First your blog is amazing and your tips have been life saving for me! Maybe you could help me with a specific problem: I’m studying to get a job in public service and the test to get in is really competitive, really hard and with a lot of subjects. Since I’m studying by myself (don’t have classes or anything like it) I was hoping you could give me tips on how to organize better for it. My study material is mainly books and I’m suppose to study between 8-10 hours a day. Thank you!!
Thank you so much!! :) Wow that’s an intense course!! I wish you the best of luck for getting into it!! ^_^
Quality over quantity of study i.e. study smart 8 to 10 hours is the “suggested” time, but like office workers all over the world, very little of an 8 hour workday would you be working at 100% efficiency.
In fact, for a self-study type course with difficult concepts, it’s probably better if you study in bursts and take regular breaks. Rather than studying efficiently for the first few hours and fizzing out, it’s better to do pulse-dose studying.
Make yourself a schedule that’s realistic and stick to it! Self-accountability and responsibility is the name of the game!
If you start studying early and study consistently then it makes it so much less stressful for you at the end. You don’t even necessarily have to study for most of the day, if you’re focused you could probably study as much content in half the time and just give yourself the rest of the day off.
Past papers are a great way to study if you can get your hands on some. Use at the beginning, and at the end. First get an idea of what the questions in the test are like to guide your studying, then at the end, attempt the test in test-conditions so that you know whether you’ve studied effectively enough.
Prompt yourself with questions if there aren’t any past papers possible. This helps you engage actively with a large amount of content so that you can narrow in on the important concepts.
For books, the best method for summarising all the content and reviewing it is the Cornell Method. I’ve written a post about that here! :)
Hope that helps!! ^__^
