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How to Study for Exams - An Evidence-Based Masterclass

2020-02-27 · Workshop, masterclass or full course · Ali, Osaid, Simon Clark · recording, 2 h 50 min · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness, Productivity and time) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Lesson from a book

Ali puts his three-hour Skillshare masterclass on studying, filmed in 2020, on YouTube for free: understand first (Feynman technique, active recall, notes, scoping the subject), then remember (spaced repetition, interleaving, flashcards, Google Sheets, mind maps, memory techniques, his essay memorisation and active recall frameworks), then focus (discipline over motivation, distractions, Pomodoros, music, balance, studying with friends).

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why the masterclass, once on Skillshare, is now free on YouTube

  • ★★ In his first year at medical school Ali struggled with exams, using inefficient techniques such as rereading, highlighting and summarising; in his second year he found the evidence on learning and his grades massively improved. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Studying effectively left Ali loads of free time at university, which he used to hang out with friends, start his first business and start his YouTube channel. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ In 2023 Ali puts his evidence-based study masterclass, which over 100,000 people had taken on Skillshare, on YouTube for free as a thank-you to the students who support his channel. — 00:00:58 · Skillshare classes, Skillshare

00:01:56 — Three steps to effective studying: understand, remember, focus

  • ★★★ Ali's class splits effective studying into three interlinked steps, understand, remember and focus, and he calls understanding by far the most important. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Ali warns students who discover active recall and spaced repetition against going straight into flashcard-making mode to memorise details: always start with understanding. — 00:02:33 · active recall, spaced repetition

00:04:54 — Understand anything with the Feynman technique

  • ★★★ The first step of understanding anything, Ali says, is the Feynman technique, named after the physicist Richard Feynman: being able to explain it to a friend or to a five-year-old. — 00:04:54
  • ★★ Learning a topic, Ali asks himself at every junction whether it makes sense and whether he could explain it to a five-year-old. — 00:05:20

00:06:36 — The science of active recall and learning new content with it

  • ★★★ Ali defines active recall as a pretentious, fancy way of saying test yourself. — 00:06:36 · active recall

    “Active recall is basically just a pretentious, fancy way of saying test yourself.”

  • ★★ Following Make It Stick, Ali says students not getting the marks they want are just not testing themselves enough: testing is the most fundamental part of learning, as with learning the piano. — 00:07:16 · active recall

  • ★★ Learning is a matter of taking information out of the brain rather than putting it in, Ali says: the harder we work to retrieve it, the more the neural connection is strengthened. — 00:07:38 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali cites Professor Dunlosky's review of studies on students, which rated practice testing as having high utility across test formats, materials, ages, outcome measures and retention intervals. — 00:08:07 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali and his friends discovered active recall in a psychology lecture in their second year of medical school, and it completely changed their lives. — 00:08:37 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali treats testing as part of learning: reading a textbook, after every paragraph or two he looks away and asks what he has just read, what its key concepts are and whether he can phrase them in his own words. — 00:09:11 · active recall

  • ★★★ If students take one thing from the class, Ali says, it should be that we should all test ourselves probably two to three times as much as we do, throughout learning and not only once a topic is learned. (hedged) — 00:10:09 · active recall

    “we should all be testing ourselves probably two to three times as much as we currently are”

00:10:38 — Taking notes during class

  • ★★ Professor Dunlosky and colleagues rate summarising with the book open as fairly low utility, Ali says: those who summarise do worse than those who test themselves, since summarising is usually passive. — 00:10:38
  • ★★ For notes taken during class, Ali says there is quite a lot of evidence that handwriting notes is better than typing them. — 00:11:07
  • ★★ Ali cites a Washington University in St. Louis study: students who typed lecture notes on a laptop did slightly better when tested straight after, but handwriters did better 24 hours later. — 00:11:36
  • ★★ Since realising that taking notes is not very effective, Ali's only real reason to take notes in class is that it keeps him awake. — 00:12:06

