Speaker 1: So this rule is very very important and I found that this really helps me in my GCSEs and A-levels. If you find maths the hardest thing ever and you're only doing it once a week, re-evaluate what you're doing and think about it because if something's the hardest subject for you and you're always avoiding it, how do you think it will get any easier? One thing that I'm going to say that's going to be very controversial is... Hey guys and welcome back to another video. It's been highly requested for a long time now and I finally decided to make this video. Here's how you make the best revision timetable so you can ace your exams through consistent but small sessions of revision and end up getting an amazing grade at the end of it. I'm going to be talking about how you can plan your time effectively for different points of the year including pre-exam season, so this is the bulk of the year, majority of your working time and then I'm going to also explain how you can organise your time for exam season because E's differ drastically. Before we get into it, you guys know the drill, be sure to like, comment and subscribe for more content like this and let's get straight into it. The free template that I will be using throughout this video will be linked down in the description, be sure to check it out because it's going to really help you and you can basically customise it as you watch this video and it will have two tabs which will both have timetables on it. One will be for the pre-exam season timetable and the other one will be for the exam season but let's jump straight into it. The first thing you need to think about is whether you are night hour or an early bird. This will really determine how productive you are and when you should schedule your revision sessions. If you're a morning bird, you don't want to be doing your work at like 11pm and vice versa. If you're a night owl, you don't want to be doing your work at 6am, 5am and being tired and not even getting anything. It's very important that you schedule your work to frame how you are as a person and you don't do the opposite because you will notice that you will burn out a lot more quicker and you're just going to not enjoy studying because you're not doing it at times which are optimal for you. So this is something that you definitely have to bear in mind when you're making your timetable and if you don't know what kind of person you are, whether you are a night owl or an early bird, the best way to check is to basically spend a week being either. Whatever you find out is the most effective, load that for the timetable that we're about to plan out. When you get your everyday timetable and you're ready to start planning it out, block out times. Block out times where you're at school, where you have a club, where you have a priority such as babysitting, doing some chores. Block out the things that you know you have to do so that you can work around this. You don't want to be as in revision at times that you're not going to be able to revise because that just defeats the purpose of having a timetable. Studying is important, getting good grades is nice but it's not more important than things that are central to you, so you have to make sure you have good priorities at the start. Once you finally block these times out, you can start to add in your subjects, add in when you want to revise and that's what we're going to do now. And ideally after you come back from school, university, college, you want to make sure you schedule downtime. You can't just go straight from one place of education and then go home and start revising immediately. I mean if you can then kudos to you but me personally, I need a downtime, I need time to relax. So do something not academically related and I recommend scheduling this for like 30 minutes to one hour. The most important thing is do a time that you can stick to. If you know you're someone who you need more than 10 minutes to relax, don't schedule it for 10 minutes, schedule it for 15 minutes for one hour. Schedule yourself a time which is enough for you to get into relaxation but not too much for you to be like slouching around and you don't want to do anything for the rest of the day. So it's all about balance and this might take you a couple of weeks to figure out what works for you. And one thing I really recommend for easing yourself into revision because it can often be really really hard to get back, relax and then straight up do it and exam people for your hours. So I really recommend that you ease yourself by doing homework, by doing something that is required for you to do but it may not be as high intensity as actual revision or actual active recall and this basically gets you in the mood for being productive. So what I recommend is following something called Parkinson's law. So Parkinson's law is basically a way of saying that an activity will expand to the time that you set it. So let's say you have a really short homework, it's literally like a worksheet and you could probably do it in 15 minutes but for some reason you give yourself one hour because your timetable says one hour. You will actually probably spend majority of that hour doing that worksheet, getting distracted, doing all sorts of things and you'll probably get the same amount of work and the same quality of work as if you just focused and spent the 15 minutes. So if you know it's homework and you know that you can do it, like you actually have the power in you to complete it quickly, get yourself less time than what you want to give yourself. After that you can allocate certain amount of hours to certain subjects and the way you want to do this is, as I've been saying on all of my videos, rank your subjects. Rank your