6 Principles to Get More Done in Less Time

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can get higher grades while studying less, especially if you're in university. I do this by showing you

university. I do this by showing you three things every student does that you need to stop doing because it's a complete waste of time and what you should actually be doing instead. For

me, doing this helped me cut down my studying time by over 80%. It allowed me to graduate medical school and rank first my master's degree, all while working full-time. So if you want to

working full-time. So if you want to study less and get higher grades then the first thing that you need to avoid doing is note dumping

of the tens of thousands of students that I have coached over the years. This

is one of the most common most tragic habits that you can have for learning.

Note dumping is what I call it when you just put things down in your notes just because you feel like you need to have it down. There's usually this general

it down. There's usually this general belief that if I write it down in my notes, I'm going to learn it and remember it. Even though you probably

remember it. Even though you probably know that that's not actually true.

People who note dump tend to have a lot of notes and they spend a lot of time writing those notes. And the way you can tell whether your note-taking is effective or if you're just dumping is write down your notes, spend your time,

and then a week later test yourself. How

much do you actually retain? and how

deep and nuanced is your knowledge and ability to use what you've learned. For

most people, they will retain less than 50% of it and it's usually very superficial knowledge only and that is a clear sign of note dumping. And so while note takingaking is useful, note dumping

is a complete waste of time and I explain what the difference between those two actually is. So if we think about how we actually learn, it basically goes like this. We have

information that comes into our brain and then our brain thinks about it. And

this thinking is something that we call processing. Based on how high quality or

processing. Based on how high quality or low quality the processing we do is aka depending on how we think about the information that's come in, that's going to influence how well it's stored into

our memory. And this is a process that

our memory. And this is a process that we call encoding that goes into our long-term memory. So if we want to have

long-term memory. So if we want to have knowledge and expertise and develop skills and use our knowledge to answer questions and solve problems, we need to

have a high quality of knowledge at a high level of retention inside our long-term memory. And to do that, we

long-term memory. And to do that, we need to have high quality processing. So

when we write notes, the idea is that it allows us to think more freely and more easily because we're not just holding on to everything inside our brain. When

you're note dumping, you are actually saying this processing is too hard. It

takes too much mental effort. It's too

complicated. I don't know how to do it properly. So, I'm going to avoid

properly. So, I'm going to avoid processing it. And instead, I'm just

processing it. And instead, I'm just going to take the information and just chuck it directly into my notes, which now makes me feel like I'm learning cuz I feel like I'm doing something

productive, even though we haven't actually achieved the ultimate goal, which was having that knowledge in our long-term memory. And so note dumping is

long-term memory. And so note dumping is a really serious problem because not only does it take a very long amount of time without actually producing much

memory because our memory is so poor, it actually gives us extra work to do in the future by having to relearn the things that we're constantly forgetting.

And so while it can be effortless and fast and feel great to type super fast into your perfect notion template, what's the point? it will be a better use of time, even if it takes a little

bit longer, to think more about what you're writing and make really great, effective notes rather than note dumping. And I'll give you some tips on

dumping. And I'll give you some tips on what you can do to make that happen later in this video. The second thing you need to stop doing is something that

I call paint and pray.

Painting and praying is basically when you take your highlighter and you go through your textbook or your coursework or whatever it is and everything that you think is important for you to learn,

you highlight and then that's it. And

you just hope that somehow the act of highlighting has put that information into your brain. And I am just as guilty as all of you. In fact, I even took these notes. These are some of my notes

these notes. These are some of my notes from when I was in my first year of university. And you can see pretty much

university. And you can see pretty much the entire page is highlighted. So why

does just highlighting not work? Well,

if we go back to the diagram that I drew just before, you can see again in order for you to learn stuff. You need to process and you need to think about it.

