Name: The Ultimate Study Scheduling Tutorial (the GROW method)
Uploaded: 2024-10-31T17:38:46.000Z
Duration: 8 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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How cool would it be to have a personal A.I. track all our studies?

Present continuous

We're tracking how well we know each topic to scheduling review sessions for us.

Adverbs of frequency

So we always know what to be doing at any given moment.

But in today's study skills episode, I want to show you how to build a system that does everything I just mentioned to save you time and give you peace of mind to know exactly what to work on at all times.

And yes, you can grab a template for yourself at the end of this video.

So we call it the GROW method, and it's based off Ali Abdaal's retrospective revision timetable.

The idea of the GROW method is to build an adaptable review schedule, one that changes based on our confidence and how well we know the information before using the system.

I would plan ahead of time when I would review each individual lecture one by one.

Like on Monday, I'll do lectures one, two, three on Tuesday, four, five, six, and so on.

That's a prospective revision schedule, and it has some issues.

Like what if it takes me a lot longer to do lecture three or I need to take Pepe to the vet or I come down with explosive diarrhea?

Then I have to shift my entire schedule around, which gets chaotic and I get overwhelmed, and that makes my diarrhea a lot worse.

Second, a prospective revision schedule doesn't consider how well I know a topic.

If I'm super confident in lecture one, then reviewing it is a waste of time.

It's like farming with level 100 Diglett.

And say lecture six is high yield and tough, but I don't get to it because I wasted all my time reviewing the previous lectures.

Then I double screwed myself for the exam.

I wasted time reviewing stuff I already knew, and I didn't review the stuff that I didn't know.

So the GROW method avoids both these problems.

GROW is an acronym that explains the method step by step.

The general idea here is to consider every topic as a plant or a tree.

Some topics are harder to learn than others and require more time and attention.

Problem is, we only have a certain number of days until the exam, which means we don't have unlimited water.

So the GROW method helps us distribute our water efficiently.

We schedule our reviews in a way that prevents overstudying topics we find easy and understudying topics we find challenging.

Basically, spend more time with topics we're less confident about.

This method uses a grid calendar or table type layout.

We also built a notion template that we'll link in the description below.

List all the topics for that exam in the left column.

And then every time a topic is reviewed, record the date to the right.

We want to come up with a color coded system to rate how confident we feel about each topic.

For example, you can use this red, yellow, green traffic light rating system.

So every time we review a topic, we want to highlight that date with the color based on our confidence level.

So if I didn't know this topic well, I'd mark it red.

So I know to spend more time and attention on it next time.

The goal of the GROW method is that by exam day, we want zero topics to be read and as many topics to be green as possible.

With this system, we don't have to worry about planning what to study ahead of time because we'll always decide on studying the weakest topic at that moment, which I think is pretty nice because if I took the time to plan all of my review sessions ahead of time and then I fall behind, then I have to shift everything forward and it kind of ruins the entire schedule and it gets annoying.

But using the GROW method, I can study whenever I want and just look at what red topics or yellow topics I need to address.

And if there are multiple red topics and I can't decide which one to review, then I'll go with the one with the least recent review date.

We keep reviewing our weakest topic until our overall grid is as green as possible.

OK, so now I'm going to do a very quick demonstration about how to use the GROW method in a simple app like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, something that I know you all have access to.

And I'm going to leave the GROW acronym somewhere on the screen over here so you guys can follow along and know which step I'm actually tackling.

So step one is G, which is the grid calendar.

So the cool thing about Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is that it's already organized in a grid.

So on the left side of the grid, I'm going to put all the topics or lectures and across the right is going to be the date that you actually reviewed them.

So let's just make an example that this is going to be anatomy class.

What do people, what do we learn in anatomy?

Can't think of anything else off the top of my head.

The cool thing about using Google Excel, I mean, Google Sheets, is that you can duplicate each sheet at the bottom for every single class you're taking.

You're probably going to want to make one GROW table for each class you're taking.

And so when I'm preparing to study for the day, I can just easily see every single class and quickly find the weakest topic that I need to study for.

Let's say that's today's date, which is November 30th.

I reviewed this lecture and maybe I did this one as well and this one, because why not?

So moving on to the next part of the framework is our rating system.

So I want a way to actually rate my confidence after I reviewed each lecture.

So a very easy to use rating system would be something like the stoplight system where red is super hard, yellow is kind of in the middle, and green is super confident.

So for cranial nerves, I'm not super confident in it, so I'll give it a yellow.

And you can do that by just going up here to the fill color.

I'm just going to do yellow for that one.

Sitz muscles, for some reason, I just got it.

If anyone has studied anatomy, there's a lot of neck muscles in there.

And let's say that tomorrow I'm going to review these other three lectures that I didn't touch yet.

So 12, 1, 22, I'm just going to copy this and put them in these two cells.

And once again, we're going to use the R rating system.

And let's say that for some reason, not the best day.

And I'm also going to give this one a red.

Anyways, moving on to O, which is the overall outcome of what we want.

We want to see as many of these become green as possible.

And I'm going to see that happen as I continue to review more and more and more each coming day.