subjects based on difficulty. If you find maths the hardest thing ever and you're only doing it once a week, re-evaluate what you're doing and think about it because if something's the hardest subject for you and you're always avoiding it, how do you think it will get any easier? Like it literally won't. You need to make sure you allocate the most amount of time to these subjects that you may dislike, that you get the worst grades in because ultimately that is how you'll do better, that's how you'll improve. So let's say I'm struggling with maths, maths is one of those subjects you can implement in every single day of your revision. Like even if it's 10 minutes solving one question, that one question is basically one step closer to getting the grade that you want. I really recommend doing core bit maths five a day or just like a simple quick worksheet you can do in the morning or in the afternoon, something that's really chill and it's like it will take you about 10-20 minutes because implementing this throughout your days will basically set up that consistency and also help you to start to recognise these questions more and you'll actually improve so much over time. So subjects like that, that you can do something quick, whether it's write a little paragraph, whether it's answer a few questions quickly, even if it's not the whole paper or the booklet, that will be more effective than if you just leave everything to the end and leave it to one big revision session on like a Saturday or Sunday because you're never going to want to do it. At the same time, be realistic, don't set yourself like 10 hours of maths revision, it's not going to happen and maths is not one of those subjects that you can revise for hours on end. You will burn out and you're going to feel tired and then you won't do it again so just make sure you set short and little bursts of revision, that will work out a lot more in the long run. And now I'm going to be introducing you to the one subject rule. So this rule is very very important and I found that this really helps me in my GCSEs and A-levels. So when you get home, you don't want to be revising about seven different subjects because let's be for real, once you get into that one subject, it'll be time for the next subject and you're just jumping around multitasking and all of this is less effective than just focusing on one subject in that one day. So when you get home, you should ideally do a subject which is different to your last period. So let's say you had biology for your last period, me personally, I probably wouldn't revise biology for the rest of the day because I feel like too much biology will just get too much, I'll get overwhelmed and I won't focus. So I would recommend doing something completely different. So if you haven't done chemistry for the whole day, then do chemistry because this just introduces your brain to something new, you're not bored and it's also new information for you to learn. So especially at the start of the year, I recommend easing yourself slowly into revision sessions. Don't just say I'm going to do three hours, I want to do four hours because I want to get all nines, that's not how it works. Set yourself small but achievable goals, so you can say I want to do at least one pomodoro session, I want to do at least two pomodoro sessions. Set yourself something that you can do and you'll actually be happy once you've achieved it. So one hour, 50 minutes of revision and slowly build yourself up to increase these hours and as you get better at focusing, you can start to add another subject. So you can do two subjects in one day but I would say two is probably the maximum if you want to be effective in these revision sessions and you can slowly build this up, it's not something that you will immediately be able to do. Okay so now let's talk about the retrospective timetable. If you're someone who likes to watch study videos, you've probably already heard of this term but this is basically a timetable which is in contrast to a prospective timetable. So what we're making now is a prospective timetable, so we're looking at the timetable and we're saying on Monday I'm going to revise chemistry, on Tuesday I'm going to revise maths and on Thursday I'm going to revise history and this is basically us looking in the future and thinking okay on these days I'm going to revise this. A retrospective timetable basically looks at the topics you revise and grades them based on the difficulty of that session and then you can basically use that to determine when you'll next revise that topic and I find that this is very effective especially when it comes to exam season and you've already learned all the content but now you just need to go over it. So once you've come to this point where you're not self-teaching, you're not learning anything new, you're trying to revise then definitely try to implement this retrospective timetable. It's not going to be on the same sheet as your normal timetable, it'll basically be a thing of let's say you get to chemistry on Monday and you're not sure what you're going to revise. You go on this retrospective timetable, it has all the topics listed and then you just pick a topic based on which is the hardest at that point. You do that topic and let's say you find it medium difficulty like you understand some things but you're losing some marks on something and you can then say you can revise that topic again in a week or in like three to five days and that basically sets yourself up so that you're never just randomly doing something in a revision session. You want to make sure that you're always ranking these topics that you do so that in the future when you're looking back on your weak spots you can easily target