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Four Proven Study Techniques

1. There's more to life than study

You want to get the best mark possible while not spending every waking hour on study. It's important that you do thing that you enjoy and ideally spend time doing some physical activity, even walking.

So how should you study without grinding yourself into the ground?

2. It's not about the amount of study but the quality of it

You can spend all night "doing study" when in reality you are mainly watching YouTube, scrolling social media or staring blankly into the distance.

This is a waste of time where you are neither learning very much or even enjoying yourself. Focus on one thing at a time. When it's study time, ONLY do study. When it's fun time, just have fun.

It's up to you to work out how to do this most effectively.

One technique is to put a countdown time on your phone (for 20 to 60 minutes, depending on your preference), and during this time you are only allowed to study. No social media, no YouTube, no taking out the trash, only study. Then you can reward yourself for a certain amount of time (I'd put this on a countdown timer too).

Make the countdown timer your Boss, and do what it tells you to do.

Work out the most you can study effectively and do it consistently but don't beat yourself up for not studying enough.

If you feel you should be studying more, but are having trouble doing that, then just work on increasing it a little bit each night. Even if it's just 5 minutes per subject.

This year is a marathon, not a sprint.

Don't plan to do so much that you feel overwhelmed. If you are studying more than you did last week, even it's just by a little, well done! Give yourself a pat on the back 

3. Spend your study time on the right things

Obviously you need to understanding the content, and do enough practise questions in the textbook that you feel you can answer the questions but this is only the beginning,

The real skill of Maths Methods is getting the maximum number of marks in your Tests and Exams, so shouldn't this be what you focus on? Yes. Yes it should.

No matter how much you are studying each night on Methods, you should dedicate a certain amount of time to doing exam-style questions under timed conditions.

This may mean that you do less textbook questions. 

Now, if you are doing textbook questions and you find them easy, why are you doing them? You could be doing exam questions under timed conditions instead, and this is a much more valuable use of your time. 

If you are finding the textbook questions difficult, sure do more of them. If your teacher wants you complete all the textbook questions but you are finding them easy, have a conversation with them and explain how you feel. 

Ideally you want to spend 50% or more of your study time on exam questions but you may need to build up to this. 

To begin with, it is sole destroying because you won't get any of the answers correct. 

Accept that this is normal, look at the solutions and do the questions again. Keep completing the same exam-questions until you are happy with the mark you got. Then you can move on to other questions (under timed conditions of course). 

Remember, not matter how many exam questions you do, do them under timed conditions. 1 mark = 1.5 minutes, generally.

4. Finally, let yourself win!

It's important to see where you improve, even if it is just by a little! If you increase your study time by 5 minutes from last night, that's great! If you got 0 on your test then got 1 mark, awesome! Keep going!

Give yourself a pat on the back for every small improvement. It means you're going in the right direction.