Do More With Less

Working smarter = Not working harder

The beauty of your memory is that it works well with out you even realising it. A teacher could present you with an hour of information in class, and at the end, you feel like you can't remember any of it because there was so much of it. And yet, with little prompts to assist, you would be surprised to see that the average person could recall the entire class.

The silly thing for most students is that when it comes time to study, we often put the whole hour of information out on our desk in front of us. Really, all we need to study are those little prompters that help us to remember all of the other information. This is where the "do more with less" technique comes in. Spend most of your time working on the little memory joggers such as developing acronyms etc. and the rest of the information will be yours forever. Alternatively you can just read pages and pages of notes and get nowhere.

As your class proceeds you could write a keyword on a list, draw a picture or use another tool to peg the learning to a memory link or jogger.

So, the key to great studying, is to continually reduce the total volume you are studying, but spend more time learning the things that are going to jog your memory, and less time learning the actual content.

I can still remember "My very excellent method just set up nice planets". This easy to remember phrase helps you to remember the names and order of the planets. It takes less effort to remember this phrase than it does the name of the planets. And yet you learn both the names and order this way.

Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Planetesimals or Dwarf Planets.

Activity

Your mum wants you to buy 5 things on the way home from school. She wants milk, eggs, cheese, butter and bread. Instead of saying over and over in your head milk, eggs... milk, eggs... etc. try a memory jogger. Look at the 5 fingers on your hand and say "mum wants me to buy 5 things, 1 for every finger" (it is now impossible to forget how many items and your fingers become a memory jogger). Now grasp each finger in turn and say the list above. You will find that when you come to recite your list, each finger will jog your memory to another item.