I’ve given you all the components of what an efficient study system looks like.
They’re not quick study hacks, but tools in your learning toolkit.
Today, let’s take a moment to put it all together.
These are the steps we went through:
- Concept Mapping
- Note-taking
- Spaced Repetition & Active Recall
- Memory Palaces
- Feynman Technique
Let’s go through a brief example of how you might put these together to study, say, the working of human memory.
- We find resources, like Khan academy videos, maybe textbooks and our web articles, and paste them all in one place (dump).
- We write our understanding from the sources down in our own words. In the process, we discover how these subtopics connect together, and we create links.
- We use our notes as the basis for our flashcards, by creating question-answer pairs or cloze deletions. We review those flashcard according to the optimal schedule.
- We add visual imagery, diagrams and pictures to deepen our understanding and improve our recall.
- Tidy it all up and share it with a friend to test your understanding and identify gaps.
Here’s an example of what that could look like after going through this process.
When done well, this process can feel like you're uploading your mind:
Hopefully, this has been helpful. But the most important thing is that you try it yourself and bring it into practice. An imperfect system is already much better than no system.
