Transcription
So, I've been a learning coach now for almost 15 years, teaching people how to learn more in less time. And although now I can learn very efficiently, it wasn't always like that. I distinctly remember being in school, sitting in class, studying as hard as I can, studying with the same methods that everyone else is using, but needing to put in double, triple the amount of time as everyone else.
And the reason I'm so much more efficient now is not because my brain got faster or smarter in any way. I just learned better methods. And it took me years of going through the research and experimenting to figure out how to learn as efficiently as I can now. But I want to make all of that ridiculously simple for you in this video. So, I've prepared this flowchart that we're going to move through in this video of key decisions and checklists that you can use to see if you are learning in a way that is efficient for you or not. In my personal and professional experience, when you do not follow the steps in this list, [music] that is when you start wasting time or you feel like your memory is not very good, just relearning things constantly. [music]
There are 14 steps, we're going to blitz through them starting with number one. The first thing that you need to be focusing on if you want to start learning more efficiently is asking yourself, "What am I measuring?" This is the metric you use to judge whether a learning strategy is working for you or not. And the reason this is the one we start with is because what most people do, and what I used to do, is I would judge whether a learning strategy is effective or not based on speed. Can I cover the same amount of content in less time? And so, if you try a learning strategy and you find that it makes your learning take longer and you say to yourself, "Therefore, I'm not going to use this strategy anymore." you need to stop doing that.
And instead of measuring based on speed, you need to start measuring based on outcome. How long it takes to cover something doesn't matter if you're not able to reach the right level and the right level of retention. Often the learning strategies that are the fastest up front also create fragile memories that you forget very quickly and you also can't use that knowledge very deeply. And when you zoom out, these things actually slow you down because you're now wasting extra time relearning everything that you forgot. One of the most important changes that I made to level up my learning efficiency was to stop worrying about speed and start thinking about, "Does this method drive deep knowledge and deep retention?" And even if that method was slow, the speed eventually comes by just wasting less time and then eventually getting faster at that method.
The next step, do you have a clear purpose and plan? Your brain is actually great at learning, but it needs to have focus. If I just throw a textbook at you and say, "Learn it." your brain doesn't know why it needs to learn it, how it's going to use that information, and there's no frame of context. So, if you're learning from a formal curriculum, what this looks like is going through and actually spending the time to look through the learning objectives. Understand the structure of what you're about to learn. Look through some past exams to see what style you need to use this knowledge in. Be really clear about the goal. Learning is more efficient when you are goal-directed.
If you're doing unstructured learning like you're a professional just learning on the job, you need to do the same thing. Except the learning objectives aren't given to you, you need to figure them out. Spend time writing down a list of what the learning objectives are and what success in learning actually means to you. How do you need to actually apply and perform using this knowledge? If you ignore this step and you just dive into learning, again like I used to, without a clear goal and a clear direction, then it's like sprinting off to quickly find something, but you don't even know what you're looking for. So, if you don't have a purpose and a plan, get one. If you do, move on to the next step.
Number three, do you have an actual schedule? You have to put in time in your schedule where you're blocked out hours to spend on learning. And again, do that up front. The reason we do this up front is because the amount of time you've got available during the day actually changes the way that we go about learning the material. There are some strategies that are better for when you've got long sessions, there are some strategies that are better when you've got really short blocks of time. But if you don't know how much time you have got in the first place, then you can't make that decision. So, if you don't actually have a schedule, go and make one. If you do have a schedule, move on to step four, which is did you plan for priming?
Priming is basically when you get your brain ready for more intensive learning. The best analogy I can give for this is if I'm going to throw you a ball, I'm going to say, "Hey, get ready to catch this. I'm going to aim it at your chest." That would be me priming you to catch this ball as opposed to just being like, "Huh, there. You didn't catch it." Now, priming has a lot of benefits for learning, and going into the details of that is not for this video. But when you prime correctly, it massively increases the efficiency at which your brain can form new memory. This means that later, when you go to learn it more intensively, you're wasting less time, you get less overwhelmed, and you're able to make sense of that information more easily. So, before any dedicated block of learning that you've scheduled out, you should have a smaller block of time for priming. This can be up to a week in advance or even just a few minutes before the main session. And so again, because priming is so impactful for your later learning efficiency, if you are not priming, you need to plan for it. Which probably means you need to think about it back when you're building your schedule.
