniques are not the most straightforward or intuitive to use unless you've already had prior training or you've been watching a lot of my content so I'm going to go through and explain how that guided study with me is structured why it's structured that way what you should do at each phase and you can go away and watch that study with me video while you're actually studying and not get distracted by uh explanations and instructions during it so the idea with that study was with me is that it's broken up

into a couple of different phases the first thing is the general prep phase and during the prep phase uh it's just about making sure that we're in the best situation before we start studying what we're really talking about here is optimizing our environment so making sure that we've got a nice workpace distraction free uh you know we're able to focus in I would recommend having something like water or tea or coffee or something with you I usually like to have one hot beverage and then one cold beverage it just makes me feel good don't ask

me why the next thing is to make sure that we are proactively trying to eliminate any distractions that we can predict so this means putting your phone and things on do not disturb your computer on do not disturb telling people that maybe physically around you don't disturb me uh and just doing what you can to make sure that during your focus session there isn't going to be something preventable to take you out of flow the other thing that I'd recommend is that in that video there is some white noise that's playing as well this is

designed to help you focus so I would recommend watching that video with headphones on if you can the next part after we've done the preparation is to do five deep breaths and the reason we're doing these five deep breaths is uh to create a focus ritual it's like a routine activity that you do before you enter into a focused State not only is there some evidence to say that really deep slow breaths is helpful for helping us focus and relax but it also can be created as almost like a prefocused ritual which means that the

deep breaths over time slowly help us to condition ourselves into entering into that focus zone it's not enough just to do the deep breaths um you have to actually try to let yourself feel that as you breathing out you are getting a little bit more calm a little bit more focused and more zoned in with each breath I would also recommend doing a like Max inhalation and the way that you do this is you take a deep breath in you try to use your diaphragm to Brea breathe in so don't breathe in like like that

but breathe in outwards you can't see cuz you can see here there you go so you're breathing outwards with the diaphragm um and then once you breath in all the way then you breathe in again so and then that allows you to get that extra level of inhalation to get that maximum breath and then a slow exhale and then you do that five times and across the each breath you try to think of yourself getting more and more focused in after you do your deep breaths which naturally doesn't take that long uh we're starting our

first studying phase which is scoping scoping should only take a few minutes and the idea with scoping is that you're just going to go through your resources and you want to have really all of the resources laid out already this might be a textbook it could be a you know lecture slides it could be a um you know a course guide articles online whatever it is go through very very quickly and just pick out and write down what you think are the main most important Concepts so uh you you'd create essentially like a Word document

you might type this out if you'd like with just a list of the most important Concepts and keywords you don't have to get it fully right it doesn't have to be like Mega comprehensive if you can get what seem like generally the most important that's going to be enough to work with again again you really can't do this part wrong I would recommend that if you're doing a reasonable study block aim to get at least 10 different keywords on this page and probably not more than 20 or 30 so again it's not about getting every

single bolded word on there it's about being a bit more Discerning about what you think is the most important and and starting with that so after we do that for a few minutes we're then moving on to the next step which I've talked about a lot of my other videos and I've decided to just give this a name which is called maybe mapping and I say maybe mapping because what you're doing here is just a hypothesis the idea with maybe mapping is that we're going to take the items and the keywords that we had just

scoped out we're going to look through those words and we're going to create a hypothesis on how we think those words might be connected with each other we want to try to create some very basic scaffold that's a technical term for it the idea here is that it's just a maybe you don't have to be right in fact you're almost definitely going to be wrong but it's just getting our brain thinking about how it all fits together in a big picture and having that big picture reference point is going to be hugely beneficial as a

priming step before we get into the deepest studying it's going to make content less overwhelming it's going to make our memory better it's one of the most beneficial things that you can do for studying and it's one of the things that less efficient Learners commonly skip because they don't understand the value of it they're just like oh I just need to get through the content I don't want to waste time doing this it's not a waste of time because when you invest your time to create a hypothetical scaffold and a mental model for you to

think through even if it's wrong even if it's completely wrong there is a strong benefit to helping you manage and process any new information that comes in after that so uh just spend I would recommend spending around about 10 minutes or so trying to create a map you're going to be wrong try to do your best if there are words that you're looking at and you don't even understand the meaning of that word at all whatsoever then just do a very quick Google search and just read like literally a couple lines you should never be

