From daily planning to exercises to relax your mind, here’s everything you need to know to improve your productivity and take college exams successfully.
Organization And Planning
The first thing to know to increase your productivity in the studio is that you need a strong planning activity for your days.
Correct and effective planning involves the development of some steps, which are divided into:
- Goal Definition: To know where you want to go, you need to understand what your starting points are. What are the objectives to be achieved in this exam session? Write them on a piece of paper and go to the second step.
- Building a priority level: study activities are not all the same. In fact, there may be particular needs related to some subjects. In this case, you may come across a priority of time, relating to the presence of a deadline, or a priority of importance, linked to the relevance that a given topic has for a given exam.
- Alternation of activities: do not concentrate on the most demanding activities in a single day in your work plan. Instead, alternate between intense activities and lighter ones, so you don’t get too tired.
- Defining a margin of error: Planning is important, but don’t get obsessed with controlling your activities. Unforeseen events can be around the corner, so define a margin of error from the outset.
- Control and monitoring: in this phase, you will have to keep an eye on the roadmap and understand if, indeed, you are working in the right way to achieve your goals. If something doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to change and start over.
Study Method And Mind Maps
Obviously, productivity in studying is strongly connected to a good university study method, useful not only for the planning phase we have talked about but also for learning to acquire all the notions you need in an intelligent way. Surely, you can go the easy way, and find someone to delegate some of your tasks, you could just google “write my paper” and you will see lots of options.
But the easiest way is not always the rightest way, that’s why we recommend you to work on your study method first.
By university study method we mean that complex activities, from active listening to taking the exam, are aimed at obtaining the best academic results by studying with intelligence and constancy.
To acquire a good study method and be more productive, we recommend that you:
- Listen to the lessons actively: focus on the teacher’s words and try to understand what the most important points are to be successful in your exam. Do not forget to take notes, noting the concepts to be studied in the books on a sheet of paper.
- Ask questions: if there are some unclear concepts, the comparison is the best resource to exploit. Ask the teacher to explain again what you did not understand and also compare with your fellow students.
- Work on study material: If it can help you memorize, make summaries of the exam papers, or, alternatively, you can opt for concept maps.
Concept maps can become the best allies for your study productivity.
With the term concept map, we refer to a schematic and graphic representation of a concept or idea.
It is a very useful tool to speed up and simplify the study of complex topics or to review a topic full of content.
If you want to try your hand at creating a concept map, you will need to:
- Write a key concept in the center of a sheet.
- To connect to this key concept other satellite concepts of a lower level, are linked by a causal link or a relationship of cause and effect.
- Create a legend of geometric figures and colors, in order to instantly identify the “hierarchy” of concepts and the links between them.
Stress Management
A key factor in being productive in the study is the ability to manage stress.
The exam session and the fast pace are, for many students, a source of tension and nervousness.
Being overwhelmed by stress is a mistake that can significantly affect your well-being and motivation.
We know that it is not easy to manage multiple exams at the same time and work according to a timetable.
Thanks to the constancy and the acquisition of an effective working method, however, you will be able to optimize the time at your disposal and manage it in a healthier and more functional way.