Productivity tips

With the HSC® Exam looming and the UMAT® Exam ahead, Year 12 students will find that time becomes a precious resource in the coming year. To maximise your chances of doing well in medicine interviews, you should commit some of this already limited time to other extracurricular and maybe community activities as well. In addition to this, you will also want to be setting aside time for destressing, time with your friends, etc. This means that time management becomes more important this year than in any of your previous years of school by far.

Improving your productivity will ensure that the time you spend on studying for UMAT® Exam or HSC® Exam is time spent efficiently, not wasted. This of course is easier said than done, but we’ll take a look at a few techniques that can help you stay focused and productive so that you spend your limited time meaningfully.

Firstly, break up what you need to do into smaller tasks, preferably those which can be done within say, an hour. For example, if you have an essay that you need to write, you might want to break it down firstly into planning, writing and editing. Depending on how long the essay is, you might want to further break it down, splitting the essay itself into introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion. What about studying in general? This is a little less clearly cut, but if you understand your study material well enough, you should notice that this should be splittable into topics. For HSC® Exam subjects, finding your subject’s syllabus will help you identify these topics. What about the UMAT® Exam? Clearly you need to have a good understanding of the components of the UMAT® Exam if you are to effectively break it up into smaller topics that you can tackle an hour at a time. Our UMAT® Exam preparation courses are designed specifically in this manner so that you can efficiently prepare for the UMAT® Exam.

Once you have manageable tasks, you should schedule them into your day. When doing so, there are several things you will want to keep in mind:

• Schedule tasks with extra time as leeway. It is always possible that a task might take longer than you anticipate

• Schedule tasks with breaks in between. Breaks will help you stay focused on the task at hand for a longer period of time. We’ll look at this again later.

• Remember to leave time for your extracurricular activities and time with your friends. Overworking yourself is not conducive to effective studying/work.

Putting these tasks into a calendar, either written or digital (e.g. Google, Sunrise, Outlook, etc.) is important. It’s worth spending some time at the start of the week and each day to organise your week (and then day) with your calendar.

Lastly we’ll look at how to improve your productivity when actually tackling your scheduled tasks themselves. Most people will find it difficult to remain focused on a task for long periods of time. This is perfectly normal and is precisely why techniques such as the Pomodoro technique are used. The Pomodoro technique is one of the more widely known time management techniques which consists of the following key features:

• Take 5 minute breaks between 25 minutes of uninterrupted work

• Take a longer 20 - 30 minute break instead after the fourth “pomodoro” (each pomodoro is a 25 minute block of work)

• There can be absolutely no distraction from the task: if you are interrupted, make note of what response needs to be made and leave it for after the pomodoro.

• If the task is finished early, spend the rest of the time reviewing what was done in the pomodoro.

It helps to use an actual alarm clock that you physically set, as doing so supposedly helps prime you for the task.

Following this productivity guide closely should help you immensely with efficiently using your time, but as mentioned earlier, this is very much easier said than done. It will take discipline and good work ethic to make this a habit. However, once it becomes a habit, you’ll find that it is possible to apply this methodology to many other tasks other than study. 

One last final important point: while this guide mostly handles how to use your time, what you spend it on is even more important. It is essential that the work you are doing is actually going towards your goals. Make sure that the way you are studying is actually helping you learn. One effective method of study is to test yourself repeatedly. For the UMAT® Exam, this is effectively the only way of studying as there is no set material to learn. UMATReady provides plenty of study material with which you can practice.