reading or thinking about it for more than like 30 seconds it's just enough for you to get a very very very general superficial understanding of that word to construct a maybe map and again it's not that you're trying to get it right it's that you're trying to figure it out create some kind of model and then you can work off of that if you find this process really difficult and you're like kind of paralyzed there not able to map anything out at all this is a very very high yield thing that you will need to

work on it probably means that you're not used to relational thinking or higher Ro of learning in general and that's actually going to be a limitation for your studying efficiency for life this is something you have to learn to be able to do if you want to become a more efficient learner very black and white so after we've done a maybe map we should already have a general understanding about how some of these ideas might relate to each other and that can in some cases make us naturally more curious about it as well the next

step after doing this is the EV valuation and this is the first round of evaluation that we're doing the evaluation is the part where we're now going to go through and learn more about each of the key wordss if you are more comfortable with this you can actually start at whatever keyword you feel is the most relevant for you if you're a beginner at thinking in this way just start at the beginning but every time you learn about one keyword or a concept I I want you to take a step back look at your overall

picture and ask yourself how does this fit inside the overall picture and there are a number of objectives that I want you to have on the front of your mind you may want to even just have this like literally front and center on the study with me video you'll see that this actually pops up during the evaluation process all the time on screen so you've got it as reference the idea with evaluation is that you want to make sense of the information you want to make sense of it which means we're trying to make it

more obvious we're trying to reduce our need for memorization so anything that you feel man I need to repeat this and do it again and again for me to stick it in my brain that's a red flag we want to think how could I think about this how could I connect it create an analogy for it integrated into a network so that I don't need to do that repetition or at least I don't feel like it's slipping away imminently so we're creating analogies we're actively comparing that concept with other Concepts and we're asking ourselves how

does it fit in the big picture you want to do this after every concept or every keyword because if you go through three or four Concepts and then you take a step back to see how it integrates it's much more overwhelming because you've got so many more pieces that you have to try to think about it's much easier to say do one concept take a step back integrate it with the big picture see how that changes our mental model maybe if we've mapped it out first uh then we can we can redo it uh if

you're at a point where your nonlinear note taking skills are still relatively new then this may be something that you find a little bit more challenging but just keep pushing at it nonlinear note taking again is one of those things that you really need to get good at because linear note taking is just so so limited if you have not even tried nonlinear note taking before in the first place then I would very strongly recommend checking out my video on uh nonlinear note taking before doing the study with me because otherwise you you're really going

to struggle a lot so this evaluation process involves a lot of back and forth your going to your keyword list that you've created you're going to your textbook references or lecture slides or Google search you're exploring it and after you've understood that concept you're then straight away going okay take a step back how does that fit within my big picture you're remapping moving things around adding other arrows thinking about it a lot of this time is spent in your head just thinking and trying to put the puzzle together okay it should feel like you're trying

to put a puzzle together and then once you feel like okay I think that's how it fits that makes sense to me then you're going to move on to the next keyword and then go back evaluate you know learn more about it and then add it to your map and then think okay well how does that fit with what I've already got on my map all the other things how does it fit in the big picture you know refine it a bit add more arrows move things around and then once you feel like that makes

sense we're going back to the keyword so we're doing that process again and again a lot of this time is spent just in our heads thinking and then refining and consolidating and simplifying the map as we go you absolutely absolutely want to have the feeling that as you are learning more the map is becoming easier and simpler to understand the amount of overwhelm you feel should go down as you keep studying if you find that as you are studying it's getting harder and harder to keep track of what's going on it means that you're either

not pulling out to look at the big picture and like often enough or when you are you're not simplifying it to a level that makes sense enough before you move on this is something that we call multiple element interactivity which is part of cognitive load Theory which is the idea that when there are too many things that our brain is trying to process it struggles and enters into overload which is a detrimental effect on our learning memory efficiency understanding so we want to make sure that when we learn something we're then exerting mental effort and

time to simplify it and consolidate it to a point where we can look at it and think yep I feel like that makes sense to me and then we're ready to move on we don't want to just be overloading overloading overloading and overloading because even though we may be covering content physically very quickly in terms of what's happening in our brain we're actually going to be operating a very low efficiency and you're going to have to pay the consequences of that in future sessions because you forgot on half of everything that you've learned and that's

ultimately the biggest waste of time so after we do our evaluation period which lasts usually at least 30 minutes maybe potentially more if you're really focused then we move on to questions when we do the questions part we want to deliberately think about what are the gaps in my knowledge right now what are the things I'm most curious about and if you're not really curious about something try to be curious about something and we're going to create a list of questions that are the most pressing on our mind that reflect the direction that we're thinking