00:13:01 — Taking notes after class

  • ★★ After class, Ali takes notes for two reasons: to build his active recall questions and to consolidate his understanding of the subject. — 00:13:01 · active recall
  • ★★ When something does not make sense, Ali turns to other sources such as Google, Wikipedia, a textbook or lecture notes, and these days makes a separate Notion page for it. — 00:13:52 · Notion, Google, Wikipedia
  • ★★ Making notes on every lecture, as Ali did himself in first year, became unsustainable: most of what was tested came straight from the lecture notes, and the extra material added was not that useful. — 00:14:46
  • ★★★ Rather than rereading notes, which he calls pointless, Ali writes questions for himself from them, using Notion's toggle feature, such as "what is the function of the cell membrane?" — 00:15:44 · Notion, active recall
  • ★★ The thread running through Ali's whole class is that the more effortful learning is, the more likely the information is to stick. — 00:16:31

00:17:49 — Scoping the subject

  • ★★★ Ali calls scoping the subject, a phrase coined by a medical-school friend who did really well in exams, one of the most important mantras: to understand something, understand where it fits into the wider picture. — 00:17:49 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Starting clinical medicine in his fourth year, Ali had the idea of memorising the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, one of the core texts. — 00:18:21
  • ★★ Scoping the subject, Ali says, means taking a few hours to go through every topic of a subject and sub-categorise them: the tree before the branches and leaves. — 00:18:50 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Ali likes the medical analogy of the bird's-eye and frog's-eye views: exams mostly test frog's-eye detail, but the bird's-eye view helps you understand a subject and, in medicine, apply it in real life. — 00:19:37

00:20:16 — The importance of understanding, with Osaid

  • ★★ Ali's friend Osaid is a final-year medical student at Cambridge who has consistently ranked in the top three of his year group. — 00:20:16 · University of Cambridge
  • ★★ Osaid says understood material is a lot easier to retain, and he struggles to bring himself to memorise details without any understanding. — 00:20:57
  • ★★★ Osaid: For Osaid, understanding a topic is coherence within his mind: no unexplained questions left, and being able to derive it from basic first principles. — 00:21:41
  • ★★ Osaid says in-depth conceptual clarity is not always possible, especially with the complex concepts of physiology and neurophysiology. — 00:22:42
  • ★★ Ali sums up understanding a subject as having a mental model of it in your mind. — 00:24:16
  • ★ Osaid explains that the hippocampus works as an index: it does not store memories but, like a book's index, records where in the cortex they are stored. — 00:25:14
  • ★★ Osaid uses a basic concept and guiding principles, such as "neurons that fire together, wire together", to re-understand what he understood years earlier. — 00:25:57

00:26:22 — Finding a syllabus for yourself, with Osaid

  • ★★★ Osaid: Wherever it is unclear what you need to know, Osaid says you need to find a syllabus for yourself: not limiting what you learn is really counterproductive. — 00:26:51
  • ★★ Osaid made the Step 1 textbook his curriculum and supplemented it with Passmedicine, a combination he found incredibly comprehensive. — 00:27:13
  • ★★ Osaid says you have to accept that you cannot know everything: it is better to know a lot well than to stress yourself trying to achieve the impossible. — 00:27:41
  • ★★ Ali told an overwhelmed medical student that he was making clinical medicine harder than it had to be: all you basically have to know is the Oxford Handbook plus a few extra bits. — 00:28:39 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ Osaid finds the Oxford Handbook poor at explaining, just a list of information, so he hardly used it in his clinical years. — 00:29:01 · University of Oxford
  • ★★★ Osaid's key is to take one resource or a small set of resources, make it your canon and master it. — 00:29:22
  • ★★ Osaid would not compile a master set of notes from his resources: rehashing information you already have is pointless, just redundant notes. — 00:29:46
  • ★★ Osaid read his one key book about three times to really understand it, then skim-read the rest; reading every book in turn would have given him a more superficial understanding. — 00:30:43

  • ★★ Ali sums up Osaid's approach: make one book your Bible and the rest supplementary texts. — 00:30:43

