How I UPGRADE the Most Popular Study Techniques

I mean this just plainly sucks so that's a d if there was an e it would be an e welcome to part two of The Ultimate study TI list in the first video I ranked some of the most popular techniques everything from active recoil and space repetition to mind maps pomodora technique even sleep but that was ranked on the way people normally use them in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to rerank them based on how good they could be with a few adjustments and modifications because the thing is because learning

happens in the brain the same technique can be either really good or really bad depending on how you execute it if you're new to this Channel and you're wondering who I am I'm Dr Justin Sun I'm a learning coach and the head of learning at I can study I'm also a former medical doctor and for the last decade I have helped train thousands of Learners around the world how to learn more efficiently before we get started with this video I'd really appreciate if you give this video a like as we all know liking helps with

the algorithm and that is an S tier move also if you haven't watched the first tier list video already then I'd recommend that you watch that one first so anyway let's Jump Right In okay so let me just start here at the uh a tier practice papers practice papers could easily be an S tier if people got rid of the answer sheet and then started creating answer sheets for themselves really big problem with practice papers is that people depend way too much on knowing whether they got the answer right or wrong but actually it doesn't

matter if you got it right or wrong because the point of doing a practice paper is to find a knowledge Gap and if you answer a question and you're not confident on it there's a knowledge Gap there and even if you get it right it doesn't change the fact that you weren't confident and what that means is that if you were to get asked a question that's very similar to it but a little different you might get it wrong because there was a gap there and that question maybe didn't quite hit it from that exact

angle where the Gap is so going by confidence as a more accurate indicator of whether you've got a knowledge Gap and then looking through to create your own model set of answers is a really great generative activity which for the amount of time spent is going to be better than brain dumps or blurting or summary Pages or Cornell note taking it's the same advantages of summary Pages blurting all of those things but it's much more contextually relevant and it's more targeted towards where there are probably knowledge gaps and you can make that even better by

getting a group of friends together if you don't have practice papers you create for each other which means that there's like another layer of learning because you have to create a question that actually makes sense and then create your own perfect set of answers and you can compare that with the answer sheet that your friend creates so uh like that's that when you do it that way this becomes like a double s tier um technique Pomodoro Pomodoro um probably like it could maybe go from an A to like an A+ tier um I I'll leave

it an a one of the things that we can do to really easily make it more effective is instead of just setting the random time just start tracking the amount of time it takes before you lose that focus and flow and then just take your rest depending on how long that flow session was for after 25 minutes if you're fully in flow there's really no point breaking out of that flow to to take a break because flow States tend to be quite energy efficient and so if you're in flow you want to maintain that flow

for as long long as possible so you could do like an hour and a half of good flow which is actually pretty impressive like you know that's that's probably getting to the limit of where I'm reaching like Flow State hour and a half 2 hours Max and then after that amount of time then you take a break which I normally recommend to be around a quarter to a third of your flow session so if it was an hour and a half you take a 30- minute break and then after the 30- minute break then you

get back into it and then during the break you should also be intentional about the type of activity that you do so don't just like start playing some games because that's not going to end in 30 minutes uh you know go for a walk uh do some meditation something that's actually going to help you to properly rejuvenate and recover so when you get back into it you're actually able to enter into that flow State very quickly I'm giving it an A plus rather than an S though even with those adaptations because the quality of what

you can do in a flow State still depends on what you're actually doing and your ability to do that so for example you could be Flow State studying but doesn't mean that your studying is actually going to be effective if the method of studying you're using is not effective flow or not is not going to change so the next one here findan technique uh again you can't really do it wrong so that stays at an a active recall this this one could easily go up to an S just make being much more deliberate with the

type of recall that you're doing so understanding that you can practice recall at a low level discret um facts definitions uh explanation like things that you need to potentially just wrote memorize but also testing your recall at the higher levels more complex questions more complex problem solving more nuanced applications having discussions if it's a procedural skill like coding or languages having more execution and practice working on many projects so a lot of people usually when they're doing active recall they have like the same method and then they just do that same method like multiple times

as their spaced active recoil and you're really going to get a very diminishing level of return after you do that the first time it will be better to have a different technique that you're using for each space retrieval where you're covering the whole scope of the type of knowledge that you need to have rather than just like the same thing again and again and again pre-study easily hands down can shoot up to s double s Triple S one of the most important things that you can do by priming your brain priming basically means that you

give your brain a scaffold like a skeleton of relevance before learning a new topic and this is essentially like quite easy to do because all you have to do is try to create a big picture of understanding about what the main ideas are and how they relate together and maybe just like the key Concepts and just don't worry about memorizing any details or like really being able to explain anything you know too much the problem is that a lot of people struggle to do that because they have such like deeply ingrained habits of trying to

memorize every single detail like usually out of insecurity and that's the thing that actually holds them back so if you do correct pre-study and you know you've done it correctly if by the end of it you can say what a topic is about and the main ideas and how they connect to each other and why it's important but you cannot explain the actual processes or give the actual definitions if you can do it to that level of detail after pre-study you've probably done it wrong and this is a little bit more complicated than just what

