Speaker 1: It's nearly Christmas now, yay. Lots of baking, going out with friends, Christmas songs, snow, actually not snow, it's England, who am I kidding? Presents, Christmas lights, and exams. A lot of people have exams soon and for people in the UK just like me, straight after Christmas we have two weeks of mocks. But anyway, whether you have exams soon or this is the first time you actually need to study for that important exam or you just need some study tips that you might not have considered before, this video is for you. We'll cover how to set up your study space, create a revision timetable, and deciding what to study efficiently and effectively so that you can minimise the time needed to make time for your friends and family and other festive fun. Number one, your study space. A lot of people under-look this part whereas a lot of people obsess over this part too much. I have friends who just study wherever they feel like it, on the piano, on the floor, at the gym, on the bus, in the garden, on the stairs, and I also have friends who are really really picky and won't study unless they're at their favourite cafe with their favourite armchair tilted at 35 degrees and the air is a pH of 6.7. But what you need to do is you need to designate a place where you're going to study and stick to it. So to find out whether your space is a good space for studying, ask yourself these three questions. Number one, can I stay in good posture and comfortably in this place for 90 minutes or more? Number two, is it a quiet place where I can study? And number three, is it destruction free? If your place ticks yes to all three of these questions, it's good. And the reason we wanted to designate one place for studying is that your brain associates activities to places. When you go to a library, your brain automatically associates it with quiet and study, so you might be more productive there. And you feel sleepy in bed because it's the place your brain associates with sleep and so that's why you shouldn't study in bed because your brain has already associated that place with sleeping. Number two, timetable. People just tend to get stuck into revising without planning or dedicating a timetable and they wonder why they get lost. It's like you want to venture through a snowstorm and instead of having a map, a rope to hang on to, you're just walking through aimlessly and you're going to get lost, right? Whereas if you just set out a rope for you to hold on to as you walk through, you might not be able to see properly but you're going to make it out alive. So the thing you want to do is you want to make a big list of all the things you want and need to do. So this includes those things such as watching kdramas as well as studying and I'll get on to why that's important in a bit. And so once you have this, you want to create a planner or calendar of some sort, it doesn't really matter which. And now this is where you need to be honest. If you're a procrastinator and you know that you're a pro procrastinator, you need to plan your days individually with times as empty gaps are the prone reason why procrastinators procrastinate. Having empty gaps and ambiguous time slots makes it so your brain looks for other things to do and that's why you get lost in scrolling on your phone. Whereas if you're someone who you know that can stick to things that you said you'd do, you don't need to plan for individual hours of the day, rather just plan for the day which is what I tend to do. But some days where I'm not feeling productive or I'm not at the place where I want to be, like for example, I haven't done anything, I just watched that kdrama, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start planning the rest of the hours I have because although it takes more effort, when you have this hour by hour plan, you're so much more likely to just follow it. And slot in fun activities and leisure time. This is a way to not get burnt out. When people make their revision timetable, they slot in 10 hours of science, then 10 hours of English and then 10 hours of biology and one minute of social media as if they're going to follow that. When as in reality, they spend 10 hours on social media and 10 minutes on maths. And so it reduces distractions as well as acting as motivation, which we talked about in this video. Slotting things around your rest breaks and things that you want to do makes us hope you look forward to that and will motivate you to stay on track. And when putting in your revision timetable, the things you want to study and subjects you need to cover, don't just put maths revision, English revision, like I used to do as well. Bro, what the hell is maths revision? Like, are you going to revise every single mathematical formula known to man? So you have to be specific. The reason that you don't stick to things is that it's too vague. Like your brain sees maths revision and then it doesn't know what to do. Your brain's dumber than you think, no offence. You need to tell it specific things like I'm going to do questions 10 to 16 on circled theorems. And I've already talked about this before, but try using the traffic light system because it's so, so time efficient. There's no point in saying revise maths and then revise everything that you've done in the year because a lot of the time you're going to know some of those topics. Like when I'm revising French vocabulary, I'm going to know some words better than others. Like bonjour bro, like I know what that means. So make sure to make a list of the things that you don't know because revising what you don't know is the whole point of revising. And the third thing is once you've made your timetable and know what you have to do, do past paper and topic questions. Make a spreadsheet or table with the name of that question or past paper you've done, your score and most importantly your mistakes so that you can come back to it. The reason that this is good is because you can check your answers. And so make sure that you save questions you got wrong because obviously if you did a question now and you got it right, you're probably not going to get it wrong in the exam. Whereas if you got a question wrong now, you're probably going to get it wrong in the exam. So revise the questions you got wrong. I keep all my mistakes I've made in a single place so that before a chemistry exam, for example, I can quickly do control F and I can see all the chemistry mistakes I've done. So those are just some of the mistakes that I've prevented and that makes it so that I prevent losing easy marks. And this is really underrated because by collecting all your mistakes in one place, it's almost like a second brain. Your brain's not going to remember all the stuff you got wrong. And so for example, just the day before that test, doing last minute revision by only doing the questions that you got wrong, it's actually proven that will reduce your marks loss by 70% because obviously marks that you lose will be based on stuff that you've already gotten wrong before. And the fourth one, as for timings and techniques, do what works for you. I recommend that you try all of them and you can watch this video on study techniques that I made if you don't know any and you need some ideas. Pomodoro works well, but I suggest you do at least 15 minutes of work as 25 minutes is just too short. But if you know that you just work best by sitting down for two hours and just getting that work done, do what works for you. Because the thing is, as contradictory as it sounds, there is no best way to study. Because the thing is, you can study the way I studied, you can study the way Lang Lang studied, but you're not going to get the same results because you have to do what works for you. You're different to another person who will watch this video. So leave in the comments what you found work to help others and also motivate others to study.