So with highlighting, it's kind of like writing notes except it's even easier and even less effortful because you don't even have to write any notes. All

you have to do is just highlight it and it makes you feel good. The point of learning isn't to make you feel productive. It's to get information into

productive. It's to get information into your memory. And highlighting and

your memory. And highlighting and painting and praying is one of the greatest learning sins because it creates the paradox of learning. You're

deciding that something is important enough for you to highlight it while at the same time not being important enough for you to actually do anything useful

to keep it in your memory. you are

basically highlighting all the things you are deciding you will forget. Now

obviously no one is studying deliberately trying to forget. It's

usually because you don't know of a better alternative and I will cover those after the final thing that you need to stop doing. The third one and I might offend a lot of people with this

one is you need to stop abusing flash cards.

Flash cards using tools like Anki or whatever other flashcard app you want to use are fantastic tools. They're

fantastic softwares that create a very specific type of learning. But that

doesn't mean it is the solution to all of your learning problems. Just because a screwdriver is a great tool does not mean that it is the only tool you need.

And in fact, if you see someone trying to build a house with nothing but a screwdriver, you would say that that is probably not very effective. Could they

succeed?

Maybe with enough time. Flash cards are great for remembering tiny little discrete facts and details. They are

terrible for higher order knowledge like problem solving or having discussions or writing essays. But even if you do use

writing essays. But even if you do use them the right way, there's actually another problem with using flashcards that most people do not talk about. And

this is the fact that you start entering into recognitionbased learning. When we

talk about retrieving information from our long-term memory, this is the process called retrieval.

Often there are two ways that we can think about this. One is recall and the other is called recognition.

So recognition means that for example, if I show you this highlighter, you can look at it and you can recognize that it's a highlighter. If I show you a coin, you can recognize that it's a

coin. Recall is far more than just

coin. Recall is far more than just recognition. It's saying that if I show

recognition. It's saying that if I show you this highlighter and then you close your eyes, you would be able to then draw out this highlighter accurately from your memory. It's the same thing

with knowledge and the things that you learn. It is one thing to recognize

learn. It is one thing to recognize something that you've studied before, a fact or the right answer for a question, and it is another thing entirely to be

able to recall that from your memory without help and prompting. And the

issue is that when you do higher levels of repetition, you start going more and more towards recognition and further and further from recall. So, if you have a few flash

recall. So, if you have a few flash cards and you've repeated them six or seven times, you're actually starting now to just train your ability to associate that question on that flash

card with the answer on that flash card.

And a red flag warning sign that this is happening to you is if you can answer a flash card without even having to fully read the entire question. You've simply

recognized the first few words and understood, oh, I know what flash card this one is. And for this flash card, the answer is this. And you can see that that is not the way that you need to use

your knowledge unless you're being tested exactly the same way as your flash card. So if you study the way that

flash card. So if you study the way that I used to, which was like note dumping everything into flash cards and then letting flash cards do the heavy lifting of all the learning, you're going to be wasting an incredible amount of time.

And eventually you're not really even studying for an exam anymore. You're

just playing a game to get your flash card number down to zero. And everything

I've talked about so far actually comes back to this diagram that I drew earlier where we're understanding what needs to happen for learning to occur. And when

we don't know how learning occurs, we just use whatever techniques feel simple and easy that other people tell us are effective. And often the easiest way to

effective. And often the easiest way to do that is just to take the things that we are forgetting and just repeatedly smash them back through into our brain using volume and

time as the only variables. And that is why it is incredibly crucial. In fact, I would say it is impossible to study less and get better results without thinking

about learning as a system of techniques. There are things that you

techniques. There are things that you can do here before you even collect the information and consume it. The way that you consume the information, there are techniques to optimize that. There are

lots of things that you can be doing in the processing part that you can optimize so that you're able to encode the information better and that your long-term memory is improved. And there

are things that you can do to reduce the amount that you forget and make your retrieval more effective so that you're not spending all of your time just

constantly relearning things. And if you have never thought about learning as a system and you're not sure what you can do at each point and where your strengths and weaknesses are as a system, then I'd highly recommend

checking out the free quiz that I've developed, which goes through and asks a bunch of questions about how you consume information, how you process it, how you write your notes, how you prime yourself, and it will give you a score

that actually tells you which parts of your learning system are holding you back the most. It takes two or three minutes to do, but you will learn things about your learning system and where you

are wasting time that took me months to figure out. So, if you're interested in

figure out. So, if you're interested in that, you can check it out. I'll leave a link for you in the description below.