    “make one book your Bible and the rest are supplementary texts”

00:31:09 — The magic of spaced repetition

  • ★★ Ali describes Ebbinghaus's 1800s experiment on himself: his memory for each made-up word decayed exponentially, but testing himself again brought it back to 100%. — 00:31:52
  • ★★★ Because each repetition makes a topic take longer to forget, Ali says, we should space our repetitions of it over time: the idea of spaced repetition. — 00:32:20 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Reading a topic three times in one day is a bit pointless, Ali says: with nothing forgotten, the brain does no work to retain or retrieve it. — 00:34:26 · spaced repetition

00:35:21 — The retrospective revision timetable

  • ★★★ Ali's favourite way to apply spaced repetition is his retrospective revision timetable, a term he coined: rather than deciding topics in advance, decide on the day from the topics done in the past. — 00:35:21 · spaced repetition

    “the retrospective revision timetable. Now, this is a term that I've coined.”

  • ★★ Keeping his retrospective revision timetable in Notion, where table cells cannot be coloured, Ali rates each session of a topic out of five, or traffic-lights it with emojis. — 00:36:18 · Notion, spaced repetition

00:37:17 — Simon Clark's spaced repetition journal

  • ★★ Simon Clark says the two words he would put into his 10-year-old head are spaced repetition; it gave him his best academic performance, in his third-year exams at Oxford. — 00:37:47 · spaced repetition, University of Oxford
  • ★★ Simon Clark's spaced repetition diary: after studying a subtopic he wrote it into his paper diary again a day, a week and a month ahead, gradually filling it with what to revise each day. — 00:38:32 · spaced repetition · first in: 2020-02-13, Top 5 Revision & Study Tips for Students
  • ★★ For what he learns on the wards, Ali wants Simon Clark's method as calendar reminders: read up on, say, ectopic pregnancy management, then be reminded to look it up a week and a month later. — 00:39:37 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali admits that when he is not preparing for exams he does not use many of these efficient study techniques, even though he should. — 00:40:17
  • ★★ Ali says he is going to start using Simon Clark's method for what he learns on the wards and will see if he can build a macro or shortcut on iOS for it. (hedged) — 00:40:17

00:40:53 — The power of interleaved practice

  • ★★★ Interleaving, Ali explains, means doing a little of one topic, then another, then a third and back again, rather than hours on each in turn; there is a fair bit of evidence that it improves retention. — 00:41:33
  • ★★ With mixed problems, Ali explains, the brain must first work out which method to use, and that extra step makes us more likely to perform better in the exam. — 00:42:49

00:43:21 — Should you reread your notes

  • ★★ Ali cites Professor Dunlosky's 2013 paper, which concluded that rereading is low utility and typically much less effective than other learning techniques. — 00:43:21
  • ★★ Ali still rereads his notes some of the time, but only when he has very little energy and cannot be bothered to do something more efficient. — 00:43:56
  • ★★★ Ali likens rereading to going to the gym, doing a single pull-up and going on your phone; active recall is so much better, but rereading is nice to have when energy is low. — 00:44:42 · active recall
  • ★★ Students who reread a lot and are unhappy with their results, Ali says, should switch to active recall and spaced repetition. — 00:44:42 · active recall, spaced repetition

00:45:21 — How to highlight effectively

  • ★★ Dunlosky and colleagues concluded that highlighting is low utility; Ali notes one 1974 study finding active highlighting superior to passively rereading highlighted material. — 00:46:02
  • ★★ Ali highlights anyway: it helps him create active recall questions later, helps him concentrate and makes his notes look pretty, and despite Dunlosky's verdict he enjoys it. — 00:46:30 · active recall

