Speaker 1: In my second year at Columbia University, I took seven classes, worked a part-time internship, and ran a student organization. Despite my crazy schedule, I still aced all my exams without ever making a study plan, and I will share how you can as well. Hi, my name is Han. I'm a recent engineering grad from Columbia University. Before college, I used to love making study timetables and plan out every single detail of what day, what time, and what I'm going to study. You know the satisfaction that having a vision and knowing that for the next weeks or months, that every detail of my life is optimized for preparing for my exams. However, it usually even wouldn't take two days before some unexpected event occurred, either a last-minute change of plans or a study session that took longer than I expected, and the whole system would collapse. If today's material won't finish, means tomorrow's workload is doubled, and things started to pile up. It's the worst feeling to see my notifications on my phone reminding me that I was not doing something that I'm supposed to be doing. Then I felt lazy and questioned myself that, why can't I just have more discipline? As the days passed by and the exam got closer, the anxiety of falling behind grew. All I wanted to do is lying on my couch because I know there's no way I can finish five days of materials in one single study session. I found myself trapped in a cycle that make very ambitious study plans, falling behind, feeling overwhelmed, then giving up completely, and then after a while, making another study plan. It took me the longest time to figure out why can't I stick to my study plans and be more disciplined. I really wish I had realized three things sooner. Number one, people are bad at predicting things and things change last minute all the time. It's just nearly impossible for me to make realistic study plans that's not even weeks or months. Number two, there's no way for me to strictly follow a schedule and always do the right things at the right time. Because I am a human, sometimes I feel tired, sometimes I feel unmotivated, and it happens. Number three, not making plans doesn't mean I'm unorganized. I can still organize my life and study without planning ahead of time. After years of trial and error, I finally developed an exam prep system that helps me succeed in all my exams, but also gives me the flexibility to study whenever I actually feel like it. This is a combination of my personal experience, science-based learning techniques, and the help of my favorite productivity tool, Notion. Thank you, Notion, for sponsoring this video. Notion is an all-in-one productivity app, and I've been using it for years for my school, work, and personal projects, and I really love it. In this video, I will be sharing my exam preparation method using Notion. I have also implemented it in a Notion template so that you can use it too. I will run through an example of how I prepare for my exams step by step very soon, but let me give you a brief summary to show you the main advantages of my exam prep method. Number one, track instead of plan. For each exam, I have two progress bars. The first one is the reference progress, which is based on how many tasks or topics I need to study and how many days I have to study them. I will explain later how I calculate this reference, but basically, this will tell you the percentage of topics you should have studied by a certain day if you want to be on track in your exam preparation. The second one is the actual progress bar, which is based on how many topics I have actually studied and how many topics I haven't finished, including how difficult they were when I studied them and whether I want to review them later or not. By comparing to my actual progress to the reference progress, I can tell if I'm ahead of or behind the reference schedule. There's no strict schedule that I have to follow or stress about, but this gives me a feeling of what I have done, what I need to do, and just keeps me roughly on track. Second, spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that has been proven to increase the rate of learning. The main idea is the newly introduced topics were the more difficult topics, you should study them more often, and the older and less difficult topics, you should study them less frequently. So after each study session, I will record the date when I reviewed that topic and how difficult the topic was for me, hard, good, or easy, which will help me to decide what I'm going to review next time and will help me to study as efficient as possible in the time that I have left. I will show you exactly how to do that in a moment. Three, focus on what really matters. As I mentioned in my previous videos, I categorize all my study topics into three different categories, most important, secondary, and nice to know. The parental principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, means that roughly 80% of the outcomes result from 20% of the effort. So we really want to put a lot of our effort and time into the most important topics. Also, some topics may be the foundation of other topics, so we want to study those first. This is especially helpful when you deal with a large number of study materials. Now I've explained why my study method works so well for me. I'm going to show exactly how I will prepare for my exams. Let's use Morden analysis as an example. So this is my notion. I will start by putting in my exam date. Let's say it's in 10 days, in December 4th. I will start reviewing today, which is November 24th. I usually want to finish reviewing all the materials two or three days before my exam, because I may want to use that time to do extra practice problems, and it's just always nice to have some buffer time in case something comes up. You can leave more or less days based on how big is your exam and how much time do you have. I will go ahead and put that in. This gives me seven days that I can use to review. I already wrote all the formulas in Notion, so it automatically calculates those for you. Then I am going to go ahead and put all the topics covered in the exam. Got this from the syllabus that my professor provided. Now we can see all the status for these topics are defaulted to never reviewed before I started reviewing them. Then I will evaluate the priority of each topic. We want to spend more time and more effort into the more important stuff. Also, some topics may be the foundations of the others. We want to start reviewing those first. And if we have a large amount of materials, by setting a filter to only display the most important ones, we can start working through those first. Also, it counts how many topics we have in total. We have nine topics. Make sure you don't accidentally leave any blank entries here, because it will count