I've made it out to be but I I would say that for most of you watching this like 99% of you watching this unless you're already on my program I would say that that's that's going to be like a rule that you should follow like I really don't think you're going to go wrong if you follow that rule uh pneumonics probably can be and a by ironically using it l there are some things that you you just should not have in pneumonics because that's not how you need to use that knowledge anyway pneumonics are good

for when you need to remember things almost like a checklist um you don't need to use that information in many other ways other than just like a checklist when you start using pneumonics to learn things where you actually have to manipulate that knowledge like in a more multi- relational way pneumonics can actually hold you back because it's almost like putting a lot of tools that you use very often but you keep it inside like a single locked toolbox every time you want to use that tool which could be like very frequently you then have to

unlock the toolbox and open it up and then take everything out and then like put it back in so it it requires more effort to like unpackage and go through the pneumonic and then pull the information out and then reconnect it and then apply it to what you want to to to use it for it would actually just be better to learn it in a way that already connects it to how you need to use it and that's going to improve your memory and your depth of understanding and it's also just less effort and energy

to use the information at the end of the day so the key to making your monics more effective is understand what it's good for and just don't use it for situation where it's not effective for that Cornell not taking probably caps out of a b again you can't really do it wrong um and even when you do it right it's you know like there there's limited benefits brain dumps and blurting I think can stay at a c there's a chance that brain dumps can get to a b uh and the way that you're do this

is that you create a brain dump that is deliberately different to the way that you have initially written your notes and understood it like you are deliberately trying to create relationships structures orders hierarchies headings flows logic narratives that are different to how you first learned it to force yourself to understand the information in a different perspective and through a different structure the reason is because a true expert on the topic can probably explain that topic in multiple different ways and from multiple different angles emphasizing different things depending on the circumstance and situation whereas a like

a noob pretty much can't and they have to just start at the beginning and they just go through and it's it's very fixed the way that they've understood the topic that's problematic because you often have to use your knowledge in a way that's not just fixed so learning to do a brain dump in a way that is deliberately different to how you previously thought about it is one way of pretty much instantaneously upgrading the usefulness of this technique summary Pages uh I mean can probably be be if you were to do the same thing like

basically the same thing as brains but again you try to summarize it in a different way mind maps can be S tier because mind maps and really any variation of relational nonlinear note taking is kind of the only possible way to write notes where it is directly aligned with higher order relational thinking and good deep processing which is the processes that contribute to having better memory and deeper understanding of information and and even like using apps like notion or or whatever you're using that create these relational D databases like REM node uh obsidian Rome research

even at the end of the day the fact that you can visually represent on a single page on canvas the relationships and the fact that you don't have the benefit of Technology making it easier for you that actually makes it more effective for learning because now you have to hold yourself to such a high standard for where you put things on a page how you connect it why you connected there how thick you make the arrow all of these things play a part in your judgment of the importance and place that that information sits relative

to every other piece of information and so for that reason my maps can be really effective however it's there's a lot that I can talk about with this and there there are many more conditions to make mind maps really effective if you have previous used it before and you found that it was kind of a waste of time or if you're just want to know how you can make it even better I would really recommend checking out my video on why mind maps are useless for a lot of people okay flash cards flash cards can

be really effective just like pneumonics can I'm I'm going to put flash cards in uh B uh because again for what they're good for they are excellent for as long as you know what they are useful for and you do not use it in situations that it's not useful for now you might be wondering okay so in what situations are they or are they not useful that's going to be another big one to explain I would probably recommend checking out my video on how you can make flash cards more effective first as a starting point

and you'll see that there's a lot more levels of flash card proficiency that we can add to to bring the value out of it in fact to be honest actually I would say that if you use flash cards in the way that I talk about in that video this can possibly be even an A but you have to be really strategic with it watching videos and mixtures and essentially just re-watching or just consuming content mindlessly is by definition useless so that's a d it's forever a d listening to music is is a generally speaking I'm

I recommend people to just have silence or white noise uh even lowii beats things like that it's probably actually more distracting than it is helpful the reason that sometimes people find it useful is that it helps them to concentrate and enter into a flow but this is the problem which is like it's like funny and sad in a way if the music is helping you enter into flow what that means is that the process that you were trying to use in the first place was inherently not engaging and what's happened is that you're able to

enter into flow because the music is the thing that is keeping you like in inflow like in a sense of Rhythm now that's problematic because that usually only happens if the level of thinking that you're using while learning is low and relatively passive if you're engaging in the right types of thinking while you're learning which you should be because that's what gives you good memory and understanding and that's what makes your time worthwhile then it should be very very engaging and your mind ends up being very busy and you should naturally find that any form

of Music whatsoever is actually distracting because you now have to invest cognitive resources in ignoring the music so that you can think about what you're meant to be thinking about and it doesn't matter whether it's instrumental or it's your classical music whatever it is uh it's it's just the way that your cognitive resources are distributed so if you find that listening to music helps you to study I would I'm 90% confident that it means that the way you're trying to study in the first place is actually not very effective listening to music can be helpful

if you're doing tasks and activities that have a lower level of cognitive load investment in the first place a great example of this would be anything that is like te tedious like I know a lot of like software engineers and coders they like to listen to music because what they need is attention to detail but they don't need to be doing a lot of like higher level cognitive thinking and so the listening to music can be effective for that if you're doing like admin tasks or um for example like if I'm doing some kind of

art or you know sort of creative type thing then listening to music is going to be effective but anything that requires me to like properly sit down and think music's a definite no so I don't know what that means maybe a boost it up to a c as long as you don't use it when you need to do heavy thinking and you only use it for the tedious stuff yeah it's it's great it's good it makes things more fun rereading and highlighting like I said it's just kind of useless um I I I don't think

I'll ever be in a situation where I would find that it is worth doing that compared to anything else so I I don't I don't see a way that you can make that more effective than almost useless so I'd say that's a deep and there we have it the uh ultimate study tier list for some of the most common study techniques and I know I didn't cover every study technique and there are so many other ways that you know we can talk about this and for each of these things I I have a whole series

of videos talking about it in more depth if any of them particularly interested you I'd love to know leave your comment down below otherwise if you like this video make sure to subscribe so you don't miss my future uploads thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next one