There's a book called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. It describes the approaches to work of many creative people.

Reading the book, it becomes obvious, that there is no ultimate truth or one solution that works for everyone. People are different. But the reason these people are even in the book, is the one thing they all had in common - they did stuff. No matter how they went about it, in the end they did stuff.

The same is true with studying - it doesn't matter how you get to it or go about doing it - at some point you have do the work.

What is the work when studying? I think it boils down to two things.

1. Making time for studying.

2. Studying

How you go about it can be a matter of personal preference. But inevitably, you have to do the things in some way.

Studying is a long term project. An individual exam can be accomplished in a small amount of time, but education as a whole takes time. You're going to be in school for years. One option is to hope for the best, power through each exam and wait until it's over. But that's not pleasant or reliable. The greater your educational goals are, the harder the challenges, the better you have to be.

What's the alternative then?

Below is the thinking and the systems that worked for us. Using this approach we went from struggling students to taking exams with confidence and finishing with good grades. Maybe you can use some of the lessons here to improve your studying too.

Putting time into studying

Make studying into a habit. Why would that be better? Habits are things you do regularly and easily. They are reliable. They are consistent. They are effortless. They are everything you want your studying experience to be.

Putting in effort to create a studying habit is an investment that will yield phenomenal returns. But how does one go about making a habit like that? The best answer we've found so far is the book Atomic Habits. If you read that book and apply the lessons, your life will better. Here's a short breakdown of how we did it.

There are some basic rules or guidelines:

1. Start small
2. Reward yourself each time
3. Focus on consistency

Why a studying habit is useful and how to create one

Let's take a look at each one and why it matters:

Start small - you want to make it as easy as possible to do, when you're starting out. New things are hard to do. They have to push out something you're already doing. No matter what your life looks like right now, you're using all the minutes in your 24 hours every single day. There are no spare minutes. So to add studying in, something needs to get pushed out. Change is hard by itself. Studying is extremely hard by itself. So at the beginning you have to make it as easy as possible, if you want it to stand a chance.

Decide when you're going to study. List out the things you do on a normal day. For example: you get home from school, you change your clothes, you eat lunch, clean up the kitchen and then you watch TV. Decide which current habit will be the start of your studying session. Basically, complete the sentence "After <current habit> I will sit down at my desk and open my notes." So one answer could be "After I clean up the kitchen, I will sit down at my desk and open my notes."

Whatever your final studying goal is, at the beginning you have to break it down. 2 hours reduced to 1 hour, to 5 minutes, and finally to just opening your book. That's your starting point. That's what you reward. That's what you track. That's what counts as showing up. You can add additional rewards to the additional effort you put in. But you always reward showing up.

Reward yourself each time - you started. You did a really hard thing. Reward yourself! What gets rewarded gets repeated.

If you've ever seen someone train a puppy to give it's paw, then you've seen the effect of a reward. A puppy does not inherently want to give you it's paw. But after you grab it's paw and give it a reward it starts to learn. Soon the puppy shoots out it's paw every time you ask it to, because it gets rewarded.

That's what you want to achieve with this rule. You want to train yourself to enjoy studying like you would train a puppy. To look forward to it and to see it as something rewarding. Rewards don't have to be big. But they have to be meaningful to you.

Here's what worked for us. We enjoy going on trips. So we chose that as a reward for studying. We decided that for every 40 hours of work, we deserve a day trip. We turned those 40 hours into 10 minute chunks - 240 chunks. And then we counted out 240 pebbles. For every 10 minutes we studied, we moved 1 pebble into the Trip jar. We also moved one pebble every time we sat down at our desk, even if just for a second. A slightly bigger reward for starting. Once all the pebbles were moved, it was time for a trip. Gradually as studying became easier, we decided to go on a trip for every 60 and then 80 hours of work, because we found that trips were stacking up too frequently.

Find a reward that is meaningful to you and use it to make studying more pleasant and to be more motivated to do it.

Focus on consistency - habits are things we do consistently. So if you want studying to be a habit, it has to happen regularly. If it doesn't happen regularly, then it's not a useful habit.

Being consistent has multiple advantages. It makes doing the things easier. And when it comes to studying, it is more compatible with the way the human brain takes in information. Trying to cram everything in there all at once is hard and inefficient. You lose a lot of the knowledge shortly after learning it. If you space out your learning, the brain can handle it much better. You're winning on two fronts by being consistent.

What gets measured gets managed. What gets tracked gets done. You need a habit tracker. A calendar where you mark the days you succeed. Print one out and start using it. Or create one on a blank piece of paper. It isn't anything fancy. It is a simple piece of paper. The simpler and easier to use, the better.

