Three-step plan for exams

I had this insanely elaborate blog entry planned out before my finals season started. However, before I got around to posting it, I ran out of time, and I had to prioritize what was most important (which coincidentally is a running theme in this entry). So here’s that very same entry – originally intended as a guide to final preparations for either GCSEs or SATs or whatever else you have coming up at the end of the semester.

In my case, I had to prepare for both an oral exam and all my written university exams. In addition to this, I had to write even more essays (this has really been the year of the essay for me, which I guess was to be expected when studying literature).

So here’s a guide to how to prepare for both oral and written exams, and getting through all of the course material leading up to your finals:

 

Simplify your daily choices – avoid decision fatigue:

This is a technique I have applied for many years, and I’ve included this year’s work plan above this passage. It is in Norwegian, but the basic gist of it is that it’s sort of a rough outline for what I have to get done every day leading up to the exams to stay on track.

Through this, I avoid having work pile up through procrastination, and I don’t lose 20-30 mins each morning, trying to figure out where I’m at, and what I need to get done.

This also helps with the terrible feeling one can get before an exam, where you feel as if the amount of work you have ahead of you is insurmountable.

• So in this step – figure out exactly what you have to know before the exam in these easy steps:

 

1. Go through old exams, and make a document where you include all the old exam questions.
2. Match this up with notes from the lectures and classes you have attended. What has the professor/teacher focused on the most in each of the modules?
3. Create categories for all the questions, either by chapter or by theme (I have provided an example from my geology course, which again, is in Norwegian, but you see what I’m getting at.)
4. Repeat for all your upcoming exams.

 

Portion out your work – trim the fat!

Which leads us to the next part of my three-step-plan to a stress-free exam period, which is portioning things out. In this part, you are going to have to trim the fat. What I do is that I combine all the questions that are similar, and create one more comprehensive and detailed question for each of the themes sub-questions. I try to dedicate equal time to the entire syllabus, because you never know when your professor is going to throw a curveball at you. So here’s my approach to portioning out your work:

1. Count the days leading up to all of your exams, and create a document that has all of the dates in it.
   • Now this part is important – DO NOT use your regular planner. This is you declaring Martial Law over your work habits, and a planner you have to search through to get to what you need to get done will only add to the inevitable decision fatigue you’ll feel throughout the exam season. Have it on one very visible page, print it out, and hang it somewhere you cannot avoid seeing it.
2. Figure out your fudge ratio, and be honest with yourself – how much can you sustainably manage to do in a day?
   • NOT how much can you force yourself to do, but how much will you do without passing out at the end of each day. If you are already strapped for time, try to use the days leading up to the exam to get an overview of everything, instead of aiming at the world champion title in statistics or chemistry or whatever subject you are struggling with.
3. Leave the final day before every exam open so you can figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are, and close them.

 

Give yourself a break, literally.

I have blogged about this so many times, but take many short breaks, preferably by doing something active, like going for a walk or a run, or some other exercise that you like. Sitting and working all day will only make you sluggish and tired. My best tips for how not to spend your breaks:

1. Turn off all your social media alerts. Deal with it before bed.
   • You do not need to deal with all that femo, and agonize over how you are not able to go to every party or go out into the sun. And if you spend all your time snapchatting how much it sucks having to revise for your exams it’ll only suck even more when you get back to work.
2. Do not sit down to watch TV.
   • If I had one dollar for every time I lost track of my five-minute break time by sitting down and watching whatever crappy sitcom was on TV while I was having my break this exam season…

Just a few closing words (and a little shameless self-promotion):

I did a few extra things to keep myself on track, which might not apply to everyone. However, if you are the kind of person that is always coming up with new ideas about things to do, whether it is creative projects or practical things that need to get done, I highly recommend carrying a book with you, to write in whenever you feel a pang of inspiration.

This is sort of an adapted version of Tim Ferriss’ morning pages, where he tries to put his “monkey-mind” away before getting to work. My monkey mind never seems to let up throughout the day, so taking five minutes perhaps two or three times a day to sort through whatever creative plans you have for the evening or projects you want to get done over the summer helps me not derail from my work plan.

As far as the shameless plug goes, here are the links to some of my most read blog entries, which I think can be of use whether you are in an exam season, or if you just want to get your study habits sorted out in time for the next semester.

How to get organized for the new semester!

