5 Effective Study Techniques I Wish I Knew Earlier

It's a struggle to consistently study and learn new skills once you've left school. Other responsibilities to work, family, and other obligations pile up and make it difficult to keep motivated to learn a new skill or build your knowledge on a certain subject. In these circumstances, leaning on certain habits or study techniques can help you progress in your learning journey.

I’ve graduated college more than a few years ago, but have still been able to keep studying and learning more through education platforms like Coursera and edX, and even through gently used or free textbooks by incorporating a few of these study techniques that have helped me study on a regular basis.

1. Pomodoro Technique

This is a fairly popular time management technique created by Francesco Cirillo, the owner of a German consulting firm. The idea is simple: Set a timer and spend that time doing your work. When that timer goes off, give yourself a short break before returning to your studies. Repeat as many times as you need. This incorporates breaks into your routine so that your brain can stop and fully absorb the information. Studies show that studying for a long, uninterrupted period of time (like cramming for an exam in the morning) weakens your ability to actually retain that information. Taking intentional breaks improves your overall recall.

The typical cycle is 30 minutes, with 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest. However, the actual work/rest time can be customized as you see fit. For example, if you do better with longer stretches of uninterrupted study, you could do 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes of rest; if you’re a particularly restless learner, you could try 15 minutes of work and 2 minutes of rest.

2. Study with others

People often think of studying as a solitary behavior, but the fact is that we learn best when we’re surrounded by others. Other people help us keep accountable to our goals, much in the same way that a fitness buddy can keep us going to the gym on a regular basis. Imagine the scenario: you approach a particularly boring or difficult part of your study. Alone, you might give up for the day and reach for your phone. With others, you’re more likely to resist that urge and power through.

If you’re taking an online course, try reaching out to some of the other students to coordinate some study sessions. Not only will it keep you accountable, but you can then ask questions about the material, and strengthen your own understanding by answering other questions.

While it is great to study with others learning the same material, that’s not necessary to reap some of the benefits. For instance, studying in a library can help put you in the mindset to learn. Similarly, attending or hosting “study with me” sessions on sites that support streams like YouTube can help you feel like you are studying with others, even if you’re at your home desk.

3. Test Your Knowledge

You may feel like you’re doing a lot by rereading a chapter, or flipping through flashcards over and over. While those can be somewhat helpful, they aren’t the most efficient way of learning. In fact, your brain often dismisses a lot of the information you’re trying to learn simply because it says, “I’ve already seen this; I don’t really need to look at it.”

However, actively testing your knowledge helps you identify gaps in your learning, as getting something wrong the first time often helps us memorize it for the future. It also asks you to be engaged while trying to recall the information, rather than expecting the answer to be right there on the back of a card.

As you are learning about a subject, write down 10-15 quiz questions on a page, with the answers to those questions on another page. After a few days have passed since learning the material, take out your homemade quiz and try to answer the questions. Compare your answers to the ones you wrote in the answer key, and mark which ones you got wrong. Try taking the quiz again in another few days, and you may find that you greatly improved your retention of the material.

4. The Leitner System

The Leitner System, developed by Sebastian Leitner in his book So lernt man lernen (or “Learning how to learn”), is a way of sorting flashcards by their level of difficulty, so that you can focus more of your time on the more difficult items and less on concepts or terms that you’ve already mastered.

In the original methodology Leitner first described in 1972, you would prepare your flashcards and 5 cardboard boxes. All flashcards go into Box 1 as you create them. When you’re ready to test yourself, flip through the cards. Any answered incorrectly stay in Box 1; cards that you got right will advance to Box 2. Review the ones in Box 1 daily.

About every other day, review the ones in Box 2. If you answered the flashcard correctly, move the item to Box 3. This time, if you got the wrong answer, move that card back to Box 1.

And so on and so forth. Cards in Box 3 will advance to Box 4 or fall back to Box 2, and ones in Box 4 will move to Box 5 or regress to Box 3. The boxes further up will be reviewed less often, with Box 5 being the least often. All items in Box 5 should hold cards that you have more or less mastered. Note that while the original system used 5 categories, you can create as many or few categories as you need - typically 3 boxes are enough to effectively study.

While this study method used to be completely physical, technology has made it so that you can easily incorporate this digitally - some learning apps like Duolingo use a version of this in their algorithm when generating new exercises for you. You can also use sites like Quizlet to create different flashcard decks and treat them like Leitner’s boxes.

5. Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is a method of studying that trains your brain to move learned information from your short-term memory storage to long-term. Some of these methods already discussed build spaced repetition into their system: creating test for yourself are most effective when taken several days after you’ve first absorbed the information, and are better retaken every few days as opposed to right after you’ve taken the first; similarly, the Leitner System has you reviewing material with more and more time between intervals as the cards move up the boxes (Box 1 would be reviewed daily, Box 2 every other day, Box 3 every week, Box 4 every other week, Box 5 every month, or something similar).

Try reviewing material you’ve just learned the day after, then a few days after, then a month after. Eventually, you’ll be able to recall the information without having to re-review it.

Find what works for you

There are about as many ways to study as there are types of students. Everyone gravitates to different study techniques, and one learning method may not work as well for one person as it does another. These are five that work for most people, but if some are less relevant to you, or if something else better helps you master your learning material, go for it.