00:47:00 — How to use flashcards properly

  • ★★ Ali calls flashcards a marriage of active recall and spaced repetition. — 00:47:00 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali thinks physical flashcards a total waste of time now that apps are so good: he recommends Anki, or Quizlet, whose premium version, about £20 a year, has spaced repetition built in. — 00:47:29 · Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Where others have already made Anki decks, as for Pathoma, Ali sees little point in making your own; in most other subjects making your own flashcards makes sense, because you engage with the information better. — 00:48:34 · Anki
  • ★★★ Ideally, Ali says, each flashcard holds one examinable fact and you go through your cards very consistently. — 00:51:28 · Anki
  • ★★ In his third year Ali ranked second in his year but jointly won the prize for best exam performance with the student who came first. — 00:51:28
  • ★★ For his all-essay psychology exams, Ali used Anki to memorise chunks of content that he could drag and drop from his mind into essays in the exam. — 00:52:03 · Anki
  • ★★ On Ali's essay flashcards, the front named a paper and the back explained what it found and why it was relevant, so each card held lots of facts. — 00:52:24
  • ★★★ Ali warns against making a flashcard for absolutely everything, which leads to flashcard overload; on discovering Anki late in his first year he did so for about two weeks. — 00:52:59 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali's friend Catherine made flashcards for everything for a whole year and had about 5,000 by the end, far too many to feasibly go through. — 00:53:45 · Katherine
  • ★★★ Ali does not usually make flashcards on his first pass through content, which he does with Cornell notes; he makes an Anki card for a fact or concept that resists memorising or is particularly tricky. — 00:54:14 · Anki
  • ★★ When he gets a question wrong on an online question bank such as Passmedicine, Ali pastes the solution into Anki, building a bank of mistakes to blitz before the exam. — 00:54:14 · Anki
  • ★ A first-year medical student who asked Ali to check his Anki decks had about 8,000 flashcards, which Ali saw at once was far too many. — 00:54:44 · Anki
  • ★★★ Ali's advice: avoid flashcards for obvious things, and make them only on a second or third pass through the content, once you know what is obvious, and only if you absolutely have to. — 00:55:55

00:56:15 — Flashcard alternative: Google Sheets versus Anki

01:08:53 — Mind maps

  • ★★ Ali quite likes mind maps or spider diagrams: a concept in the middle of the page with its branches, and their subcategories, going out from it. — 01:08:53
  • ★★ Ali put the whole paediatrics syllabus on a single-page mind map, so when revising he can go through it one topic at a time. — 01:11:16
  • ★★★ Mind maps serve Ali in two ways: they show where things fit into the bigger context, and redrawing them from memory is active recall. — 01:12:43 · active recall

01:13:18 — Memory techniques: mnemonics

  • ★★ Ali still remembers the mnemonic "some lovers try positions that they can't handle" eight years after learning it, without going back over it, because it is so strong. — 01:14:29
  • ★★ Memory techniques work, Ali explains, by creating a vivid picture or association: we are poor at remembering words but very good at remembering songs and pictures. — 01:14:29
  • ★★★ Ali recommends turning almost any list you must learn into a mnemonic, but warns against relying on mnemonics at the expense of understanding. — 01:16:40
  • ★★ Asked the causes of atrial fibrillation, Ali says, you should not recite a mnemonic that puts rare causes before common ones, but give them in a sensible order. — 01:17:40
  • ★★ Ali first came across the peg system in the summer of 2012, before starting university, in a book by the magician Harry Lorayne about developing a superpower memory. — 01:18:17

01:18:18 — Memory techniques: the peg system

  • ★★ The idea of Harry Lorayne's peg system, Ali explains, is to convert numbers into words that you can then visualise. — 01:19:27
  • ★ In the peg system each digit has a consonant sound: one is a T or D (one downstroke), two an N (two downstrokes), three an M. — 01:19:27
  • ★★ Ali illustrates his peg-system method with an invented reference, "Robinson 1976": lips in a cage for 1976, held up by Eleanor Robinson, a friend from primary school. — 01:22:41
  • ★★★ The night before an essay exam, short of experimental evidence, Ali memorised paper references with the peg system and recalled its images while writing the essays. — 01:23:09
  • ★★ Ali got a first in his essays that year and attributes some of that success to the peg system, which gave his essays the final bit of spice that made them first-class. — 01:23:37