Now, if you did plan for priming, step five, what are you focusing on in those priming sessions? I remember in my first year of university, someone gave me the advice to pre-study all my material before the lectures. Pre-study is not the same thing as priming, because what I did was wrong. What I focused on during the pre-study was the details. I would basically study the material like I would normally study it but just before the lecture. But that is not where the value of priming comes from. The value of priming comes from when you focus on the gist of the information. It's the overall idea, the general concept. When you go in and start straight away learning details, your brain doesn't know what to do with that information. It doesn't have enough context to connect it to and make meaning out of it. And so with priming, what we want to do is deliberately create an overall gist understanding. This gives us memory landmarks and anchor points so that later when we do learn the details, we're able to make sense of it and see how it's relevant more easily.
One of the easiest ways that you can tell whether you are focusing on the details too much or the gist of the information is how long it takes you to do your priming session. Priming should ideally take you around 5 to 10 minutes for an hour's worth of learning. If it takes you longer than that, it probably means you're getting sucked into the details. And if that's you, stop it. And if you're focusing on the gist, then we can move on to the next part, which is what you're doing in your intensive learning sessions. This is when you're sitting down, you're not just going over it at a superficial level, you are really trying to learn the information. And so the next four steps of this flowchart are about what you're doing during those sessions.
So number six, during those sessions, is your environment distractible or is it focused? And the best way you can tell this is not just through intuition, but actually having a distraction sheet next to you. When you get distracted, if you get distracted, write down what the distraction was. Ideally, the sheet should be blank because you didn't get distracted. But if you find that you are getting distracted, set up your environment beforehand to make sure that it is free from those distractions. And even if it takes a bit of effort, it's probably not as much effort as trying to achieve your goals while constantly being distracted. So, that's number six, the environment.
Number seven is the priority. This is a major one. While you are going through your learning session, you're reading through the material, you're watching videos, whatever you're doing, is your priority, what you are mainly focused on? Is it to remember what you're consuming? Is it to read through the sentence and try to commit that to memory? Or is it to understand what you are consuming, to feel like it makes sense to you and that you can explain it again? For most people, that's where they stop. Both of those are not very productive things to focus on. Long story short, your brain needs to form something called schemas for information to be consolidated into your memory. A schema is when one piece of information is connected to another piece of information. And then those connections form a network. What your intention or your priority is when you're taking in new information and thinking about it influences the types of processes that your brain uses. So, if your intention is to remember it or to understand it, it's going to use fairly superficial processes. And these processes do not trigger schema building and connecting. You have to deliberately be focused on connecting information as your priority. So, when you're reading that sentence, think about how it is similar or different to something else, another concept on that page, or a similar related concept that you've already learned before. Make judgments on how important and valuable and purposeful this information is relative to your purpose, the goal that you set out for yourself. And when your priority is to compare ideas and to judge the importance of what you're learning, your brain uses much deeper processes and those forcibly create schemas. You cannot judge the importance of something without comparing it to something else and that process builds a schema and that schema is what is stored as memory. So, always remember that trying to remember is a bad way to remember.
Now, if connecting information is a priority for you, then what you'll naturally find is that there are some things that you just can't connect. It's this random obscure fact or detail that you just need to memorize because you need it for an exam. A lot of professionals never fall into this situation because you can just look that stuff up. And in that situation, the stuff that's left over, this is what you use flash cards for. Chuck that detail into a flash card and learn it through repetition and rote memorization and spaced retrieval. That is what that tool is good for. But, make sure that it is your last resort. Try and connect it and create relationships and compare it and judge it first. And only when you cannot, despite trying your best, should you say, "Unfortunately, I need to memorize that." Memorization is a necessary evil. Don't be evil as your first resort.