Finding YOUR best way to study!

Gamification of habits

Pomodoro

Have a great summer

• Benedicte

X-Effect Weeks 4 & 5 – This actually works!

Writing for (almost) fifty days straight can feel a little discouraging after a while, with days where you feel like you hardly get any work done. However, some days you manage to write five pages in one sitting and you feel like this generations Stephen King. I mentioned in my last post the cumulative effects of just “showing up” and doing the work. And while I was almost dreading writing this post, because I felt as if I hadn’t met my goals, when I handed in the first drafts of my four geology essays this Wednesday I realized had managed to write almost 25 pages(!). By just writing every day, some days for as little as five minutes, I had churned out so much more than I’d expected.

If you’re a completionist like I am, this will work for you. I’m the sort of person who hates breaking a good chain, and loves making a game out of everything. Take exercise for instance. Each time I exercise, meaning properly going to the gym, or going for a strenuous hike or run outside, I put a sticker in my calendar. Right now, I’m working on beating last year’s total exercise time. I also use the app Nextrack, which gives you badges for creative workouts, continuity and even the time of day or working out on special holidays. Gamifying studying seems to be a good motivator for me, so tell me if you come across any good methods of incorporating the addictiveness of an mmorpg or perhaps the positive feedback loop of a mobile game. Perhaps I can create my own method. If I do, you’ll be the first to know!

Excuse my game/exercise digression; I’m on a four-hour train ride, wishing I’d brought my 3DS. Either way, this is my takeaway from weeks 4 and 5:

What worked:

• If you have a few spear minutes where you’re not doing anything productive, write! It may not be the best quality work you’ve ever written, but you’d be surprised by all the good ideas you come up with if you just sit in front of your computer for five minutes, writing down keywords, or thoughts you’d like to research more later when you have more time for “deep work”.
• Not all your daily writing has to happen in one interval of time. You can space out your work, if you feel like you don’t have time for a one-hour session. Some days I wrote for 5 minutes in the morning, and then picked up my work again in the afternoon. Often those five morning minutes made me have ideas while on the subway going to university, and made the work easier to pick up later in the day, as I knew what I was going to work with.

Needs more work:

• I should get back into planning my daily writing sessions, and what I want out of them. I used to be better at using my notebook system, which I wrote about in my Cal Newport entry. For these next couple of weeks, I’ll try to make a habit of waking up five minutes earlier and writing what I want out of my academic work for that day.

I’m posting this a few days early as I’m going home for Easter break. You’ll notice that I missed the day before I posted this, but that was intentional. I figured if I’m going to write every day throughout my holiday, I deserved one day off. Here’s a picture of my dog to make up for it!

 

Setbacks and Successes – Week 2 & 3 of the X-Effect

Decided to make the updates a biweekly thing, as eight entries on the same topic might become a little stale after a while. As implied in the header, there have been a few bumps in the road in these past couple of weeks, but I feel like I was able to get back into a good workflow in week three.

For full disclosure, I did not reach my goals these past couple of weeks. I ended up having to change my essay topic, and therefore I lost a lot of progress I’d already made on the first essay I’d started writing. Nevertheless, I think it was for the better, because I’m far more happy with the new essay that I’ve finished, and handed in today.

As you see from the template above, I did miss two days in week two. It sucked messing up my stats so soon in the project, but it taught me two important lessons that I needed to learn.

1. I have stopped putting the daily writing off until the evening. Those two nights I missed my targets, the reason why I missed them was that I didn’t prioritize my writing, and I didn’t view it as equally important to my other daily tasks. Since then I’ve started writing earlier in the day, and I’m churning out far more pages than before.
2. It’s all about getting back on the horse. This is sort of like when you are dieting. So what if you mess up and eat 10 cupcakes in one sitting? The important thing is the cumulative effect of doing the things that are good for you, and not giving up after one setback. After a while you’ll see pretty much the same effects as if you hadn’t messed up. And perhaps you learned something from your missteps? In my case, messing up, and having to publicize it on my blog prompted me to rethink my approach to the project, and start taking it more seriously. In the end, the only one I’m cheating by not doing my daily workload is myself.