01:24:00 — Memory techniques: the mind palace

  • ★★ The memory palace technique, Ali explains, imagines a palace in your mind whose every room is a room you are very familiar with. — 01:24:30
  • ★★ Ali has not used the memory palace extensively: in his second year of medical school he briefly used it, visualising himself along the path to Asda. — 01:25:05
  • ★★ Ali thinks the memory palace is worth trying: he tried it in his second year and thought it worked quite well. — 01:25:34

01:26:07 — The Essay Memorisation Framework

01:41:10 — The Active Recall Framework

01:58:10 — How to use Anki flashcards properly, with Osaid

  • ★★★ Ali calls Anki the most famous and the best flashcard app: open source and free except on iOS, where its £20 is totally worth it. — 01:58:25 · Anki
  • ★★★ Osaid's offhand notes have no real importance to him: unless he puts something into Anki and decides to learn it, he may as well never have written it down. — 01:58:55 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: In preclinical years Osaid studied to learn information very quickly for exams; in clinical years he uses Anki, because he wants to remember beyond the exams. — 01:59:20 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: Clinical medicine being fairly universal, Osaid says you can use Anki decks others have made, such as the Pathoma deck for USMLE Step 1, which he found really useful. — 01:59:48 · USMLE, Anki
  • ★★ Ali calls Osaid's Word-document question method and his own Google Sheets method hacks for cramming an exam about two months away; Anki suits those who have the luxury of time. — 02:01:07 · Google Sheets, Anki
  • ★★ Osaid finds that a first pass through Anki cards gives isolated facts, and only the second pass links the cards to each other conceptually. — 02:02:09 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid says that in some ways Anki lets you memorise in order to understand. — 02:04:01 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali would rather start with a broad brushstroke, such as the 30 topics of cardiology and how they relate, and then use Anki to memorise the details of each. — 02:04:23 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: On a second pass, Osaid says, tension between the card he is doing and another in his memory pushes him to harmonise the two, which deepens his understanding. — 02:04:51
  • ★★★ Osaid probably disagrees with the common advice to make your own flashcards, though he has no evidence either way; the advantage is that you will most likely understand your own cards. (hedged) — 02:06:25
  • ★★ Osaid: With decks made by others Osaid spends a while making sure he understands each card, but the net time is still significantly less than making the deck himself. — 02:06:47
  • ★★ Osaid did not like Anki in his first two years: it took much more time than writing questions with the answers in the notes, and reviews slow the rate of learning new material. — 02:07:14 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid calls Anki a very versatile tool: you can even use the questions-only method on it, writing just the questions on the front of the cards. — 02:07:54 · Anki
  • ★★★ Osaid's rule is one concept per flashcard rather than one fact, and a concept can be deep. — 02:08:41 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: Learning only one fact at a time, Osaid says, makes it very hard to resynthesise information on the spot and leaves much disconnected information that is hard to recall. — 02:09:18
  • ★★ Osaid would not split a treatment's first, second and third lines into separate cards: it fragments the concept and loses the reason one is prioritised over another. — 02:09:53
  • ★★ Ali sums up that Anki is a great tool for hacking memory, but rote memorising with flashcards, easy to do in Anki, risks missing the forest for the trees. — 02:10:18 · Anki
  • ★★★ Osaid changes Anki's learning intervals: no one-minute step, so a missed card returns after 15 minutes, and a known card after one and a half days, then seven days, then 28 days. — 02:12:10 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: With these intervals, Osaid says, a card only really counts as learned once you can remember it after 28 days. — 02:12:54 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: With a pre-made deck, Osaid unsuspends one subject at a time, such as cardiology, and moves a new subject such as renal into a separate deck to learn it apart from the others. — 02:18:21 · Anki
  • ★★ Osaid: Within a subject such as renal medicine, Osaid does the physiology and anatomy first and then the pathology. — 02:19:07
  • ★★ Osaid spent about six hours googling to understand one renal flashcard, after which the whole of renal medicine opened up to him. — 02:23:20

