Speaker 1: I hate to break it to you, but to me, the secret to an effective study routine isn't candles or pastel highlighters, even though they improve the experience. A routine is a habit. It's something you don't think about anymore. It's a shortcut. It reduces cognitive load. And the beauty is it doesn't feel like a choice anymore. You just do it. You're used to doing it. So you get it done. Today, I want to help you make studying feel easy. And to do this, we're going to develop an effective study routine. This saves me during uni where I feel like I have a million things to juggle. So I want to make this video as practical as possible. And I really hope it helps you live a more social, less stressed, free and wonderful academic life. The first element to any effective study routine is planning. The more you know about what your upcoming exams, homework, class, prep, essays, all of that are going to look like, the more you can filter that into your study activity so that you're prepared. Like, how do you know how to guide your study activities? Unless you know what things are coming up and how long they're going to take you. So much happens during uni that I know if I lived just day to day, I would fall apart like I did in first year. So planning is good. We like planning. The first tip I have within planning is a concept I came up with just now. It's called the mandatory minimum. It's so important to get really good at estimating how long tasks actually take you because the more accurately you can estimate your study activities, the more easily you can plan that into your timetable, into your life. And so when I look at my upcoming week for university, I have this idea of the mandatory minimum in the back of my head. This is the minimum amount of time I need to prepare really well for that class, for that homework, to write the essay. And my knowledge of my mandatory minimum for all of these things is guided by my experience. Odds are you're repeating these things again and again. You are doing homework every week. You have to do class prep every week. So you can get good at learning how long it actually takes you. And knowing your mandatory minimum lets you know the minimum amount. Like even if life gets so, so, so busy, as long as you do this minimum, you're going to be okay. For example, on a Tuesday, I have two classes in my afternoon. They're at 2pm and 4pm and each is 90 minutes. So I only have half an hour in between them. And if I didn't know my mandatory minimum was longer than that half an hour, and if I decided, oh, let's just do preparation in between the two, I would be screwing myself over every single time for that second class. For every class, I have a bunch of readings to do. I have pre-class work I have to submit. And I also get a test question in every class where I get tested on the readings. So if I haven't done the readings, I'm not going to be able to answer this question. And this also goes towards my final degree and just everything will fall apart. So it's important that I do that prep work well. I now know that my mandatory minimum for my philosophy elective class is two hours. It takes forever for me to read sometimes 40 pages or more of like an original philosopher's argument. And then depending on the class's pre-work, it can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. My mandatory minimum for my business classes, which is my minor, is an hour generally. If we're talking minimum, I can do it in an hour and then generally an hour for the pre-class work, which I submit. Oh my God, last week I got given a data set for a company's marketing efforts and I had to manually code and do a bunch of statistical tests to work out which of their marketing efforts was more successful under different parameters. And I remember seeing that pre-class work and being like, bloody hell, this is going to take me a long time. And if I wasn't aware of the mandatory minimum, if I hadn't looked at that in advance, I would not have been able to do it in time for the class. And then my mandatory minimum for all my neuroscience classes is two and a half hours, depending on how dense the readings are. If I didn't know my mandatory minimum for all of these classes in my schedule, it would be so easy to accept invitations with friends, to schedule too many activities, to get overwhelmed and bogged down. This would lead to me being unprepared and then being stressed after and have a knock-on effect on my understanding. And I feel like I'd always be running and catching up. So this mandatory minimum means that at least I'm going to be okay in these classes and I can plan my life accordingly. And then the next mandatory minimum in my academic life is assignments and essays. For you, that might be homework. It might be a end of chapter tests. I get given an essay, sometimes two a week. They take me varying lengths of time, but I now know that I like to have one session for planning it and one session for doing it. For me, this is a mandatory minimum of five hours. And I know I have to find the time somewhere with my class schedule, with my readings, with YouTube, with all these other things. And then I also know that I'm exhausted after classes. So my best time to work is the morning. So I have in my head, okay, cool. This mandatory minimum of morning sessions focused on my upcoming essays. And this concept of mandatory minimum, I apply to everything in my life. It's, you know, it takes me an hour to make a YouTube thumbnail. It takes me this long to film, to plan a video, all these things. And this is just the first step to having a good routine is estimating how long things take you. But the demands of my degree of your academic life change, which is why I use monthly, weekly, and daily overviews. We're all familiar with the to-do list. We know what it is. It's a list of annoying