I am a great fan of sitting there and doing nothing but still achieving good grades.
But we all know that life doesn’t work that way right?
Otherwise everyone will be doing well without doing very much
But I am a great believer in doing as little as possible to achieve best results possible.
This then leads to the age-old debate of studying regularly vs cramming.
If I am such a fan of efficiency, why don’t I advocate for relaxing for most part of the year then just teach you an effective way of cramming everything in the weeks coming up to the exam?
Why am I an advocate of studying regularly?
The answer is:
YOU CAN ONLY CRAM CERTAIN NUMBER OF THESE HIGH EFFICIENCY HOURS IN THE FINAL WEEKS
You have a whole semester or term to study – by doing regular study, you give yourself heaps more time than others or heaps more attempts at reaching your peak performance zone
(remember it is the time in peak performance zone that allows you to achieve more than other people)
Those who choose to cram have already foregone hundreds of hours of PEAK performance zone.
Yes in the weeks leading up to the exam, there are still hundreds of hours left.
You’ve got to understand, not every study hour is created the same.
You can’t force yourself to have 3x efficiency on demand – our mind is just not programmed to do that.
IN A TYPICAL DAY, THERE ARE ONLY 3-4 HOURS OF PEAK PERFORMANCE.
You can be putting in 18 hour study days but end up effectively only doing 5 or 6 hours because you are so tired and drained.
Then the tiredness carries onto the next day and you will need to recover from this 18 hour study day.
This is just not sustainable.
By cramming, you don’t have the leisure to learn the concepts and you end up memorising concepts as facts which then translates to doing poorly in the exam because you don’t understand what they are asking.
Crammers then stay up late at night where they reach a constant burnout zone and in the end crammers still often only barely pass the unit
As regular studiers, we might end up studying for similar amount of hours added up throughout the year, but the results that we achieve as regular studiers (who know how to exploit the efficiency curve) will be MUCH greater than crammers.
Remember, concepts once learned, they stay with you for a lifetime. Even when you think trigonometry was useless in school, it is the concept of problem solving that you can then generalise to life and solve problems in a logical way
THE MORE GENERAL CONCEPTS YOU HAVE IN YOUR ARSENAL, THE MORE TOOLS YOU HAVE IN REAL LIFE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THIS WORLD.
For example, the complex dosage calculations that we do for patients to save their lives is derived from skills that I have built over the years of problem solving. Right from where we learned what I thought was useless trigonometry.
ALWAYS REMEMBER, IT IS THE CONCEPT AND THE SKILL THAT YOU TAKE AWAY FROM YOUR SUBJECT OR UNIT, OFTEN NOT THE FACTS.
