How to be an efficient learner? (learning how to learn?) 

1) Take breaks.

It is not going to be the same for everyone while studying various kinds of things. First and foremost, a trained and disciplined person can study for the optimum of 12 to 16 hours. Likely, doctors, charter accountants, researchers, judges, and the like are probably putting their days into studying the tough stuffs and doing the calculations. But, the standard studying hours are 5-6 hours a day. Moreover, for a starter it is very hard to just study productively for 10-15 minutes. The reason behind this is the monkey mind which roams around and never stays focused. So, to train this monkey brain a beginner has to take breaks while studying. After studying for a period of 10-15 minutes go for a break, but make sure your study is not finished yet. A break of two to three minutes is enough to refresh your brain. In these 2-3 minutes a person can play a game, listen to a music, or do stuffs like drawing, etc. After the break ensure your continuation and go for another 15 minutes of study. Adding on, do this again and again to optimize your studies. Try to practice this technique for two or a three weeks time period then this will become a habit. 

2) Reward yourself.

Rewarding yourself is a proven way of staying focused for long hours. After a study of few hours, go for a walk while listening to the best playlist in your songs collection, watch a movie, go for bird watching, play any sport, or do anything which suits you. Our body functions on the commands of our mind, and our mind likes to the delights of dopamine. Frustrated minds aren’t going to add any productivity, no matter how long they work. To add on, rewarding means training your mind to do the tough work and at the end rewarding it. This if repeated, the mind will soon get on the track to do the cumbersome task because it knows it is going to be rewarded at the end.

3) Bed is bad for studying

Most of us start studying in our bedrooms and on our beds. Remember, beds are made for sleeping not for studying. So, it is like going to a jungle for fishing and that’s never going to be happened. Leave your beds as early as possible and head towards any other place for studying. The best place to study is library. Make going to library your habit and spend atleast 3-4 hours there. Likewise, you can choose any suitable place or spare a room in your house for studying.

4) Take a lamp for only study- make a place for studying.

Every day it is very imperative to remind yourself of studying. Furthermore, induce yourself towards study and that can be done by making meaningful signs in and around you. Employ a study lamp, a chair, a table, and put your study stuff on it. You can also use some sticky notes to remind yourself of studying. Books, newspapers, pens, and these study-related stuffs can remind you of your daily goals.

5) Build a concept.

Now, lets go for an experiment, try to remember this “h a i y n a r  p y a d y p”, it is possible that you’ve memorized it after few seconds. But, you’ll forget it in a few moments. Stay conscious and try to remember this ” happy rainy day” , off course you’re not going to put alot of brian to remember this small concept. The point is, don’t go for rot memorization, just build a simple concept. Don’t put your brains to do things which the brain hasn’t been evolved to do. The above two samples contain the same set of words but the approach to tackling them is different. 

6) Don’t highlight- it is just recognizing not recollecting.

Twitter is a platform where most of the illiterates follow the literates. Most of the students try to sound like Socrates while tweeting merely a sentence which contains around twenty words. Twitter is reliable for authentic news but it is for sure Twitter is not a platform to build a debate. Highlighting a line while reading or studying something is just like tweeting. In addition to this, highlighting is injurious to remembering any sort of information. It is not recollecting the idea as a whole but it is just recognizing that you had read something before a while. Reading a passage more than one times is a credible way to put the concepts into your short-term memory.

7) Use acronyms, speech cards

To remember names of extra-large size of organizations, molecules or the formulas of mathematics acronyms and speech cards are quite suitable. For example National Aeronautics and Space Administration is shrinked to NASA. This is a pinpoint for the mind to inculcate such rough abbreviations.

Speech cards provide alot of assistance to make sure that all what has been studied is still roaming in our neurons.

“The essence of the cup is its emptiness“, Osho. Try to remember this thing that don’t make things burden for yourself. Stay empty , stay open to learn noval ideas, and always remember to be productive.

8) Take 5 minutes to review the lecture.

After taking a lecture, try to go through it quickly. It just takes 3-5 minutes to revise a lesson at the end of the lecture. Revising and revisiting is a lucrative tool to make all the lectures productive. Do go for brief revisions in an interval of a week or fortnight. This will boost your long term memory and it will be alot helpful in remembering the lectures of the whole semester or year. It is not possible to understand everything a teacher teaches. As a Japanese proverb states” if you understand everything, you must be misinformed”. Don’t be panic if the lectures are not easy enough to grasp. Try to approach different things differently. Go for a YouTube video or any other online platform to assist yourself while tackling the complex information.

9) Group studies are so efficient.

Many students are very ambitious to get ahead in the rat race of so-called life. They’re overwhelmed with their selves and their degrees. Here the point isn’t to blame individuals but to make clear that interdependence is what humans survive with. Organizations can’t be formed by individuals, they need cooperation among people at every stage. Dependency on others is a wrath in itself but being so occupied with yourself is also not good.  As the well-known moto of Ted is ” ideas worth spreading” , and ideas need groups and communities to be transferred smoothly. Group studies is the best way to transfer and take knowledge without investing anything expensive. It is now the time to approach learning in different ways, otherwise, in the comity of nations, we would never be competible enough to contribute for the enrichment of the society.

In conclusion, learning how to learn is the key to unlock the psychology of humans in the pursuance of knowledge. It is about doing the basics well, the rest drives itself. You don’t need four walls and a teacher with a chalk to teach you. From the nature to the phone which you’re holding in your hand can be the learning tools. Doubt and question what you’re taught, learning then will open its door for you. Lastly putting few words of Voltaire” a man is judged by his questions rather than his answers“.