 

What worked:

• My use of resources has improved, and my citations are better.
• I don’t know why, but just putting in earbuds has become sort of a catalyst for getting to work. Sometimes I don’t even have to put on any music or ambient sound for it to work.
• Giving away my phone before working, and putting it in “quarantine” until I’m done with my daily writing session. I have had success with just putting it in airplane mode, but sometimes the extra incentive of wanting your phone back can help speed up your work.

Needs more work:

• This goes for all my coursework, but getting to work faster. I need to find some sort of way to get into “work-mode” faster. There is too much time wastage at the beginning of each writing session.

 

Results from weeks 2 & 3: Finished my English Literature essay, started one of my four geology essays.

Goals for weeks 4 & 5: Finish all four geology essays. (This is a huge goal, and I’m happy if I finish three of them in that timespan as well)

The X-Effect

Bringing back the project based theme of the blog this week with a new experiment. It’s called the X-effect. I stumbled across this subreddit a few weeks ago, and have been meaning to apply this to my study technique in some form. The gist of it is that you have a grid with 7×7 squares, each representing one of 49 consecutive days. If you see the template provided by this redditor, the header simply says “New habit”. I’ve chosen “write for five minutes” as my habit, as I currently have 6 essays due by the end of March, on top of all my other coursework.

I think lowering the bar to only five minutes per session will be a key factor in getting started each day. If attaining a cross in your grid is a monumental task, like “write at least a thousand words” per day, you’ll end up dreading the task. For me this is all about the habit building.

Some tips for lowering the bar for starting your own project:

1. Create a pleasant study area. I usually make a cup of tea, light some candles and put on one of the ambient soundboards mentioned in my last blogpost.
2. Try to recreate the same study environment each study session. Regardless of the type of work you will be doing, having a dedicated study area triggers something in your mind. Try to eliminate all distractions.
3. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT! Just try! So what if you don’t know the answer to the equation you are trying to solve, or if you’re stuck trying to decipher what one of the ancient Greek philosophers meant by x y and z. Way too many of my friends have analysis paralysis these days, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m challenging myself to do this. If I have to write every day, some of the things I write are bound to suck. That is what second drafts are for, and you cannot have a second draft until you’ve written the first.

What I like about this is the versatility of it. While I’m using it as a study tool, one of my closest friends is using it for fitness purposes. And from what I have gathered, reading what other redditors have written, it can be used for anything from quitting smoking to flossing every night.

I’ll try to write an update post each week! At least I’ll post an image of my X-effect grid. That way, I’ll have even more of an incentive to write each day.

(Curious about the time table hanging on my fridge? Here’s a link to the blogpost explaning the Autopilot schedule in the background)

• Benedicte

Marketing to the procrastinator

The other day when I was at a café with my friend, she said something that made me have an idea for a blog entry. “Back in high school it was so much easier to get started on your homework. Especially maths, because you had these concrete tasks you could cross off your task sheet, and feel like you’d accomplished something each time you made a cross.” We continued our conversation, agreeing that being presented with these huge tasks at the university, such as “read chapter 2, 3 and 4”, or “Write an essay on subject A, B and C” can sometimes seem as an insurmountable task, and oftentimes you can end up not doing them, because they seem so intimidating.

Therefore, I thought, why not make your own task sheet, and trick your brain into thinking the task is much smaller than it actually is? I know this is a very basic idea; break tasks into smaller entities, and I have mentioned this before, but I have not mentioned to what degree.

To give you an example, these last few weeks have been this year’s midterms at my university. As a part of these midterms, I had to write one essay, take one qualification exam and do one obligatory assignment. Although these tasks are hardly the most difficult midterm evaluations one could imagine, they did require some work, and they definitely required some willpower. My goal was to hand them in at least three days before they were due, therefore I could not rely on that last-minute panic that sets in just before the hand-in folder closes.

As I had a bit of a backlog to deal with in the subject I had the qualification exam in, I felt quite overwhelmed by the curriculum. I decided to face the backlog head on, and make new study habits for this class, as a lot of the required coursework is reading, and not task based. I think this is the case for many university courses, which is why I think this example is the most applicable for you guys.