02:24:41 — Motivation is a myth

  • ★★ The focus step of studying, Ali says, means sitting down to the work, not getting distracted, taking breaks appropriately and not burning out. — 02:24:41
  • ★★★ Ali says motivation is a myth: we only need motivation for things we don't want to do, usually ones that need short-term pain for long-term gain. — 02:25:10
  • ★★ Human psychology, Ali says, overweights short-term benefits against long-term ones. — 02:25:40
  • ★★★ Ali completely agrees with the article "Screw motivation, what you need is discipline" that there is absolutely no need to feel like doing something before doing it. — 02:26:46
  • ★★ Ali has motivation problems like anyone else, especially with the gym: he enjoys studying, but he really does not enjoy the gym and has to motivate himself to go. — 02:27:27
  • ★★★ Ali sees two levers on motivation: how pleasurable the task is, and how punishing the alternative of not doing it is. — 02:29:04
  • ★★ To make studying pleasant, Ali goes to a nice library or a hipster coffee shop or a clean desk, makes a coffee or buys a latte, and plays his Spotify study-with-me playlist. — 02:29:04 · Spotify
  • ★★ Ali treats studying as a game to make it more fun; he enjoys it enough that he no longer needs to motivate himself to study. — 02:29:36
  • ★★ To raise the punishment for skipping the gym, Ali says he could give his housemate Molly £1,000 to keep if he ever missed a day without a very good excuse. (hypothetical) — 02:30:05 · Molly Hunt
  • ★★ Ali recommends the book The Motivation Myth. — 02:31:36

02:31:44 — How to reduce distractions

  • ★★ In a real flow state, enjoying what he is doing, Ali sometimes looks up to find an hour has passed without noticing. — 02:32:13
  • ★★ Ali cites Cal Newport's Deep Work on deep, intense focus: that flow state is generally very pleasurable, says the evidence, so we are less likely to be distracted. — 02:32:42 · Cal Newport, deep work (concept)
  • ★★★ When studying Ali puts his phone on do not disturb and face down on the table or in his bag, or, if really desperate, in a different room. — 02:32:42
  • ★★ Ali advises adding friction to bad phone habits: his brother, for example, uninstalls Instagram from his phone. — 02:33:24 · friction, Taimur Abdaal, Instagram
  • ★★★ Putting his phone across the room from him has completely transformed Ali's sleep. — 02:34:23
  • ★★ Another option, Ali says, is to set your phone to greyscale, on iPhone in the accessibility and display options, which removes all colour from it. (hedged) — 02:34:53
  • ★★ Phone tricks are all hacks, Ali says: the main thing is to enjoy the subject and focus intently on it. — 02:35:20

02:35:42 — The Pomodoro technique: pros and cons

  • ★★ Brief mental breaks help you stay focused on a task, Ali says, so take breaks while studying but be intentional about them. — 02:36:12
  • ★★ The Pomodoro technique, Ali explains, was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the 1990s and named after the tomato timer he used to time his sessions. — 02:36:12 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★★ In his first and second years Ali went to the library with friends and they did Pomodoros together, which they called pomming, starting and ending each with a tap on the desk. — 02:37:10 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ When a task is hard to focus on, Ali says, the end of the 25-minute Pomodoro is like a light at the end of the tunnel. — 02:38:09 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★★ Ali no longer uses the rigid 25-minute Pomodoro: studying renal physiology or preparing for an exam he focuses for about 40 or 45 minutes, until he senses himself losing focus, then takes a 15-minute break. — 02:38:33 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★★ Use the Pomodoro technique as a tool rather than being a slave to it, Ali says: if you need five more minutes, take them; it is a guideline, like the pirates' code in Pirates of the Caribbean. — 02:39:03 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ In his fifth year of medical school Ali used the app Forest for Pomodoros: it grows a tree that dies if you switch to another app during the 25 minutes. — 02:39:32 · Pomodoro technique

