5 Tips For productive studying

What is effective studying?

Productive studying is studying that :

• Improves academic performance
• Manages time well
• Makes you understand the material to a personal level
• Is fun to a certain extent

Tips to study effectively

1) Organise your surroundings

Organisation is key to be able to concentrate and focus on practice and implementation.

To achieve effective studying, you must organise and clean not only your desk but also your room or study space as a whole.

This will enable you to have no distractions and focus on work rather than your phone or an unorganised desk.

2) Teach

Teaching other people what you have learnt is very, very important for productive studying.

This method makes you have to understand the material to be able to explain it to someone with no knowledge about it and to answer troubling questions that may come up.

Consider this popular Einstein quote: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

3) Don’t just memorise

Memorising material is just an old-fashioned thing.

At Improvcore, we believe that school isn’t the best thing ever, and you don’t have to be good at it. But if you want to be, at least use it for good.

By that, we mean that understanding the material is more useful in life, as you learn to think and use what you have learnt when you need it.

Not just remember it for an exam and then forget about it, that is not true productive studying.

Sure, remember what you are revising, but do that while understanding it, not just memorizing a formula or phrase without truly knowing what it means, where it comes from and why it even exists.

4) Learn by doing, not by reading

Too many times before, I’ve seen people just read the textbook or revision guided and expect to master the knowledge in a matter of minutes.

This may work for a short period, but after 10 minutes, you’ve already forgotten everything and get that feeling that you knew it but you don’t remember.

Instead of reading or even worse, copying down exactly what the textbook says. You must practice what you don’t understand because it has been proven many times over, that writing and practice are much more effective than just reading it.

Reading is good and all, but it’s only great if you implement what you learn, which will help you understand the smaller bits that you may miss by just reading. A great way to do while learning is by mind mapping.

Writing and practising can also trick your brain into thinking that you are using the knowledge you learned, making it remember it because it doesn’t think the material is useless.

5) Organise what you are studying

Most people just jump into their 1 hour study sessions not even knowing what they are studying.

This approach can make you lose focus, get distracted and eventually just waste away and not reach your goals for your upcoming exam.

The solution? Well, simply organise yourself, and look at the revision guide syllabus or previous notes. Find what you are good at and aren’t then make a list or mindmap of the topics and when you are going to study what.

This approach can prevent losing focus and can help you manage time effectively.

Remember, to try and implement these tips to reach your potential of productive studying.