Creating strong foundations for your habit

To make it even easier to follow those rules, there is some preparation you need to do. Some foundations to create. The goal is to make doing the right thing as easy as possible and the wrong thing as hard as possible. Water follows the path of least resistance. Electricity follows the path of least resistance. We're basically made of water and electricity, so it only makes sense we would work the same way, right? That may be a bit too reductionist, but the truth is, the harder it is to do a thing, the less likely we are to do it. And the easier it is to do, the more likely we are to do it. So how do we do that?

The first thing is to create a space for studying. A dedicated space where only studying happens. Nothing else. An empty desk where your studying materials can exist. Nothing else goes on that desk. Nothing. It is like a holy site. It is always ready for you. Waiting, calling to you.

Second, remove things that could get in the way of studying. You will be tempted to do other things and avoid studying. The harpy call of distractions is powerful. Remove all distractions from that space. Some common ones are phones, TVs, gaming PCs, books, comics etc.. Remove all of those from the space.

When we were struggling with studying, we took this very seriously. We blocked all the apps on our phones except Forest and the Phone app in case of emergencies. We set up a studying profile on our PCs and set time restrictions for our general profiles. We plugged our TV into a wall timer and screwed it into a box so we couldn't access it. We went all out and it worked well.

How to actually study

Three key components

Scoping

There's a rule called Pareto's law. It states that the majority of results come from a minority of inputs. In other words, some thing are more important than others. We have found this to be true when studying as well. Some of the subject matter is more important, occurs more frequently on tests and is a bigger factor in your grades. Your job is to identify which subject matter that is.

How do you do that?

The most useful tool are old tests. Gather as much of them as you can and sort them from newest to oldest. Analyze the questions and determine to which subject they belong. The subjects with more questions are more important, the ones with less questions less important. Now you can sort the subjects by importance or in other words priority. You start with the most important subject and work your way down the list.

However, Pareto's law applies again here. When you have learned the most important parts of the top priority subject, you need to move on. The important parts of the second subject now become more impactful that the last details of the first priority subject. In this way you move down the list, always paying attention to what is the highest impact thing you can study next. By doing this, when the test comes, you will have the highest odds of performing well.

If you can't find any old tests, the second best thing is to ask people who recently took the test, what they found to be the most important, and which topics were covered on the exam. If you can't find any people, ask the teacher, what they think the most important thing is. If you can't get information from any of them, use your lecture notes and your intuition to determine what feels the most important to you. This is the least reliable approach, but it is still probably better than trying to learn everything in sequence.

Active recall

How do you prove, you have learned something? You answer questions on the test. If you know the answer, you have learned the thing. But answering questions on tests shouldn't be the first time you try to prove your knowledge. You should learn by testing yourself. That is the fastest way of learning. Rereading your notes, highlighting, underlining, making mind maps are all worse methods to get results. Answering questions, doing the thing you're learning, is the fastest way to learn. Test yourself, quiz yourself. Answer questions from old test. When you get to the end of a chapter, close the book and write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Any form of testing, where you have to pull the knowledge out of your brain and actually start using it will drastically improve your learning speed and your results.

An additional bonus is that you always know what you know and what you don't know. That means you can direct your attention to your weakest subjects with surgical precision. One by one you can eliminate your weaknesses until all that's left are your strengths.

Spaced repetition

There's not much use in spending time to learn new things if you just forget them. Especially if you forget them prior to the exam. That's where spaced repetition comes in. As you learn new information, you immediately start forgetting it. To keep the knowledge, you have to repeat it. But our brans have a cool feature - each time we repeat the information, our forgetting of it is slowed down a bit. If I ask you what is the capital of France, you know it's Paris. You have repeated the knowledge so many times, you won't forget it. As you study, you have to set aside some time to go back and revise the things you have learned in the past, or else you'll lose them. But keeping track of what to revise when can be overwhelming so we often just skip this part.

Luckily, there is software that can help with that. One example is Anki. A free, open source program for creating flash cards. When studying with flash cards, you get all the bonuses of active recall - the card has a question on one side, you answer the question and then check your answer with the one on the other side of the card. The other key feature is that Anki schedules your revisions, so you only repeat the cards you're about to forget. That means you have to do much less work than if you tried to keep track of it by hand, or if you just blindly revised everything. It gives you clarity about what you have to do and takes a lot of work off your plate.

This is what has worked for us. The habit part is based on the book Atomic Habits. The studying part is based on the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning and some other research papers that all argue for active recall and spaced repetition as the best and most effective ways of learning. We also enjoyed many studying videos by the YouTuber Ali Abdaal. Here's his study course, which is also very helpful.

Hopefully any of this could help you on your journey. If you have any questions or need help with any of this, let us know.