Speaker 1: Hey, what's up guys? So finals are upon us. I know some of you guys have already started finals. Some of you guys have them coming very soon. And for that reason, I'm releasing this video early this week. So hopefully it can help you in creating a study schedule. And what I want to do specifically in this video is actually give you a look at one of the schedules I built for my final exams as a student. But before that, I've got some general tips and principles that you can use to build your study schedule. So hopefully you can front load all the work and plan effectively and that will help you study in the most efficient way possible through the weeks leading up to finals and through the actual finals week. Now, I think there are some guiding principles that you should keep in mind when you're building your study schedule. These will help you make it as effective as possible. And number one, you want to minimize the time that you spend procrastinating and maximize the time you spend studying effectively. You also want to study the most important material in the right order. And lastly, you want to manage your energy and stress levels. So with those guiding principles in mind, the first step to building your study schedule is to figure out when your finals are. And I have to mention this because I remember my school did not have final exams during the actual class periods that I went to. Instead, they had this convoluted formula algorithm thing where you had to go on the website and figure out the first time of the week when your first class met. And that would correlate to some other exam date, probably in the evening when you want to be eating dinner. And I can only assume they like put a bunch of dice into a Yahtzee jar and that's how they figured it out. Once you know those exam dates and you're sure you're not going to be showing up to an empty classroom an hour after the exam ends, which by the way, pro tip is the easiest way to fail an exam. Then what you want to do is arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible to help you build that study schedule. I'm talking the format of your exams, multiple choice, true, false, essay style, what have you. The material that's going to cover, is it comprehensive or is it only going to cover what you had since the last exam? And how much of your grade this exam is going to count for. You also want to keep in mind any homework assignments or projects that you have due during the exam week. And speaking of that, it's good to step back for a second and ask yourself, what kind of person am I when it comes to scheduling study sessions and project and homework sessions? Maybe you're the kind of person who likes to intersperse the project work with the study sessions to kind of give your brain a break and a change of pace. Or maybe you're like me and you do better to put all of your project and homework work on one day and then put all the study sessions on another day and keep it all compartmentalized so your brain is in the right frame of reference on each day. After that, take stock of your resources. Make sure you have the syllabi, all the course materials, handouts from your professors, notes and textbooks. And at this point, your number one priority is to assess your knowledge for each class. Try to figure out exactly what's going to be covered on each exam and figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are. One final step before we begin actually scheduling things and that is to prioritize your classes and figure out which ones you should study for the most and in what order you want to study them. And to figure that out, you want to figure out which classes are most important. There are a few different factors that go into this. One of them is which finals count for the most points, the percentage of your grade, and those are usually listed on your syllabuses, syllabi. You also want to take into account your current standing in each class. If in one class you have a solid A, then maybe your final performance is not going to influence that grade too much. And maybe in another class, you're kind of on the precipice between one grade and another and that final will really count for what your actual grade is going to be. Once you've taken those factors into account, you can compare them against the knowledge gaps you identified earlier to figure out which classes are the most important and which classes you're struggling the most in. And those two pieces of information together will help you more accurately prioritize how long you should study for each class and in what order you should schedule your sessions. All right, now we are ready to begin scheduling. So in the book, How to Study for College, which was written by the Cornell University professor, Walter Pak, the same guy who made the Cornell note-taking system, he recommends creating something called a home stretch schedule for finals. And this is basically a schedule much like your normal weekly schedule, but like ultra detailed. You want to put lots of things in there that you don't want to put in there, like your meal times, all the little tasks you have to take care of. And this can help you figure out where the gaps are that you can schedule study sessions for your finals. One thing I'd like to add to this is you should try to group and batch your small tasks into as few sessions as possible. That way, you'll have more uninterrupted blocks of time where you can actually get studying done. Now, personally, my tool of choice for this has always been Google Calendar. I've been using it ever since I was a freshman. And if you're more of a paper planner person, that's more your speed, that's totally cool. But at this point in the video, I want to go into Google Calendar, and I'm going to show you one of my own finals week study schedules. All right, so here we are looking at the week of April 25th to May 1st, 2010. This was the second semester of my freshman year. And this is the week leading up to finals, which I have my exams scheduled in blue to let me know when they are and I've looked up when they're scheduled. So let's look at this week leading up to finals. It's looking pretty crazy right now. So I'm going to turn off the homework and the other and work. So this is my class schedule. I've got, I believe, six classes here, two of them meet only once per week, which is pretty crazy. And then I've got a job review session that I remember was like a whole class wide thing the professor was running, definitely wanted to be at that. And also adding in my work, I worked probably 20 hours a week or more, basically all through college. So I was balancing that with classes. And actually, this semester, there were more than 20 hours a week because I had training sessions for the summer job I was training for. So I had to balance all of this. And because it was so hectic, I wanted to make sure that I was getting my meals and workouts in so that on my other calendar, I had lunches, which were usually very quick. And then dinners, which were with friends, and I wanted to make sure those were longer because I really valued them. I also had gym times to make sure that I was staying healthy during this studying week. So as Pac says in the book about the home stretch schedule, I now can identify gaps of time where I can start scheduling my study sessions. And that's exactly what I did. And what I want to point out here is I have finishing my homework on one day, I've got one other homework on this other day. And then when reviewing, I tried to be very specific about what I was going to review. Remember with the Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time allotted for it, you shouldn't show up to the library and just tell yourself, I'm going to study for five hours, because you're going to end up just working on one thing for five straight hours. Instead, keep Parkinson's law in mind, and also realize that your brain's efficiency is going to take a dive after 25 to 30 minutes. So you can try scheduling your study sessions with the Pomodoro technique in mind and try to accomplish a specific set of things within 25 or 30 minutes and then give yourself a small break. That being said, let's go over to the finals week. And you can see I have my finals labeled in blue, so I know exactly when they are and just have worked, there were no classes during that week. So I didn't schedule things here because I was not perfect as a student, but you could keep scheduling things and being efficient up until your finals are done, and then you are home free. All right, so to round this video out, I've got three final quick tips that can hopefully make your study schedule even better. And the first one is to pay attention to the ebbs and flows of your body's energy levels throughout the day. For instance, maybe your energy levels are highest in the morning, in which case maybe you should schedule your hardest study session for then, but also make sure you're going to bed, early enough that you're well rested to get up early, or maybe you're a night owl and you find that you're really, really focused at night, in which case don't worry about getting up too early. Number two, remember that the performance of your brain is connected to the wellbeing of your body. So schedule time to exercise and schedule time for breaks so you can reduce stress. And lastly, ask for help when you need it. Be sure to challenge yourself and try to work through problems. But if you really get stuck, asking your professor can accelerate your review process and save you a lot of stress. If you've seen my video with tips on starting a new semester, you'll remember I had a hidden calendar with my professor's office hours on it, and I could activate it at any time to figure out when a certain professor would be in the office and when I could go get help. So that's it for this video. If you check the companion article for it, you'll find screenshots of my Google Calendar in case you want to use it as a guide for your own. Otherwise, if you liked this video, give it a like to support this channel, and I will see you in next week's video. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching this video. If you want to get new tips every week on being a more effective student, you can click that big red subscribe button right there. And also, if you want to get a free copy of my book, I'm earning $1,000 a month. So make sure to hit that subscribe button right there. If you want to see that companion blog post, click the orange button right there. And if you missed last week's video, we talked about a brain hack of sorts for performing better on your exams, so check it out if you haven't seen it. And lastly, I'm Tom Frankly on Instagram or Twitter if you want to connect, or you can leave a comment down below.