Now, step number eight, note taking. If your priority is connecting information, building interconnected schemas, then you are going to really hate the experience of linear note taking. Because if you're truly focused on connecting it, you want to be able to see those connections. You want to be able to map things out and work with that on paper. And not being able to do that becomes very frustrating and overwhelming. And so, naturally, the way that you write notes should be relational. And any kind of non-linear note taking is suitable for this, but mind mapping is obviously the most common one. I've got some other videos where I talk about that as well. But you may notice that linear note taking here is yellow rather than red with a cross next to it. And that's indicate that sometimes linear note taking is still useful. And that's specifically when you are deliberately trying to create notes for reference. Like these are notes that you're creating because you need to come back to this as a learning resource in the future. Now, I would argue that these days with AI transcriptions and summarization apps, you don't really ever need to create your own linear notes. I, for example, have not created any linear notes in probably like eight or nine years. And what might surprise you is that when you start doing relational notes, they become a faster, more accurate reference source for you to come back to than linear notes. Relational notes show you how you are thinking about the information and how it's connected much more efficiently. It's like looking at an image of something versus a description of an image of something.
The step number nine after that is the order in which you are learning things. So, during those intensive learning sessions, are you learning things in the default order that is given to you? So, this would be starting at chapter one, going through the first paragraph, moving to the second paragraph, just going in that same order or in the lecture or whatever course that you're taking. Or are you going in an order that is individualized? This is a bit more advanced and this single point actually took me years to figure out. When you go in the order that is just given to you, that's often not in the best order for your brain to learn it. Because your brain finds different things relevant at different times. One thing that is easy for someone to understand may be difficult for you and vice versa. And generally, if something is difficult for you to understand, it means that you don't have enough context to make meaning out of it. And so, instead of just trying to bang your head against the wall until the wall crumbles or just memorizing it because you couldn't understand it, it's actually much more efficient to just go find the thing that is easy for you to understand. And you let your brain tell you what is relevant for you to learn and what is easy for it to learn so that over time, you just build up more and more knowledge. And now when you come back to this original point, what used to feel difficult suddenly feels much easier because you just know more about the topic. So, that's step nine.
We've got five more steps to go. And at this point, you may be asking yourself, "Well, how do I do any of these things? What are the actual methods and the strategies and the practical techniques that I can use?" Well, again, this is not the video for that. But, I've created another little flowchart to help you figure that out. Do you want something that is more structured and curated for you? If the answer is no, you don't need that, then just go watch some of my other videos. I talk about this topic all the time. There are so many strategies that you can learn from those. If the answer is yes, you want something that's a bit more structured and curated, the next question is, do you want it fast or do you want it for free?
If you want it for free, then the place that you can look is my free weekly newsletter. You can almost think of it like an email course every single week. I send you an email, takes about 3 to 5 minutes to read, there's a practical takeaway, and it's this collection of insights and perspectives and techniques that I think would help most people, the types of things that I wish I knew nearly 15 years ago when I was first starting this journey. So, that's free to join and you can unsubscribe at any time. So, if that's something that you're interested in, I'll leave a link in the description for you. Or alternatively, if you don't want to wait a week for each newsletter, you'd rather have something that's structured and put together and just there available for you to just dive into as quickly or as slowly as you would like, then the place for you to look would be at icanstudy.com, which is where I have my paid course. And this is not going to be for everyone, but if you are interested, I'll also leave a link for you to learn more about it to see if it's right for you in the description below. And speaking of the description below, I'll also leave a link to download this image as a PDF so that if you want, you can work through it yourself rather than like pausing and trying to zoom into this video.
But moving on to step number 10, which is what do you do when you feel confused? So no matter what you're learning or where you're learning from, you're going to come to a point where you're trying to understand something and it just doesn't make sense to you and you're feeling confused. You don't see how everything fits together. The way you respond to that confusion is one of the most important things that you need to get right. This point again took me years to figure out. If when you feel confused, your response is to try and avoid this confusion. You feel confused, you feel a little bit overwhelmed and you think, "Ooh, I don't like this feeling. I want to escape from this." And the way you might respond to that feeling is to oversimplify. You might think, "Well, A is important and then B is less important and C is maybe more important than A and less important than B, but what about in this context? Maybe it's different." You see, it starts getting confusing. It gets overwhelming. And so oversimplifying is saying, "Well, thinking about all of that is really confusing, so I'm just going to say A is more important, B is second most important, C is third most important. That's it." Now we have locked in that conclusion. We have got certainty on it. Now we don't feel confused anymore. Are we correct? Probably not. So you can see how by interpreting confusion as a negative emotion, we've blocked ourselves from effective learning. So that's oversimplifying.
