My diligent and aspirational form considered this week how to best revise.

I know myself that I have lived through times where I would simply work as hard and for as long as needed until I competed a task. This is an essential way of being. Knowing that you can work as hard as required to prioritise knowledge and completion underscores any worthwhile success and endeavour.

However, a full life needs to acknowledge that there are simply times where you cannot grant a task the full time needed to achieve absolute success and completion. For a student, this could be the demands of extra curricular activities, or even family and socialising.

Instead, a student needs to organise their time and attention to efficient means of learning and working. They need to acknowledge that revision is occurring at all times as the brain may (or may not!) pass over material and interest previously learnt.

To this end, such revision needs to take part under the two following principles of time management:

1) Schedule tasks on a calendar to commit to things.
2) Create a to-do list to do things as you feel.

Both of these two principles are underlined by Chris Sharples’ assertion that time management is about doing things at the right time. Of course, knowing the right time is easier said than done!

As you are embarking on your time management journeys, I would recommend the following apps:

a) Wunderlist (or pretty much any notification app). Create tasks for revision that push notifications to your phone is a wonderful way of organising yourself and your time. You can also break tasks into smaller, more manageable routines.

b) Google Calendar, or the calendar from your usual computer systems, is a default revision creator. https://getrevising.co.uk is another popular and useful system.

I would recommend that you grant yourself one clear evening every week. I would also recommend that aim to schedule revision before other more mundane or social tasks where possible in order that you mind might consider the material in the passing journeys of your mind.

I’ll share further ideas as requested in form time over the coming months and years.