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Study With Me - Weekend on-call

2020-03-06 · Study with me · Ali · recording, 10:19 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Medicine and his doctor years) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His medical past, Sponsor segment present, Aimed at students

During a weekend on call in obstetrics and gynaecology, Ali studies kidney physiology between jobs and shows his Cornell note-taking in Notion: scoping each lecture with toggles, hiding notes under questions for active recall, simple casual wording, and Pomodoros with his cousin Jahanzaib.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — A weekend on call in obstetrics and gynaecology: ward jobs, postnatal reviews and labour-ward calls

  • ★★ Ali spends a weekend on call for obstetrics and gynaecology, trying to squeeze in some studying during moments of downtime. — 00:00:00 · Obstetrics and gynaecology
  • ★ For the weekend of on-calls Ali stays in a hotel room with his cousin Jahanzaib, waking at 6.15. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Over breakfast Ali reads on Nerd Fitness about anterior pelvic tilt, his posture problem, and buys body fat calipers on Amazon to help get rid of his pot belly. — 00:00:29 · Amazon
  • ★★ On the obstetrics ward Ali writes discharge summaries and prescriptions and reviews postnatal patients to make sure they are fine to go home. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Doctors must do case-based discussions and get team feedback in every placement; having left his portfolio assessments to the last minute last year (2019), Ali has promised himself to finish them well in advance this year (2020). — 00:01:27
  • ★★ On the labour ward Ali reviews a woman a few days after delivery who has had some bleeding, examines her, does a speculum and swabs with a midwife and sends her home with antibiotics. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ From 2 to 6pm the obstetrics and gynaecology wards keep Ali busy, mostly with paperwork, plus patients with abnormal blood results and women referred from the emergency department. — 00:01:56 · Obstetrics and gynaecology
  • ★★ Ali is working on a proper day-in-the-life video, in partnership with his hospital, that will go into more of the clinical details. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ At 6pm Ali starts studying kidney physiology on his iPad Pro, with the lecture notes in Notability on one side of the screen and his own notes in Notion on the other. — 00:02:26 · iPad Pro, Notability, Notion

00:02:40 — Notion (sponsor read)

  • ★★ Ali first scopes the subject: he blitzes through the lecture notes and makes a Notion toggle for every subheading, which gives him a big-picture idea of each lecture. — 00:02:55 · scoping the subject, Notion

00:03:05 — Kidney physiology in Notion: scoping the subject, the Cornell method, active recall and screenshots under toggles

  • ★★ At the end of every paragraph of the lecture notes Ali asks himself whether it makes sense and whether he could explain it to a five-year-old. — 00:03:24 · first in: 2019-12-31, Study With Me - British Airways Business Class
  • ★★ Not fully clear on fluid redistribution between body compartments, Ali goes back to lecture one to build up its story with the Cornell method rather than ploughing on with the niggle in his mind. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Taking notes with the Cornell method, Ali types the main points in language as simple as possible and hides every piece of information under a question for his future self. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ When reviewing his notes Ali tests himself on their questions, which is active recall; passively rereading them, he says, would take zero brainpower and be completely useless. — 00:03:53 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali calls active recall, testing yourself rather than rereading, the single most effective studying technique, which he has been preaching about for the last two years. — 00:04:22 · active recall
  • ★★ Where typing would take too long, Ali screenshots the relevant part of the lecture notes into Notion and hides each image under its own toggle, so that big images do not clog up his notes. — 00:04:22 · Notion

00:05:16 — Procrastination, a patient's phone call and handover to the night team

  • ★★ Short of brain power, motivation and discipline for the topic, Ali procrastinates from 7.35 to 7.45pm, slumped on a chair wishing he could take a nap. — 00:05:16

00:05:46 — Studying with his cousin in the hotel lounge: Pomodoros, numbered lists, simple wording, notes for his future self

  • ★★ In the hotel lounge Ali's cousin Jahanzaib, preparing for a postgraduate medical exam, works through practice questions while listening to Ali's study-with-me playlist on Spotify. — 00:05:46 · Spotify
  • ★★ Although his cousin Jahanzaib is doing his own work, Ali finds that both of them studying in the same place helps keep him going. — 00:05:46
  • ★★ Ali seldom uses the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes' work, five minutes' break) these days but still finds it helps his motivation when his energy is low or he works with others. — 00:06:15 · Pomodoro technique
  • ★★ Before starting lecture seven, Ali scopes the subject by noting the series' other lectures, to see where the ones he is doing fit into the bigger picture. — 00:06:15 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Ali converts prose into numbered lists wherever possible, for example summarising several paragraphs on the experiments of Vernie (as heard) into a list of five he wants to know by heart. — 00:06:44
  • ★★ A toggle titled only "experiments by Vernie" (as heard) would not help his future self, so Ali adds a hint that there is a list of five to test himself on. — 00:07:20
  • ★★★ Ali takes notes for his future self: knowing he will forget a lot before he sees them again, he makes it as easy as possible to keep up active recall and spaced repetition. — 00:07:20 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali rephrases a wordy lecture line on ADH as "the osmoregulatory system is super sensitive": the simpler and more casual his own wording while understanding, the likelier he is to remember it. — 00:07:50
  • ★ Ali is delighted to find he can use emojis for up and down arrows in physiology notes, which he could not in his first year of medical school around 2013. — 00:08:34
  • ★★★ Ali treats his notes as a representation of his mental model of a subject: clogged notes mean clogged thinking, while simple, well-categorised notes make the concept in his brain simple too. — 00:09:01
  • ★★ Ali loves Notion's toggle feature because it shows him the big picture unclogged and lets him open the toggles when he needs to drill into the details. — 00:09:01 · Notion
  • ★★ Before bed Ali starts a session of gratitude journaling in his Leuchtturm1917 notebook but stops after a few seconds because he is exhausted. — 00:09:01 · Leuchtturm1917 notebook

00:09:30 — The study session ends, gratitude journaling skipped, sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Cornell note-taking · Notion

Also: People: Jahanzaib

Organizations: Amazon · Nerd Fitness

Concepts: Feynman technique · Obstetrics and gynaecology · Pomodoro technique · scoping the subject · spaced repetition

Products: iPad Pro · Leuchtturm1917 notebook · Notability · Spotify

Also centred on Cornell note-taking: My Favourite Productivity App for Students - Notion · My Favourite Note-Taking App for Students - Notion

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