Stitches In Time: 5 Small Habits for Academic Success

Out of all the habits that make for a “successful” student, these are the top 5 I think will make the biggest difference to your academic year if you start them NOW.

We talk a lot about effective study habits here at Exam Study Expert, but today we’re tackling this topic from a slightly different angle. What simple, little things can you start doing today – wherever you are in your academic journey – that will increase your chances of academic success in the long run?

So we have 5 manageable, good habits for you to start building into your study routines throughout your study programme. Let’s dive in.

Today is the best time to get started

I recorded these thoughts as episode for the Exam Study Expert podcast (which you can watch through the video above) in what is commonly considered as a season of reset and renewal for many of us in the world of education: students, parents and teachers.

The start of a new school year. It’s an ideal opportunity to build those new habits, the things that future you at the end of exam season might be fervently wishing you might have done all year, to make life so much easier down the line.

It’s your grandma’s old advice: a stitch in time saves nine. Little and often.

You can find similar advice in plenty of texts and teachings in religions and ancient philosophies from around the world. Chinese philosopher Confucius for instance writes that “faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage”. And the book of Proverbs in the Bible reads “the lazy one does not plow when the planting season arrives, so at harvest time they shall look but find nothing”.

An important note: if you’re reading or listening to this part way through a season of studying, then don’t feel it’s too late. Declare bankruptcy on what’s gone before, and take this as a moment for a fresh start, a new leaf, day 1 of your new habits.

The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, the second best time is today.

The secret to finding a way to follow through

How many times have we all embarked on a new course, a new term or semester, a new round of studying for the next set of exams, and told ourselves, this time will be different?

This time I’ll do X or Y as I go, I’ll start buckling down early, I’ll save myself the problems I’ve had before where it all piled up at the end.

And yet, when the realities of life bite, our good intentions start to fade. Whether that’s realities of football practice and orchestra and keeping up with friends, or for my older scholars, realities of balancing your day job or clinical practice or even taking care of your family. When all that starts to swirl around on top of your ever-growing list of things you want to do academically, our good intentions get replaced by just getting done what needs to be done each day, each week, to get through.

So, I don’t know that lack of courage, per se, is always to blame for not seeing through our good intentions. Often we know we should be doing things, but it just becomes hard, really hard, to actually fit them in amid everything else.

Keeping it simple is the key

I’ve been coaching scholars of all kinds for half a decade now, and across many hundreds of students I’ve worked with, there’s a very clear pattern in who succeeds with implementing good intentions, and whose good intentions don’t last past the second weekend of term or your study schedule.

The secret, as with so much of the way we do things here at Exam Study Expert, is to keep it simple.

Complex, or elaborate, or overly onerous: is the enemy of getting it done.

We like simple, easy, as close as we can get to effortless to weave into the messy and busy day to day reality.

So with that philosophy in mind, let’s count down my top 5 habits – simple, manageable habits – that you can start doing now to make life easier and from the outset AND improve your path academic success throughout the year.

Any one of these things done rather than not done can make a big, big difference to you in the long run. And I’ll keep each one as easy as possible. I want you to have the best chance of actually achieving whichever of these you feel you’d benefit from integrating.

Habit 5: Organise now

Let’s tackle a simple one first: stay organised as you go.

Some years on my academic journey, I fell into the trap of not really organising my stuff – I’d hit the end of the year with a big jumble of sheets of notes, assignments and so forth haphazardly stuffed into different folders, hopefully roughly sorted by subject I was taking at least, but still, very hard to study from ahead of the year end exams.

At a guess, it probably took me 2 or 3 times longer to sort out the mess when it was all scrambled up and my memory was starting to fade of what different things were about vs if I’d just taken the very slight effort to file things away as I went.

Figure out what your bottlenecks to getting organised are.

For me, I realised the reason I wasn’t filing on the go was the fact that many of the sheets needed hole punching before I could file them away, so the little thing that made the big difference was getting hold of a cheap, light hole punch I could carry round with me, so I could easily punch new sheets and file them in the ring binder as I went – it sounds kind of basic but just figuring out if there are any practical barriers, any friction to staying organised, and dealing with them will go a long way.

For you it could be something else – maybe pausing that final 20 seconds at the end of each class to take a bit of pride in your work, even if you’re finding it hard and frustrated by it, and filing it away properly rather than just sweeping everything into your bag.

Stay organised, future you will be so glad you did.

Habit 4: Know now what good looks like

This is an interesting habit for me, one that can really lead a student to a successful academic journey.

As some of you might know if you know a little bit about my story, I did well – really well – in terms of my grades on my academic journey. Top of my class at school, and then at Cambridge.

Thing is, I tended not to land those grades on Day 1. Far from it. Often, those initial weeks I was performing at a fairly mediocre level in the class. Over time, I’d learn how to be successful in that subject and catch up and eventually do well, but I wasn’t doing super-well at first.

I think the secret is learning what good looks like as early as you can. Carve out a little time at the outset to ask questions, listen, plan, refine your approach.

Ask your teacher or course leader for guidance on what kind of work scores really well. Understand the criteria for high scores in your exam. Seek out examples of excellent essays in your subject. Befriend peers who went through your course last year, and find out what they did. Beware though, not all peer advice is good advice, even if they performed well.

Don’t rely on guessing or instinct. Be great on purpose, not by accident.

Habit 3: Understand now

When you’re taking a stretching course, you’ll inevitably come across material you don’t fully understand at first. So this habit is all about prioritising that understanding NOW, so you don’t struggle in the future.