02:40:40 — The best music to study with

  • ★★ Ali says he is going to make a proper YouTube video on the evidence about music while studying in a while. — 02:40:40
  • ★★ Lyrics interfere with the phonological loop of working memory, which processes words, Ali explains, so music with lyrics is generally considered bad for studying. — 02:41:07
  • ★★ Absolute silence is probably the best for studying, Ali says: no distraction from music, and studying in an environment like the exam's improves performance. (hedged) — 02:41:36
  • ★★ Ali cites studies where people who learned words underwater did better when tested underwater, and those who learned on land did better on land. — 02:42:12
  • ★★★ Though the evidence suggests studying in silence, Ali ignores it and studies with instrumentals, a good middle ground between boring silence and distracting lyrics. — 02:42:12

02:42:59 — Maintaining work-life balance while studying

  • ★★★ High-stakes exams aside, Ali says, exams mostly do not matter in the grand scheme of things, especially when they come at the expense of physical or mental health. — 02:43:24 · Mental health
  • ★★ Many of Ali's friends burnt out because everyone around them worked each other up into feeling the exam was the most important thing in their lives. — 02:43:24
  • ★★ For work-life separation, Ali studied in different libraries and kept his room a work-free zone, with a rule never to study at home. — 02:44:03
  • ★★ For multiple-choice exams Ali also found work-life integration useful: chilling with friends over pizza while doing Anki cards or question-bank questions. — 02:44:33 · Anki
  • ★★ Skipping the gym in exam season made Ali feel less good about himself, which bled into his studying; even on busy weeks he now goes two or three times. — 02:45:23
  • ★★★ Life can be out of balance for a season, Ali says, such as the week before exams spent cramming and neglecting friends, as long as you redress the balance later. — 02:46:12

02:46:39 — How to study effectively with friends

  • ★★★ Studying with friends, which Ali did from his first year of university, is one of the few things that really changed the game in making studying more fun for him. — 02:46:39
  • ★★ For group study, Ali says, find people motivated to study at about the same level, not people who hate studying and will distract everyone. — 02:46:39
  • ★★ Someone in a study group must take charge of what the session looks like, Ali says; among his friends it was usually him. — 02:47:08
  • ★★★ When a group studies the same flashcards, Ali imposes a 10-second silence for everyone to think and ideally write an answer, so that Paul, who knew everything, cannot shout it out first. — 02:48:02 · Paul, active recall

02:48:31 — Conclusion

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Mentioned

Central: active recall · Anki · Essay Memorisation Framework · Google Sheets · Osaid · Skillshare classes · spaced repetition

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Cal Newport · Derren Brown · Francesco Cirillo · Harry Lorayne · Hermann Ebbinghaus · John Dunlosky · Katherine · Molly Hunt · Paul · Richard Feynman · Simon Clark · Taimur Abdaal · Thomas Frank

Works: Deep Work (book) · First Aid for the USMLE · Make It Stick · MRCP · Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine · Pirates of the Caribbean · Screw motivation, what you need is discipline · The Motivation Myth · USMLE

Organizations: Cambridge University Islamic Society · Emmanuel College · Facebook · Google · Instagram · Skillshare · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Washington University in St. Louis · Wikipedia

Concepts: "what's the deal with…" question · compression versus context · Cornell note-taking · desirable difficulty · Feynman technique · Flow state · forgetting curve · friction · interleaving · intermediate packets · memory palace · Mental health · mnemonics · OSCE · Parkinson's law · peg system · Polymyalgia rheumatica · Pomodoro technique · scoping the subject · spaced repetition diary · spider diagram · working memory

Products: Forest · Microsoft Excel · Microsoft OneNote · Notion · Passmedicine · Pathoma · Quizlet · Spotify · Zanki

Only in the description or credits: Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

Also centred on Essay Memorisation Framework: How I ranked 1st at Cambridge University - The Essay Memorisation Framework

Also centred on Osaid: How my friend ranked 1st at Medical School - The Active Recall Framework · Interviewing a Writer // Day in the Life VLOG · Study with Me - Hustle & Chill

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