Now, we've covered all the things that you need to stop doing. So, let's go through to the things that you should do instead. The first thing that you need

instead. The first thing that you need to do as much as possible is pattern mining. It's really simple. get a bunch

mining. It's really simple. get a bunch of information. So, let's say that the

of information. So, let's say that the information here is these pens in my hands. And you ask yourself, how are

hands. And you ask yourself, how are these things similar to each other? How

are they related to each other? And by

looking for patterns, you're helping your brain form connections. And those

connections are what form memory. And

here's the beautiful part is that the connections and the patterns you find don't even need to be very meaningful.

If they are meaningful and then they're relevant for you, that's the best case scenario. But even just the act of

scenario. But even just the act of deliberately looking for patterns and relationships and similarities and differences and grouping things together

forces your brain to connect information in a more effective way, which means better memory, more effective, less wasted time. Now, here's my pro tip.

wasted time. Now, here's my pro tip.

When do you pattern mine? because you

can't do it for like literally every single word that you read. As a tip, anytime you feel overwhelmed, like there's so much information that this information is going to start

slipping out of your brain, pause and mine for the patterns. And what will happen is that the information that you've just consumed that's complicated and overwhelming and there's lots of different parts to it. As you see

patterns, you will find ways to simplify it. You might think of analogies and it

it. You might think of analogies and it will help you to break down this complicated thing into more simple components. Basically, you're taking

components. Basically, you're taking this overwhelming set of points and by finding the patterns between them, you're able to group them together. So,

instead of having 16 overwhelming things that you need to remember, it's just four groups of four. Efficient learners,

people that can get great grades while spending very little time are able to find patterns more quickly. And the more you try to find these patterns, the

better your ability to find these patterns will become and the smarter you get. The second thing you should do is

get. The second thing you should do is higher level testing.

An example of lower level testing is like just doing a bunch of fact recall flashcards. If you are practicing for a

flashcards. If you are practicing for a pure fact recall exam, great. If you're

testing for something that requires you to use your knowledge in a little bit more of a complex way, you need to practice how you will play. And I

actually want you to think about the way that you study in terms of the grade that it unlocks for you per hour that you spend on using that method. And this

is a really useful way of thinking about learning. The fastest path to getting

learning. The fastest path to getting the highest grade is focusing on everything except the fact recall first.

Let me draw this for you. This is going to make it very obvious. The red boxes are every possible question and fact that you will be tested on. When you sit

an exam and then you get a question that asks you about like a bigger concept or solving a more complicated problem, it often involves you needing to know about multiple different concepts and multiple

different facts and using them together.

Let's say for example, these are the four facts and concepts that we would need to know. we are able to spend some time testing our ability to answer this

box and then we move on to a different kind of higher order testing method like a different kind of problem that uses a different set of facts and concepts and so we test on this spread here and by

the time we've covered the major concepts and the big picture ways that they might ask us tricky questions or solve complex problems we've done something that looks like this. You can

see we haven't covered everything that we need to cover. Like these boxes here, these are still empty. But by testing a few big areas in a connected way, we've

been able to test our knowledge at a much wider level. And so we cover a higher percentage of possible problems and questions that we might get asked.

And the thing is testing in this way takes time. It is more time consuming to

takes time. It is more time consuming to test our ability to solve bigger problems than it is to test ourselves on learning a single fact. But most people

spend the early part of their studying or the entirety of their studying just focusing on learning each individual fact. And what if this fact is not even

fact. And what if this fact is not even tested in the exam? In that case, the time we spent on learning that fact is almost a waste of time completely.