that as well. So based on the number of topics that I need to review and the days left to review, I can roughly know how many topics I need to review every day. This is the number of topics divided by the days I have. In this case, we have seven days left and nine topics in total. So I know that if I simply review the exact same amount of materials every day, I should roughly review 1.29 topics every day. Once you put in those information, my template also estimates a reference progress bar for you. Basically, this bar tells you that if I equally distribute all my tasks across the days I have to study, how many tasks should I have finished by now? For example, let's say if I have five days to study for an exam and I have 10 tasks need to complete, I can just study two tasks a day. And then by the end of five days, I will complete 10 tasks. And on the first day, I should complete 20% of my total tasks. And on the second day, I should complete 40% of the total tasks. Hopefully that makes sense. Once we complete all the information, and now it's time to actually start studying. So on the first day, which is today, November 24th, I picked these two topics, finance sets and connected sets, to review based on the priority and because I like them. And every time I finish a topic, I will mark that topic as hard, good, or easy, depending on how I feel about them. For example, I found the finance sets very hard for me because when I was doing the practice problems, I had a really hard time to get the answers correct. But I felt pretty good about the connected sets. So I would just go ahead and mark that. Also, I will record the date that I reviewed each topic, which is today. And the last column is the dates since last review. It will automatically calculate based on the last review date you put it. Okay, so on to the next date. November 25th, I felt really productive today. And I had lots of time, so I reviewed all the first priority topics that I haven't reviewed yet. And I actually felt good about all of them after I looked at them and working on questions about those topics. And notice that at this point, my reference progress suggests that I should be finished with 14.3 of all the topics because a day has passed and it shows zero actual progress so far because the progress only advanced when I complete reviewing a topic and it marked the topic easy. So it shows that I'm a little bit behind in my progress, but it's completely okay because I know I worked on all these topics already and I felt good about most of them. Also, it's really just a reference bar. It's a suggestion to show me what is going on. It doesn't mean anything that I have to follow. On November 7th, I see there are stuff that I haven't reviewed yet. So I go ahead and review those. Compact sets were actually pretty easy for me. And perfect sets and Cauchy sequence were pretty hard for me to answer the questions. And now I go ahead and check my reference progress. It shows that I should be finished with 43 of all the topics by this point because three days has passed, but I only made 11.1 actual progress. Now I'm starting to get a little bit nervous because I am falling behind a little bit too much. So I am going to put a little bit more effort to catch up. On day four, November 28th, I noticed that I have three topics that are currently very hard for me. However, I won't review the nice to know topics because they require a lot of effort, but they actually give me minimal results. Remember the 20 and 80 rule. Therefore, I want to prioritize studying the most important ones first, this hard one and also the finance sets and matrix spaces. Now I see that I'm no longer significantly behind the progress. I'm getting closer, so that's good. So on day five, November 29th, I reviewed all the important topics that I didn't review yesterday because it's been a long time I reviewed them. Now they're all pretty easy for me now. I see that this is the first time I'm actually ahead of my schedule. Yay. On day six, November 30th, I studied perfect sets and Cauchy sequences again. Still, one is very hard for me, but I felt good about the other one. The last day I reviewed the only two that I haven't felt easy and perfect sets finally become easy and the Cauchy sequences are good now. Now I'm actually supposed to finish 100% of my studying, but I still have one topic that is not easy for me. It is okay because I already felt good about it and I actually do have three days of buffer time and I will be using that time to review them. That is a complete example of how I will review for my exams. I want to share a little bit more about how I integrate Notion AI to my existing exam revision flow. For each individual topic, I can go in and put all my notes and materials that are about that topic. The first Notion AI feature that helps me study faster is the Q&A. We can use it by clicking on the small sparkle icon on the bottom right corner of the screen. Basically, you can ask any questions and it will search through all your content in Notion. For example, let's say I am reviewing the Cauchy sequence and I forgot the definition of matrix space. I know it's somewhere in my Notion, but it would take a lot of effort to search it manually. So instead of getting distracted and wasting time searching, I can just use Notion Q&A and ask, what is the definition of a matrix space? It will search through all my notes in Notion and just provide me with the answer. It will also show me where that information is located, so I can go to that page and read more if I want to. This just saves me so much time and help me be more focused while studying. Another feature of Notion AI I use a lot and it saves me so much time is its ability to summarize notes. You can select any of the paragraphs and click ask AI and then select summarize. It will provide you with a summary and you can ask it to make it shorter or longer. Also, you can do it to the whole page. We can add a property to the page and click AI summary. It will summarize the entire page for you. You can also do this to all the pages in your database. So it will just go ahead and summarize all the topics for you, even if there are lots of notes in each one of them. Now you can see the summary of all of them without even going into the page. Another Notion AI feature that is useful when reviewing is it can explain things to you. For example, I do not completely understand what this sentence means, so I would just select it and click ask AI and choose explain this. I can ask it to continue explaining until I fully understand. There is just so much more you can do with Notion AI and it truly helps me study and work faster and smarter. I highly recommend it. Again, thank you Notion for sponsoring this video. I will put the link of my Notion template in the description box. Bye.