things we have to check off, but they're really helpful to guide you. And I've gotten into the habit of on a Sunday, I plan the coming week. It takes like 30 minutes to an hour on a Sunday evening. I look at the topics we're going to be covering and how long it's going to take me, like how dense the pre-work is, how dense the readings are, to see if I need more than my mandatory minimum. It lets me look at essay deadlines coming up, all of these things. And it just gives me the foresight to know, should I overwhelm myself with saying yes to friends, to doing a million exciting exploration things in the city? Or is that going to make me really stressed because there's a lot going on. And then from this week overview, every single day I can come back to it and then I can make a to-do list for that day. I generally love Notion and Google Calendar as a combination, but I also love Jack Edwards' Ink Outside the Box weekly calendar. You can also use a planner. So all of this is just to shape your study routine that you're going to have for that day. What are you going to be studying? Why are you doing those activities? Because you've planned them. You're aware of everything you've got to do in the week. Like you spending time now in this study session is great because you know that it's something you've got to tick off. Okay, cool. So we've talked about the high level of planning, which I think is the first step. And now we're going to talk about the activity of studying itself. One of the things I talk about in my book is called sanctity of space. The idea is that our brains come to associate physical spaces with an activity. When we're in the kitchen, we expect to cook or to eat, which is why we often feel hungry. When we're in bed, our brain expects to sleep, which is why you often feel tired or relaxed. When we sit at our desks, what do you want your brain to expect? What are you training your brain every single time you sit here to believe? And that's the thing. You need to have the discipline to carve this space as a study space, to get your brain in this mindset of when I sit here, I'm studying, and that means don't go on your phone there. If you can, every single time that you want to go on your phone or you want to scroll, actively come away from your desk or your study space, like sit on your bed, go outside the room, sit on the floor, make it so that your brain thinks this space is for deep work. And if you don't have a desk, that's okay. Like if you use a certain cafe or a library, try not to go on your phone too much in that library so that when you enter the space, you're telling your brain, I am here because I'm going to study. Secondly, as I said earlier, habits are repeated over time until they become unconscious activities. The best way to know when to put the habit in is to look at your life and think, what is the time that my brain is most active? When is a logical place for me to always study? I know that when I was at school, I had the most motivation either early in the morning or just when I came home from school. By the time it was late at night, I just wanted to go on my phone. I wasn't productive. So I got into the habit of coming home every single day, going and getting a snack, taking off my school uniform, and then just sitting down and blurting down everything that I needed to do on my to-do list. It would just come gushing out of me, all these things on my mind. And it wasn't hard to make this to-do list. It didn't require energy because it was a habit. I didn't think. I just came home, got the snack, went upstairs and just wrote it down. And then I quickly prioritize what I need to do. The first step is already done. And then just spend an hour or so doing that task. And then later I enjoy my phone, enjoy my life. Nowadays, my uni timetable is more dotted around. So I build a routine around certain spaces and around my classes for that day. I love going to a certain cafe for doing readings. I love going to a certain workspace for classes. I love doing YouTube and creative work at my desk here. Whatever it is, make it a habit. Get used to deeply focusing on one task. Set yourself small breaks. So deep focus for like half an hour and then have a 10 minute break. That is what an effective study routine is. It's habit, it's reinforcement. It's knowing your space that you're going to go to, to get these things done. And it's having planned it in advance. So just to recap, what is a study routine? A study routine is the high level planning of what you want to do. It's having an understanding of the mandatory minimum time it takes you to do things, having sanctity of space over your chosen location, and then being disciplined enough to do the routine again and again until it becomes a habit. I really hope this helps you in some way. And I know school can be so stressful. So just developing a study routine is one really concrete step to feeling less stressed, feeling in control. It sounds really weird to say it, but I actually did write a book on this topic. It's called The Only Study Guide You Ever Need, which is a very pretentious name. And it details everything from timetabling to study habits, how to revise, motivation, all of that stuff. I'll leave it, the link to it down below. My casual magic for today, which is just like a little thing that I'm grateful for is, well, this morning I woke up and I heard these kids like playing outside before going to school in the morning. And I was making my porridge and I was just listening to them. And I was like, oh, like, I don't know. There's something about children's joy, which is just so refreshing. Sometimes I wish I could have that, that childish playfulness again. It's just, I love it. Have a wonderful rest of your day and let me know if there are any study related videos or specific university videos you'd like to see. Bye.