Today, I would like to share with you my award-winning* formula for Good Grades, Getting Things Done and General Success.
You see, I have spent most of my academic career, spanning all the way back to the beginning of primary school in 1999, attempting to work out the Best Method for Studying. I have always been that little kid who has to be absolutely perfect at everything. My parents are to this date somewhat puzzled about my obsession with grades, for they insist that they never enforced this attitude. In fact, toward the latter years of my compulsory schooling, their attitude had taken a steady turn toward "oh, another A? Cool." I have never been scolded for receiving occasional bad marks, even that one D that I once received for a history exam, for there have always been very good reasons for any of my failings.
As I began university, my study routine was merciless. I would take notes in class, and later transcribe the notes into Scrivener, giving them key words and sometimes adding graphics; even going to the effort of linking related lectures to each other via internal document links. In the study period before exams, I would then re-write these notes by hand, since I knew that the slower pace of writing by hand would force me to absorb the information more effectively.
For the first year and a half of my university career, I burnt out at least once a semester. Most of the time, I would manage to push this burnout toward the end of semester, just beyond exams, but at the beginning of this year, I burnt out halfway through semester. I even started having strange symptoms like sudden onset of dizziness and nausea that was never really properly explained.
That's when I decided that something had to change. I had suffered the physical symptoms of stress before, during my last year of high school, and they took me almost a year to fully recover from. I decided that I did not want to go down that road again, and so I set about re-evaluating my method of studying.
Despite my consistent efforts of not studying, I failed once more to obtain bad marks.
Hence, I can guarantee that the following method has been rigorously tested and subsequently judged to be functional. It has been approved by a panel of judges consisting only of myself for succeeding in upholding a pre-existing standard of excellence. Behold, this is the secret method by which good marks can be obtained, displayed in the most effective method of a flow chart:
Happy studying, everybody.
*Awards for best grades in my class for Literature and Chemistry at the end of high school, as well as some awards for achievement in the laboratory during my university studies etc.