What some people do is rather than oversimplify is that they under question. So is A more important? Is B more important? Is C more important? Man, I'm feeling confused. Ah, I probably don't need to think about that. Wow, the confusion is gone. We've eliminated the problem by ignoring the problem. Over simplifying as a response to confusion is like your house being on fire and you feeling like it's really difficult to put this fire out and saying, "Ah, I'm sure this bucket of water is enough." Whereas, under questioning is just not looking at your house that's on fire anymore.
Now, there is an alternative, which is that you don't actually feel confused in the first place. What do you do when you feel confused? Well, I can't answer that question. It's not applicable for me because I don't feel that confusion. If you're not feeling confused when you're learning something new, and if it's even moderately complex, it means your priority is not right. If your focus is on just trying to remember every sentence or just understand the meaning of every sentence, you're not going to be confused because you're not asking questions. You're not exposing gaps in your understanding. This is A. This is B. This is C. Cool, I can remember that. I understand that. There's nothing confusing. It's only when we start prioritizing, judging which one is more or less important, how are A and B similar or different, do we start realizing, "Hmm, I'm not really sure. Actually, now that I think about it, A and B seem really similar. What even is the difference behind this? Now I'm confused. Now we're learning." So, if you're not feeling any of this confusion, then you're probably not engaging in that deep thinking in the first place.
Ideally, when you feel confused, your response to that is to explore the confusion. And what that means is that you take that feeling of confusion and you turn it into a question. I call this technique the confusion compass. You're feeling confused? Great, your brain's trying to figure something out. Instead of leaving it as this vague emotion, turn it into an actual question. Now your brain has something to focus on, and that's going to help build that schema and build that learning. People waste hours of time while learning something just generally being confused when they could turn that confusion into a set of focused questions in just a couple of minutes. So, that's step 10. Make sure that you respond to confusion with exploration.
And the final set is around how you test your knowledge. Testing knowledge is what allows you to perform at a high level with fluency and rapid recall. Testing yourself also keeps your knowledge topped up so that you're not forgetting as much. And so, there are four major aspects of testing yourself, and this is the order of priority. The most important thing about how you test yourself is the challenge. And that's number 11. Aim to test your knowledge in a similar style of challenge. If you need to present your findings to a group of people, practice presenting your finding. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but try and match the style to whatever is reasonable.
The next is the level of challenge. If you need to apply your knowledge by solving complex problems and making difficult decisions and having deep discussions, don't test your knowledge based on whether you can recall facts and definitions and explain individual concepts. Test your knowledge at the same level of challenge that you need to perform at. And again, it doesn't have to be exact, but try and be at least in that ballpark. And the third part of challenge is the cue. Are you having to respond to questions that someone asks you? Are you responding to exam questions that you're given? Are you having to have a discussion, present things without any cue, completely freely from just your memory? When you test your knowledge, try to make the cue similar to the type of cue that you're going to get need to perform with this. If you need to use your knowledge without any cue, just purely off your memory, but you're never testing it purely just off your memory without any cues or questions or prompts, then you're going to struggle with that. Or if you are performing with cues, but the cues that you're testing yourself with are completely different to the types of cues that you're going to get in the actual thing, then again, that's going to impair your ability to perform when it really matters.
