How to Study Smartly?

My name is Ben Jarvis and for the last fifteen years I have learnt and read everything I could on the subject of Study. Now I am a lifelong student with degrees in Journalism, Law and an almost complete Master of Arts in Digital Communication. I have spent considerable time developing some heavy hitting study secrets and I want to share them with you so that you can blitz your exams just like I did.


What Is The Most Important Thing To Do Before You Start To Study?

Unlike the other websites where they tell you a lot of stuff about study techniques or how to study effectively, like “study at the same time and same place”.


The Most Important Thing To Do First Is To Plan…
Study at the same time and same place may help you to concentrate or focus better, but all these tips or techniques are not going to help you much if you fail to plan. In fact, all these tips and techniques are going to kill you or make you fail your exams if you follow them blindly.


But how to plan?
Most students would either think that this is just simply waste of time or they don’t even know how to plan. They think that by start studying immediately would be saving more time instead. Well, that is true if you study one day before your exams. But the truth is if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Setting Your Goals With SMART

Specific – Your goal would need to be very specific. You can’t just set a goal of wanting to “get ‘A’s”, instead you need to make a specific goal “getting ‘A’s for all Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics for ‘A’ Level exams”.

Measurable – When we set our goal, it got to be measurable. If our goals are measurable, then we are able to find out what we are doing correctly and what we are not. And from there, we are able to tweak our strategies and work towards the goal.

An example of a non-measurable goal is something like “I’m going to be smarter in 2011”. How do we measure smarter? Unless you made it into a measurable test, we won’t be able to measure it.

Attainable – The goal must be attainable. For example, for most language essay exams, no examiners would give full marks for the paper. In fact, the highest score may be around 90-95 marks. If you set a goal of getting 100 marks for the essay paper, it’s not an attainable goal.

Getting ‘A’s for all your exams are definitely attainable and you would definitely want to set the goal of doing that.

Realistic – You don’t want to set a easily attainable goal either. Easily attainable goal won’t motivate you to achieve it. You would need a bigger goal yet attainable goal in order to achieve it.

But if you are trying to aim for ‘A’ at the end of 2011, when you are now a ‘D’ or ‘F’, it’s definitely attainable if you follow the right strategies and take massive action towards it.

Time-Frame – Your goal would need to have a deadline for you to achieve it. If we don’t have a time frame to bound our goals, we could always delay it over and over again. Having a time frame is to prevent yourself from procrastinating again and again.

Does that mean if you plan, you will definitely get excellent grades?

No! Of course not. There are many stories where you’ve noticed that people are just planning and planning, but when comes to taking ACTION, they begin to run away from it.

Try to visualize this, if you are planning to get from destination A to destination B, and you have planned the exact route to destination B. But do you think that you can reach destination B if you start making your way there?

If you refuse to work towards getting excellent grades, there’s no way that anyone could help you to achieve it.

You see, the vehicle we are using to travel from one place to another is like our learning strategies.

If we are going to use a lousy strategy to study, it’ll be like traveling by a ship. And it will take us a long long time for us to master what we are supposed to learn in school. By the time we have mastered the subjects or topics, the exams are already over a long time ago. I bet you don’t want that…

However, if we are using a highly effective and proven system to study, it’ll be similar to ‘traveling by a plane’. We’ll be able to shorten our learning process tremendously. Things that we usually take a long time to understand, we are able to cut short the time to learn.

And the faster we learn, the faster we’ll achieve our objectives or goals.