in because after the questions we're going to take a break so the questions are really good as almost like a here's a current snapshot of what I'm thinking about where I'm curious at where I want my mind to be directed towards and then when we come back into the session we can use the questions to springboard ourselves back into that deep Flow State very quickly and pick up from where we left off you can have you know as few as three or four questions I would probably not spend you know too long on this just

a few minutes writing down some of the pertinent questions after we have written some questions we're now going to enter into an active relaxation period active relaxation means that we are doing something in our break the active relaxation part is important because we don't want to then go off and watch like a like your favorite Netflix show or uh get into like a really deep meaningful conversation with someone that's going to take ages or play your favorite online game those are not things that even though they may be relaxing they're not things that are going

to help you to get back into a flow state after the break obviously if you don't have any more time to study and that's your session done you can go do whatever you want but if you need to come back into another session straight after this then uh you want to make sure you're doing something that's somewhat productive during this time but not mentally taxing so what that means is that this task needs to have a low level of cognitive load otherwise known as mental effort however it should be something that is generally productive a

great example of this is actually housework cleaning your room organizing something these are methodical you could think of them as almost like tedious but mindful tasks that don't require lots of thinking if cleaning your room makes you Mega stressed then maybe don't do that do something else instead another really good one is to just take a walk go for a stroll getting some kind of movement or physical activity in is really beneficial and in fact you can even take the questions that you wrote before your break with you on a walk and then while you're

walking just generally think about those questions and what the answers might be we're almost creating a mini maybe map just in our brain and again we don't want to be like super super focused on this we do want our brain a chance to just relax cool off but still stay in that productive intentional mode once our active relaxation time is up we're then going to move back into the next session and as before we want to start with having some nice deep breaths and just as before trying to get into the Zone with each breath

and then after your fifth breath we're then moving back in and this time we're starting straight with the questions that we had left over we'll spend some time to explore the questions and try to see what the answers to those questions are this may naturally lead you into the next phase which is another round of evaluation essentially what this means is that we're picking up from where we left off we're moving on to the the next key concept the next key word the next part in our material and we're going to just continue going through

that exactly the same process as before and just continuing to build on our map and get a deeper and deeper understanding of things but still keeping things relatively big picture depth complexity technical detail these are things that happen in layers and only once you've got a broad understanding at a big picture then do we move on to a deeper understanding add a big picture and then we move into the progressive levels of detail you should never ever really be focused on F granular detail when you are first starting to learn something if you can't already

explain it in simple terms don't move on to trying to explain it in more complex terms work with the simple one first Master the simple then Master the intermediate and then Master the advanced and work in that way across the entire topic and it's going to be much more beneficial for your learning efficiency as well as for your memory another thing that we can do during this evaluation period which is different to what we were doing before is that we can potentially start offloading some material if we need to onto a memorization tool such as

flash cards so if there is a particular detail that you think this is really detailed I don't see how it fits into the big picture really at all it just seems like a very very specific technical thing that I probably have to end up root memorizing then we can make the decision to then put that into our flash cards as we go and not have to worry about it too much we can continue to move through that big picture higher level conceptual stuff instead and again we do this process uh for the the bulk of

the session and we move back into leaving ourselves some questions exactly like we did before thinking about where our gaps might be and then we move into another round of active relaxation and this cycle basically just repeats themselves this is a cycle that we would continue to work through every successive cycle and when we move on to a new topic that is now falling outside of what we initially had scoped out before then we would start again from this stage where we're actually scoping it and if obviously it's a whole new day a whole new

session we have to start from the beginning where we're actually doing the preparation as well so this General cycle of studying is something that you can apply really for any subject that you're learning it is stronger for subjects that are conceptually very dense uh so for some subjects like studying mathematics uh coding things that are really procedurally heavy this type of flow may not work the best for you there's variations to this that uh might be more relevant but for any type of conceptual material uh medicine Anatomy uh you know basically all the stem subjects

really uh history economics philosophy accounting these subjects are going to be ideal for this type of flow it involves a lot of scaffolding it involves active management of your cognitive load it involves elements that are made famous by things like pomodora or fodora which is the work rest timing and taking active relaxation we've got priming involved in it we've got nonlinear relational note taking so there are a lot of things in this that are going to be very very beneficial for your memory for your engagement you actually even enjoyment of studying the topic and ultimately

it's going to save you time and make you a better learner so with the instructions out of the way you are now ready to go and do your actual studying check out the guided study with me video the link is in the description and happy studying