those instead of just doing random topics every day. So this is something I really recommend for studying for exam season and then after the session write down the date that you want to revise the next time. You can highlight the session, you can make it green if it was easy, orange if it was medium and red if it was like really really bad. So that means you should probably look at it the next day or the day after. Okay so now let's talk about weekends. So weekends are very important. As I said before, block out your priorities, block out your relaxation time because weekends are still to be enjoyed. Even if you're revising you don't need to be like depressed on your weekend. You can have a good work-life balance so block those times out so at least you can say okay I've finished revision for the day and I can do this. You don't want to have the whole weekend to revision because you're gonna burn out and you're not gonna feel refreshed for the next week. So be realistic, don't be set in like seven hours, set ten hours because I'm telling you you're gonna hate weekends, like you might even hate weekends more than you hate weekdays. So be realistic and be kind to yourself and always give yourself a bit of leeway. Don't beat yourself up if you can't do what you set yourself for the weekend. Only when you build your focus you'll be able to study for these longer periods of time without having to stop or like be burnt out and it's much better to ease yourself into it slowly. And one thing that I'm gonna say that's gonna be very controversial is set at least one day completely off and I said it completely off. So for me in secondary school and college this was Sunday because you need one day where you can completely chill and reset for the next week. When you're in exam season you may not have this one day completely free but at the start when you want to prevent burnout and you want to still enjoy yourself, try to keep one day almost completely free and just enjoy that one day because at least you can say okay I relaxed and now I can go back to school on Monday feeling refreshed. And this is coming from a grade nine A-star student, like I find that when you actually enjoy yourself in the week, when you actually spend time for yourself, you will feel so much more motivated to study when it's time to study and you have this distinction between study and relaxing and that basically ties into work-life balance and you feel better in the long run. So now let's talk about exam season. So exam season is very important that you change your timetable because some things that may have been a priority to you at the start are no longer a priority. You want to make sure that your timetable sessions are as long as the paper that you're going to have in that subject. So let's say you want to study chemistry, a chemistry paper is like one hour 45 minutes. You need to make sure your revision session is now long enough that you can do an entire paper and mark it. This basically makes sure that you have enough time to constantly do these exam papers and you finish all of them before your exam comes and also reallocate your subjects based on how you did in your marks. So if you actually revise your marks and you took them seriously, your marks are basically a representative of what you're going to get in the exam if you don't do anything, if you just leave it like that. So obviously you want to do better so look at the subjects that you did the worst in and spend the most time doing those. Obviously prioritise everything, at least one paper for each subject every week or every two weeks and that will just make sure that you cover everything in time. But guys look at your marks and see what you did wrong, see what topics you need to cover and then also add those to your retrospective timetable so you can highlight those topics and say you need to cover these before this exam comes and it basically just sets you up so that you don't miss your weak spots before the exam. Finally let's talk about discipline because you can make the prettiest, perfect, static timetable that you want to but if you don't stick to it, you just wasted your time like you might as well have not made a timetable. So guys discipline is greater than motivation always because there's going to be times where you look at this timetable with hate in your eyes like your eyes are red, you're tired, you don't want to do it but at the end of the day if you set up a realistic timetable that you're able to stick to even when you're feeling like a bit low, then you are going to do better in your exams and I'm not saying that you need to follow your timetable strictly every single day because I know there's times that I didn't like I had a whole block of revision set for me and I didn't do it and I was fine but just make sure that consistently you are actually adhering to discipline and not motivation. You're not waiting to be struck by this feeling of motivation when you look at your timetable, you're just looking at the timetable and you're like okay today I'm going to do some chemistry, okay today I'm going to do some physics, even if I don't do the most productive session and I only do one page of physics, I'm going to do some physics and that sense of discipline and consistency will follow you to your exam and to your exam season. So guys we're coming to the end of the video, I know this was a very detailed video and I really hope you found it useful and also be sure to edit the free timetable in the description and basically add on everything that we've been talking about in this video and I hope you guys find this really useful for your exams and for your general studying. I'll see you guys next time, be sure to like, comment and subscribe. Bye.