So instead of telling myself “read 5 chapters”, I wrote this in my planner:

1. Write down key words from chapter 3
2. Explain the key words you found in chapter 3
3. Give examples of the key words you found in chapter 3

I repeated this for all five chapters, and ended up with five word documents that looked like this:

In the end, I had done all the required reading, albeit not in the chronological order, and I had managed to take comprehensive notes on every chapter we were being tested on. How you perceive the difficulty of the task lies in the presentation. I do not mind sifting through the text, jumping back and forth trying to find out what is the essence of the chapter. I do however mind sitting for hours and hours without jotting down a few words, trying to gather my thoughts. The idea here is to present the task to yourself in the way you know will be most “palatable” for you, and will make it easier to start the task. If you are a perfectionist, as I’ve been called many times, you know the feeling of not wanting to start, because you do not want to hand in something that is less that “perfect”. As my father always says, sometimes good is good enough, everything does not need to be perfect in order for you to have accomplished something.

That is why I like this method so much. Not only do I think it makes the “barrier of entry” easier for most procrastinators, I think dissecting tasks in this way also makes you find your preferred way of learning. If you’re enjoying yourself while learning, I think you retain so much more of what you’ve read, so make the most of your study sessions. Make it fun, and remember to enjoy yourself! Hopefully, you were the one who chose the program you are currently enrolled in, so try to appreciate the chance you’ve been given!

In the end, I’ll just add a little “morsel of wisdom” for my fellow procrastinators out there;

Do not wait until the clock turns a round number, or until the next hour starts, just DO IT NOW.  If only the planning stage of the task, you’ll feel so much better if you do just five minutes of work. Or you could always do it next week, eh?

Have a good weekend!

– Benedicte

Gamification of habits

I’m working on a proper blog entry, but in the meanwhile I thought I’d share some tips about habit formation. Some tools I’ve been using is the app HabitRPG, and a simple excel spreadsheet.

I found out about HabitRPG about a year ago, while lurking on /r/productivity on reddit. This app works the same way an RPG does, in rewarding tasks you’ve made for yourself with XP. You decide how much value each task should have, based on how difficult you find them. Some are dailies you can tick off on your list and not worry about until they are active tasks again, others are habits you can do as much as you want, and still receive rewards each time you repeat them.

This app is free, and is accompanied by the website www.habitrpg.com, where you can join parties, guilds and do challenges. I really recommend it, because it is a fun way to create new habits, and perhaps break old ones. It uses the instant gratification of receiving XP and finding items like pets, armour etc. to feed the “habit loop”. The thing that makes it the easiest to form a new habit is instant gratification. That is why making it a habit to check your social media sites is so much easier than perhaps to do three sets of 15 push-ups every evening. You might not feel like you are getting stronger each time you do the push-ups, but with social media, you get the instant gratification and entertainment you crave, so you keep coming back. After a while, people might say “have you been working out?” but by then you’ve already been pushing yourself every night the past few weeks, without any form of reward. That is where I’ve found HabitRPG to be a great tool. I often feel as if my revising amounts to nothing, and that the study session did not pay off to the degree that I wanted it to. However, if I keep at it for many weeks straight I will see results, perhaps in how much faster I can do a task, or my being able to understand something I previously could not. This reward is far from instant, so getting potions to hatch new pets, or a new sword for my avatar right away is much more gratifying.

The excel spreadsheet is something I’ve been working on this week, with the help of my father. He used it while working on his PhD, to break down bigger tasks into smaller ones that were less daunting than just “finish your PhD!” For me it’s a tool to spread out my workload before my upcoming exams, so that I know how much time I can use on each chapter. I also use it for my workout schedule. The great thing about formatting in excel is that you can use as many tabs as you want, colour coordinate them, mark specific dates, like labs, exams etc. You have to set aside some time to create your own formatting to suit your needs, as well as planning REALISTICALLY how much work you are able to do in one day. If you plan to do too much each day, you will burn out, and not do any of it. You need that instant gratification of marking a task as “done” on your list, because leaving them unfinished will only make you feel disappointed in yourself, which you shouldn’t be, because in my opinion, just doing one of the many tasks you’ve set for yourself is an accomplishment.

By the way, I know I did not stick to my posting schedule over the Easter holiday, and I’m sorry! What I learned over the break is that I do not concentrate well when working with other people, which was last week’s study technique. Since I spent a lot of time goofing off, I did not want to write a huge blog entry about something so subjective. Instead, I’m making it up by finding out techniques to learn whether you are an auditory learner, visual learner, kinesthetic learner or if you learn best just by reading.

Looking forward to the results! I think I can make some interesting findings 🙂

– Benedicte