How to Stay Motivated During Revision Time

DON’T SLOUCH ON THE COUCH:
RISE UP AND REVISE!

Procrastination can be described in many ways:

procrastination/prə(ʊ)ˌkrastɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/
noun
the action of delaying or postponing something.

It is said to be the Thief of Time. A waste of your life. Absolutely pointless. But it is also actually human.

No-one should feel guilty for wanting to take a break sometimes at an appropriate moment. As the saying goes:
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
It also makes him an exhausted, overstressed, unhappy and unproductive boy!

Managing your breaks is the key to unlocking successful revising time.
Start by working out how long you have until your exam and how confident you are with the subject. Basically, the longer the time and the better you rate your knowledge, the more breaks you can fit into your days.

So if I had an exam in a week that I had done no revision for, I'd need to make sure that my procrastination time was down to a minimum. If the exam was in a couple of months and it was one of my favourite subjects, I'd be able to include lots of time for breaks.

This system varies, however, depending on your best way of learning. A lot of exams are just memory tests so you have to find out which is better: your short term memory (remembering things that you learnt recently) or your long term memory (your memory of things that you learnt a while ago). Most people are a mixture of the two and are slightly better at one or the other. If you realise you are more likely to remember something you revised recently then it might be worth making sure your revision gets more and more organised the closer the exam gets. And if you think you've got a better long term memory, it might help if you really focus on starting your revision as soon as possible rather than cramming loads of information into your head with a couple of days to go. You cannot afford to start your revision late, though, or do the opposite and think your revision is sorted just because you started early.

The most important point is that there is no such thing as a bad memory. Everyone can remember loads of stuff – you just need to know how to train your brain! We all find it much easier to remember stuff that we are interested in compared with stuff that is boring for us. We just have to discover ways to get those dull facts into our heads.

One way of improving your memory is sleeping properly. If you're struggling to sleep six hours per night, your brain will take in much less revision than if you're getting a solid seven or eight hours. When our brains are given enough time to rest and recover from hard (and often boring!) days of revision then they will be able to take in much more tomorrow. Sleep is especially important on the night of the exam but I’ll cover that more in another article which will be published really soon.

It is crucial when tackling your revision you make a revision timetable. Here is an example:

	0900	1100	1300	1400	1600	1800
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Written by Edmund Cox