In honor of the brief respite of UW-Madison’s study day—the calm before the storm that is finals week—I’m putting pen-to-paper, so to speak, on some study hacks I have developed in my 5+ years in higher education studying engineering. My goal is to leave you with (at the very least) one thing you can implement this week to bring some confidence, ease, or clarity.
1. Get the big picture
Each finals week I start with the big picture. I sit down, usually with a blank piece of paper and a sharpie and a black pen (although this time I did it with a handy white board) and draw out a timeline. I start from today and draw it out to the end of finals or the day of my last exam or due date. I add in all the key deliverables for each of my classes to the timeline, and leave a list of “other” items at the bottom that don’t quite fit on the timeline clearly. I use this to house only hard deadlines, not the milestones I’ve made up for myself about writing or studying, just the hard stops and due dates.
Now you have your path. You know how long the week will be—it’s just a week. It’s finite. It’ll end, soon enough. You also now have a picture of the distribution of your work so you can start setting priorities for each day.
2. Put it in reality
Now that you have a sense of the big picture, you need to step down to the step-by-step, daily living of the larger timeline you drew out. How will the work actually get done? When will you do it? Where will you do it? Do you need to coordinate with anyone else?
You can do this in many ways, but start by moving backwards from the due date or final. For example, I’ve drawn out a timeline for a paper that is due next Wednesday. I know that if I’ve turned it in on Wednesday, I’ve probably done final edits the day of or day before (so let’s pick the day before to give some extra room), which means I wrote the final results section the day before that. I know already that I won’t work on this paper on Sunday since I am walking at graduation or tomorrow since I have an exam and presentation and a few meetings. So I keep stepping backward to what I would accomplish today.
I might not do all this work for something that is less complex, say for an exam which I will just know that I need to block 3 hours to study for. Use your discretion and trust your gut, you know what works.
Now the real trick is to not leave it on the whiteboard or piece of paper, but to put it in reality next. Block off the time in your calendar and re-arrange the less urgent items around it. Text the people you need to coordinate with, and if you don’t hear back, but a note in your calendar to follow-up. Fool proof your plan in reality!
Other tips:
- If you’re having trouble focusing, set 2 or 3 goals for the day, total. Stick to those and only those.
- Start with the hardest thing, the thing you have been procrastinating on the longest. Even if it isn’t THE most important, having it complete may give you the boost you need to do the other things with alacrity.
3. First comes first: you
Now that you’ve done a lot of thinking about what you need to do (and when, and how, and with whom), give yourself the moment to think about what you want to do. Is there a way you can schedule in a bit of “me” time? Can you create breaks that are actual breaks that fulfill you, bring you joy, give you rest, move you forward on something else you’re working on? Put those in the calendar or on a list in front of you so that you can take them when you need.
A few examples of breaks I have taken:
- A warm bath reading Ray Kurzweil’s book, How to Create a Mind.
- Spending time with my pet rats and/or cats.
- Perusing LinkedIn for interesting articles or new possible connections (or the chance to re-connect with someone I’ve known before). This can be an especially useful way to spend your time, paying off down the road in meaningful connections.
- Simply switching gears to a different project—maybe the break I need from writing is just to look at a spreadsheet and do the mind-numbing task I can’t usually get myself to do. Putting those next to each other as I plan my day may be advantageous.
- Going out to dinner with my family.
- Seeing my therapist.
- Cleaning the kitchen and listening to the news or my favorite podcast, 99 Percent Invisible.
I’ve been a student for what feels like forever and will be a student for what some people would call forever. If I’ve learned anything along the way, it’s that you won’t always remember the grade you got on that exam or paper, but you will remember the people you studied with, learned from—whose company you enjoyed—and who you got to be in the process.
Build those moments to reflect on what you have accomplished this semester and celebrate yourself and your friends/colleagues into your week as you tackle finals! Good luck!