Master Your Finals: Tips for Organization and Creating a Productive Study Schedule (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey guys, and welcome back to my channel. With finals week right around the corner, I'm going to be sharing with you some tips on how to get organized and get your life together before then, as well as how you can create a productive finals study schedule to help you stay on track when preparing for your exams. I hope you find this video helpful, and let's get organized and prepared for finals week. First thing I'm doing is cleaning up my desk space and room, as this is where I'll be spending most of my time in the next two weeks studying for exams. It's really important to have a clean workspace and only keep the items that you absolutely need. This ensures that you don't get distracted by random items sitting around on your desk, and for me, I simply have my computer, monitor, and keyboard, as well as a timer, speaker, headphones, and a few other pens and notebooks that I use to jot down notes. This way, I know when I sit down at my desk, I can only really focus on the work in front of me and maximize focus and productivity in studying for my exams. In addition to just my desk, I also ensure that the rest of my room is clean, and especially during exam season, I try to make my bed every morning to prevent crawling back in bed for naps throughout the day. The second thing I'm doing is fixing my sleep schedule. Ever since we transitioned from online to in-person uni, I found that while I've been having more structure and routine in my day-to-day life, it's also left me not as much time to study and spend time on my own, so I tend to stay up later to compensate for that. And as a result, I've been sleeping past midnight and waking up quite late. I think fixing your sleep schedule is important for two main reasons. One, to ensure that you have the energy to focus on studying during the day, and the other, to be able to actually wake up for your 9am exams when the time comes. It's much better to start transitioning now than to wait for the days leading up to the exam. However, I think it's still important to determine whether or not you're a morning or night person, and when you work most productively. Because at the end of the day, it would be counterproductive to force yourself to wake up at 6am to study when you know that you work much better later in the evening or at midnight. Now if you are looking to sleep earlier or have an easier time falling asleep, here's a few things that I've found to work for myself. First is listening to a designated playlist that's suitable for falling asleep. I'll link the one that I personally listen to in the description box below. Another thing I do is turning off all of my phone notifications at least an hour before bed, and just generally avoid going on my phone or my laptop, and so instead I will try reading or journaling. Sometimes turning on my diffuser with my favorite essential oils is also super helpful. And I think if you make sure that you get enough sleep, hitting the snooze button shouldn't really be a problem the next morning. Now that we've got the basics, let's move on to making our study schedule and weekly schedules to help us stay on track when studying for the exam. I will be doing this in Notion, so thank you to Notion for sponsoring this portion of the video. I will have the links to download and access to the templates in the description box below. The first thing I would do is access my course syllabus and write down all the units and the contents that were covered in the course. So I'm creating this specifically for my anatomy final, and so the main course content includes recorded lectures and lab modules. In this new page that I've started, I'm first pasting in any study resources that's been given by the professors, TAs, or other students, and this may include pre-made flashcards, notes, or practice tests. Then I'm using the toggle feature to organize the content for each of the units we covered, which includes cardiology, immunology, respiration, renal, gastrointestinal, and reproduction. Within each toggle, I'm writing all the lectures and lab modules covered. At the same time, I'm also checking to see if there are modules or lectures that I haven't seen, as well as any content that I want to pay special attention to when reviewing. I will either bold or highlight when I come across one. So here, I'm highlighting a couple lectures that I still need to watch for the first time. Once I have a general overview of the content I'm working with, I will input slash calendar to add a calendar to this page, and then I will mark down the day of my exam, which for anatomy is on April 29th. Then I will look back to see how many days I have to study for it and begin planning from there. Now when it comes to delegating tasks, I try to leave out a buffer period of two to three days before the actual exam, in which I make no plans as of now, and it's only for if I fall behind in my study schedule, which usually happens, hence the buffer period. Then I prioritize watching lectures and modules that I haven't seen to ensure that I've been exposed to all the testable content at least once before jumping into review. Here I'm adding a new box with the lecture number and the title of the lecture that I want to watch and dragging it to the specific day. Now when it comes to review, I will also try to focus and spend more time on content that I've struggled with more throughout the semester, as well as content that was covered much earlier on compared to recently. For me, those would be cardiology and respiration. For reviewing units and topics, instead of creating individual to-dos for each task, I drag a box across the days that I want to dedicate to it and open it as a page for more detailed planning. This helps me feel less overwhelmed when I look at my study schedule, especially when in addition to all of my other courses. Now that I've tackled the unfamiliar and more difficult concepts, I will add the remaining units and topics to my calendar accordingly. Sometimes when I have several exams to study for, I like to use a grade calculator to determine what is the minimum grade I need on the exams to achieve the desired final grade in the course. And based on that number, I will also prioritize the studying of various different subjects. Additionally, I also try to finish any miscellaneous assignments before settling down to study for an exam. This way, you know, you can dedicate your full attention to a single task. The calendar feature in Notion is also super convenient in that you can turn it into any other view, such as table or list by subject or date, and this can help you get a better idea of the tasks you need to complete for each class by a specific deadline. Now that we've talked enough about creating the plan, it's also important to find the best strategy for review, and this can differ drastically depending on the class you're taking, whether it's calculation-based or content-based, as well as the format of the final exam. So if it's written, multiple choice, or a mix of both. For calculation-based courses like chemistry or physics, I think on top of going through the lectures, it's important to work through different practice problems, especially ones provided by your professors, as those would best reflect the format of your final exam. So in that case, that would take up a big portion of your review process, and it would be beneficial to do those under exam conditions, checking your answers, and most importantly, figuring out why you got a certain question wrong. And if time permits, it's also useful to organize the commonly seen types of questions for each major concept, and I like to use the toggle and table feature in Notion for this. As for memorization-based courses like anatomy or biology, active recall is a great way to ensure that you've got a full grasp of all the content. You can do this with any flashcard app, such as OnKey or Quizlet, or utilize the toggle feature in Notion by typing slash toggle and typing the question you have in mind. Then within the toggle, you write down the answer to the question. Unlike other apps that have built-in reminders for you to study and review, you need to actually create a schedule and stick to it if you choose to do it in Notion. Finally, you can use Notion for various other features to help you stay organized during finals week. My favorite pages are my weekly planning and deadlines page. My weekly page includes my events and to-dos for the upcoming week, as well as a calendar reminding me of deadlines. Meanwhile, my dedicated deadline page gives me an overview of all the assignments I completed and still need to complete, as well as the percent it's worth in the overall calculation of my grades. So the link to download Notion and to access all the templates I've mentioned today will be in the description box below. And one last thing to keep in mind during finals week is to remember to take breaks and avoid burning out right before the exam. You can do so by taking the evenings off on weekends or studying with your friends, regularly engaging in activities that help you de-stress, such as through exercising or really anything that works for you. And with that said, brings us to the end of this video. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to like, subscribe, and check out more of my content. And all of my social media will be linked in the description box below. Wishing everyone a productive and balanced exam week, and I'll see you in my next video. Bye guys.