The next part of testing yourself is feedback. After you've tested yourself, of course, it's always best to give yourself feedback. But, when you give yourself feedback really matters. The worst thing that you can do, which a lot of people do, is giving yourself feedback before you even try to test yourself. And this seems stupid. Why would someone do that? I used to do this all the time. I would be lying on the couch with a with a practice exam, reading a question, and then I would just immediately look at the answer, read the answer, and ask myself, "Do I think this answer makes sense? Do I feel like that answer is something that I would say?" And that is how I would test myself. That is using recognition-based memory rather than recall. And the gap between recognition and recall is enormous. Just because you can recognize something does not mean in any way that you can actually recall that. So, whenever you test yourself, always go through the effort of actually trying to do it, to make the decision, to solve it. Even if you don't know, even if you're just not sure, even if you think you're pretty much wrong, generate the answer first. Do it and then check yourself. The very act of trying to generate a response primes your brain for learning from the feedback much more effectively than if you weren't generating it at all. And you also have to be careful with getting feedback during. During means that you are attempting to answer the question, explain something, to test your knowledge. And when you get stuck, you're getting cues. You're getting direction from someone else to help trigger that memory. Now, this can be useful in the very early stages of testing yourself, or if you know that in the actual final performance exam, presentation, whatever it is, you will also be able to get those cues from someone else. But, if those conditions are not met, then getting those cues and directions and feedback during your attempt is also not going to help you. It's going to give you a false sense of confidence. Again, just because you can recall something when someone cues you on it does not mean that you can recall that without the cue. That is a separate thing that you have to practice. And so, the ideal in most situations is to get feedback after you have done a full proper attempt, even if your attempt, you know, means that you're going to be wrong.
And number 13, the one that everyone overhypes, which is the frequency of testing yourself. Overall, the frequency at which you test yourself doesn't matter so much if you've been following everything else here. Now, if you weren't following this and your only method of learning is just to smash material into flash cards and do it over and over again, you need to have your frequency dialed in perfectly because that is the only mechanism through which you are learning. It's just repetition. That is an extremely inefficient way of learning. But, if you're doing everything else right, then your knowledge will naturally be more resilient. Your memory is more durable, so you just forget things more slowly. And as a result, you have much more room for error. And so, all you need to decide is whether you are testing yourself too early, too late, or if it's just right. Too early is before you've had a chance to forget anything. You actually do want to let yourself forget a little bit and then test yourself because that process of forgetting and then correcting yourself reinforces that memory to be even stronger than it was originally. But, if you wait too long and you forget too much of what you've learned before, then that testing session and the the time it takes to relearn it is going to take too long. And so, that would be too late. Just right is testing yourself when you've forgotten about 20 to 30% of what you first learned, which, if you've done everything else correctly, should be about 1 week to 1 month, depending on the complexity of the information, after you did your intensive initial learning session.
And the final step, number 14, is your testing conditions. There used to be this advice I heard all the time going through university that you should learn material and test yourself in the same conditions as when you're actually performing. So, people would actually go and study in the lecture hall where the exam is being held. And while it is true that the conditions of encoding do affect your ability to recall that information, in reality what the research shows is that it's just not practical to recreate the conditions accurately enough for it to make a difference in real-world settings. In order for it to make a difference with a very controllable example, like an exam, you would need to learn the information and test yourself at a similar time of the day after having eaten similar foods with similar amount of sleep, feeling similar emotions and levels of stress. There were studies that show that your level of caffeination is also a condition that you might need to match for. And even when you match for all of those things, how much of a difference does it really make? Not much. And so, what I say is try and give yourself the chance to test yourself in similar enough conditions, especially when it comes to intensity, nervousness, and time. If you're going to be performing under pressure and scrutiny, under strict time pressures, then practice testing your knowledge with similar conditions. That is where it is worthwhile trying to match those conditions, and everything else doesn't really matter. So, try to be relatively similar, whereas being too different might mean you're sitting a time-strict test, but you've never tested yourself under time pressure. That would be bad.
And so, these are 14 of what I think are the most important things that you need to have locked down if you want to learn more efficiently. If you skip even one of these steps, it will have a measurable difference on your ability to learn. Either your level of retention, your level of depth, or the time it takes. And just like that, I saved you 10,000 hours. Now, if you want me to go into this in a little bit more detail and how you can [clears throat] build an entire system that follows these principles, then you might want to check out this video here where I go through my process of how I think about building a learning system. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.