This was especially true for me for some of the harder science and maths courses I took at Cambridge, particularly in my first year before I got my act together. I’d sit in 9am lectures – half asleep incidentally, which was probably a big part of the problem in hindsight – and not really follow all the explanations, but tell myself that I’d study it all later and get my head round it on my own.

I’d attempt the weekly essay or problem sheets, inevitably with not enough time to wrestle with them, so I’d end up leaving holes or guess my way through things. I’d go to the supervisions and the tutor would walk through how to solve the problem, I’d nod along, and say to myself, I’ll definitely study up on that so I know how to do it on my own.

But then next week’s lectures and work would land, and so I’d think, I know, I have a great idea, I’ll leave the previous week for now, I’ll have tonnes of time in the long holiday over Christmas to study up and I’ll catch up then.

It never quite worked out like that. When you’re in a busy academic term, the prospect of a multi-week holiday seems like virtually infinite time, time enough to do anything you need. It’s not.

Holidays can be a good time to catch up, consolidate, fill in blanks, but only to a point – the time goes far quicker than you might think. And besides, the problem of falling behind compounds, as if you don’t grasp a lecture or two worth of material you might struggle for weeks to come through the rest of the class, as you don’t have the prior knowledge and understanding you need as the foundations to build on to access the later material in the course. So you get further and further from the pace.

What if you just really can’t keep up?

You’ve got two choices if you feel you’re not understanding significant parts of the course as you go.

• Option 1 is seriously evaluate whether this is the right course for you.
  • It might not be. Don’t be a hero. There’s no shame in switching to a course you’re more suited to, you’ll be happier, more successful.

• Option 2 is digging in and wrestling with the tricky material, taking the time you need to get your head round it at the time.
  • There are at least a couple of keys to making this work – one is having the time, one is having the energy.
  • For first year Cambridge me, I would have needed to free up time so I had both more time at night to sleep properly, and more time in the day to study. In my case, that would have meant cutting back on my extra-curricular interests.

Don’t put your head in the sand – if you feel things sliding, be real with yourself, and take action now – the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.

Habit 2: Say no for now

The counterpoint to my last comment is that you don’t have time to do everything you might want to, even within the scope of your academic pursuits.

Once you progress to a certain level of study, there is always more depth you can go to, always more papers you can read, always more authors you can get relevant opinions from.

The key as with so many things is balance. Finding balance is a really, really good habit to start now if you want to get to the end of the year successfully, without overwhelm or burnout.

Draw a line around the core content, the parts you really, really must know or understand or read. The other content is the more peripheral material, that goes to more depth or detail – nice to have, but you can still perform respectably on your course without it.

Learn how to say to that material: no, not right now.

I started using the term “Tangents List” with my coaching clients some years ago, and it’s been very popular with many of them.

A tangents list is a simple list of the extra readings, questions, issues, books, papers, problems etc that you might ideally investigate in more detail, but you are going to park for now.

When I design a weekly routine together with my coaching clients, one of the rituals we might allocate time for is some time to review your tangents list from the week, and give you a little time to pursue at least some of those points.

We focus on the core, but we explore too, with sensible boundaries.

Habit 1: Learn now

We’ll wrap up with one of the most common questions I work on with my study strategy coaching clients, which is how they can do a little study or revision as they go along, so there’s less to do at the end.

Almost everyone who’s studying for a final exam of some kind can divide their work into two broad phases:

• initial discovery of the content
• and final review or revision in the last weeks or months before an exam

Building this habit is really about what we do in Phase 1, so we can establish a strong foundation for a successful Phase 2 – and exam!

So you’re in school getting your normal lessons; at uni getting your normal lectures; or even if you’re following a self-propelled course of study for a professional exam and going through the initial chapters or online classes for this first time.

My top tip: Memory journaling

Here’s what can you do during this initial phase to make life easier when you’ve covered the whole syllabus in your lessons, and shift into review and revise mode:

Now, there are lots of options for this, and it depends on the subjects you’re taking, your style, and how much time we’ve got to work with, ie. have we got the luxury of a lot of blank canvas time to populate each day, or, as is perhaps more common with my students, are you fitting things into an already quite full schedule each week.

One of my favourites is memory journaling: a daily exercise to retrieve and therefore consolidate some of the key points you learned about that day by writing them down, from memory, ideally as a daily ritual at the same time each day so you can stick to it. If you want to take a dive into the science of memory journalling, you can find all my secrets in Episode 23 of the Exam Study Expert podcast: My 5 Minute A Day Secret To Supercharge Your Learning.

Getting help in building good habits for academic success

If you’re serious about your success in the exams you’re working towards at the moment, it would be my pleasure to work with you as your study strategy coach. I can help you find the right day-to-day, week-to-week habits, routines and systems that not only help set you up for great success in your exams, but also make the whole process feel lighter, easier and more enjoyable.

Everyone studying for their exams at school, university or as part of their career, has the opportunity to work directly with me to optimise your study strategy for your specific circumstances, so you can ace your exams, the smart way.

So, if you’ve got major exams on the horizon this year or next, now is the perfect time to start working together, so we can set up some good habits and build towards a successful academic year, from the outset. It all starts with a casual chat about how you’re getting on and how I might be able to help – book your complimentary consult today.

While it’s never too late to make a difference, the earlier you put these 5 simple good habits into action, the better, as the more time you’ll have to benefit from adopting the most efficient and effective version of your study habits. Good luck!

Wishing you every success in your studies.