Hey,<\/p>\n
In an ideal world, you’d learn everything deeply and memorize every idea perfectly. If you had unlimited time, you could do this with any class. Just figure out which tactics apply, and use them extensively to master the subject.<\/p>\n
But that’s rarely the case. Time pressure means that you can’t always learn ideas as deeply as you would like, so even using efficient tactics, you need to selectively apply them for maximum impact per hour spent.<\/p>\n
Today I’m going to share with you a setup designed to do just that. This is the setup I used to complete 120 hours worth of physics in less than 5 days. This setup isn’t optimized to ensure an A+, but rather, to waste as little time as possible–getting the biggest amount of learning for every minute you spend studying.<\/p>\n
If you’re juggling work and school, or need to pass but don’t have endless hours to study, this setup can help you achieve it. The Setup<\/strong><\/p>\n I split my learning into three phases, each streamlined as much as possible:<\/p>\n Lectures\/Reading<\/strong><\/p>\n I watched all the lectures, totaling 30 hours, over two days. Sustaining focus for that long without losing efficiency meant I needed to make the learning as active as possible. To do that, I kept flow-based notes (a practice I teach in Learning on Steroids) to stay engaged and watched the videos between 1.5-2x speed.<\/p>\n The goal of this part is a first-pass. This is to get the feeling that you understand everything that was said, even though you may not be ready to pass an exam.<\/p>\n Practice Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n Next was the practice questions. I took a few steps to streamline this process. First, I did a survey approach, sampling the hardest problems from each topic area. This would flag me into any areas that I was weaker on.<\/p>\n Second, I would give up faster on early problems than on later problems. This allows you to fill in your knowledge in the first part of a problem set, then at a later stage you can actually develop the mental discipline to push through a hard problem.<\/p>\n Finally, I would skim questions and try to mentally get a sense of how easy the question would be to answer. Only if the question seemed hard, would I spend 15 minutes drilling down onto it. That way you can focus on the best questions out of a large problem set, if you don’t have time to do all of them.<\/p>\n Concept Mastery<\/strong><\/p>\n Whenever I got a question wrong, I would ask myself why. If it was through an obvious mistake or algebraic error, I’d make a note of it and move on. If it was because I couldn’t answer the question, or used an incorrect procedure, I knew there was a concept error.<\/p>\n Now, at this final stage, I would apply the Feynman technique to these concepts. Notice how I didn’t blindly apply the tactic to every idea I read about. While that would be great if I had time, the tactic works best as a way of accelerating learning on the hardest or most foundational ideas.<\/p>\n Setup Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n The only tweak I’d make to this layout is breaking up lecture watching with practice questions. Both as a way of increasing focus, and as a self-test to catch foundational concept errors early, so there is less work fixing them later.<\/p>\n If you want to get straight-A’s and not just pass a test in an extremely short timeframe, the only adjustments I’d make are spending more time on practice questions (doing more, instead of just sampling as I did) and using the Feynman Technique on more concepts. In a factually dense class, I would use mnemonics as well as the Feynman Technique to cut down on flashcard time.<\/p>\n I hope this setup gives you some insight on how the tactics fit into learning more in less studying time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey, In an ideal world, you’d learn everything deeply and memorize every idea perfectly. If you had unlimited time, you could do this with any class. Just figure out which tactics apply, and use them extensively to master the subject. But that’s rarely the case. Time pressure means that you can’t always learn ideas as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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