Whereas, it's almost guaranteed that they're going to test you on these major concepts. And by studying for these

concepts. And by studying for these major concepts with these major relationships, you will probably also be able to answer some of those individual fact recall questions as a side effect.

And because you are testing these together and looking for patterns and testing the relationship that they have with each other, you are forming more connections, which means that the memory

here is actually stronger, which means that you forget it more slowly. Unlike

spending all of your time on isolated factory call where by the time you have actually finished learning this and then you are now memorizing this one, this one is already starting to be forgotten.

And so by the time you're finished this, you need to go back and then learn this one all over again. And that's how you get stuck in a spiral of neverending memorization because your ability to

memorize new content is matched by how fast you forget what you've already learned. And then half of the things

learned. And then half of the things that you study don't even come up in the exam anyway, and you wonder why you couldn't answer that tricky curveball question. So rule of thumb, spend 70 to

question. So rule of thumb, spend 70 to 80% of your time learning the bigger concepts, testing yourselves with problem solving, writing discussions,

testing your ability to connect the information together. The isolated

information together. The isolated little details that are left out at the end, you can cram that stuff in and put that into your flash cards. In fact, for some of my more recent assessments, they

don't even test me on my factory call at all. So, all my classmates that spent

all. So, all my classmates that spent time like writing notes and then doing flashcards to memorize stuff, that knowledge just like never became useful.

Now, here's the final thing that you need to do to be more efficient. Use the

confidence compass.

If you do practice questions as part of your preparation, great. Practice

questions, actually testing yourself, especially under test conditions, is a phenomenal, awesome method of preparation. Keep doing it. But it can

preparation. Keep doing it. But it can be better. And it all comes down to how

be better. And it all comes down to how you use your answer sheet. The way you use your answer sheet can completely make or break how effective testing yourself can be. Because let's say that you answer the question and you're

feeling a bit iffy about it. You don't

know if it's right or wrong. And then

you check the answer and then you realize it's right. You feel good about yourself, but you shouldn't because you didn't feel good about your answer. That

means there is a gap in your knowledge there. So, if they ask you about that

there. So, if they ask you about that concept in a slightly different way, maybe you get it wrong. Or maybe you answer it and you're feeling confident about it and then you check the answer and then it's wrong. And then you read

the answer and you think, "Oh, yeah, of course that makes sense. I just made a silly mistake." No. The most important

silly mistake." No. The most important thing, you got it wrong, which is your confidence. In an actual exam, your

confidence. In an actual exam, your ability to detect a silly mistake and correct yourself is going to be based on your confidence. If you make an answer

your confidence. If you make an answer and you're confident that it's correct, you're more likely to miss something.

And so, you need to really look into why you felt confident in the first place.

That is the bigger problem. And so, here is where the confidence compass comes in. Do your practice questions. But

in. Do your practice questions. But

before you check the answer sheet, mark down next to every single answer how confident you feel about that answer.

Then, and this is the part that takes a little bit more time, make your own answer sheet until you feel like you don't even need an answer sheet anymore.

You want your confidence for every single answer you put to be at 100%. You

can then check your answer sheet with the official answer sheet if they are available. And if you notice any

available. And if you notice any differences, then that's a really worthwhile gap for you to look into as well. But this sequence of testing

well. But this sequence of testing yourself, writing answers, assessing your confidence, making your own answer sheet to make your confidence 100% and then checking that with a real answer

sheet and looking for differences is a perfect stack of cognitively optimized techniques. It leverages and multiplies

techniques. It leverages and multiplies several learning science principles on top of each other to force your brain into a more efficient state of learning.

It does take a little bit of time to use the confidence compass technique, but for every hour you spend using it. There

are very few other things that you can do that will drive up your grade more in the same amount of time. So, stop doing this, start doing this, and that is how you can get better grades while studying

less. Now, if you want to watch some

less. Now, if you want to watch some more videos on how to study and learn more efficiently, then you might be interested in this video right here.

It's on the paper, right? Right there.

You can see it.