Save More Time for Your Side Projects

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

If you ask me what is the one thing that is most important for a college student's future, I would say this: Have your next step already lined up before graduation. What I mean is that you need to start preparing for life after college now.

How?

One great way to do this is by starting side projects while you're still in college (though there are other ways too). These projects could be something you can own and work on after graduation, or even a source of income while you're studying. Whether it's a small business, freelancing, or any creative endeavor, a side project can offer financial security and a way to transition smoothly into life after college. If the project succeeds, you'll have something solid to fall back on; and even if it doesn't, you'll still gain valuable experience.

A Reminder of What Is Important

While side projects can be a game changer, you also have to study very well to understand your classes (others we can say to get good GPAs). If you have all these activities, the pie of time on your plate now gets so eaten and eaten with other activities you introduce every day to your college life, and this can be detrimental to the quality of your studies; you can't serve many masters with a less strategized system.

This is where study hacks come in; they can help you carve out more time for your side projects while still excelling in your studies.

Study Hacks That Work

Today, I want to share what I have found to be more of the best practices in studying, which also have helped me even up to this point (I am still a student!!!). These practices helped me to get more time to experiment with many other side projects. Most of them failed, and some of them gave me and my team 5 M TZS. I am still working on some of them up to this moment, but in the end, I still managed to get a "decent" GPA, which might be a good "first impression" to land me another job if I want.

The old common ways

Most of us use study methods that we have used since secondary school. We thought these were the ones that worked, and we trusted them; as a result, how we performed has been the same ever since. To get better grades, we are forced to study overnight, doing multiple notes rereading, all the time like we are in a war, to ensure that we won't mess up things. If you are studying like that, it's a clear sign there is something wrong with the way you study.

If you are using these kinds of methods and at the same time doing other side projects, you are putting your grades at risk (or you may end up with SUP like others who have forced their way out just like that).

The Way to Make More Time

I will try my best to give a shot on this in a simple way, but more series on the best ways to study in depth will follow up on risefromCollege (so make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet).

Retaining What You Learn Is a Crucial Step

The first step in learning is understanding what you have read or been taught; this involves various techniques for capturing the concepts very well. The next step, and the most critical one, which will be our focus today, has always been how you can retain what you have read for a long time and be able to apply it in the future effectively. We tend to forget what we've learned shortly after studying; as a result, we usually return to the material to reread it, again and again, to compensate for the concepts we have already lost; and from this is where we usually lose a lot of time compared to the first step of just learning the concepts. So, we need better ways to retain more of what we have learned, which should be done using less time.

The Better Way to Do This: "Put It Down on Your Own"

There are better ways to do this, which lies in this truth: through the pain you experience it is where you get to retain and understand more the materials you read, but this is quite controversial to what we always navigate towards; we always tend to avoid pain, we want our studies to be more straightforward as much as possible, and that's why it makes us running away from the right methods as we unconsciously detect pain from them.

But, the real secret (maybe not so secret) lies in the hard methods, the ones that make you always have the urge to run away from them as they are painful to do and you become more uncomfortable with them (there is more science to back this up); these involve forcing your brain to actively recall information on your own without relying on notes or textbooks, this can be done through methods like answering practice questions, rewriting what you've learned, or teaching it to someone else; we call them retrieval methods. Yes, I know they are really uncomfortable, but that's exactly why it works. Confronting what you don't know strengthens your understanding and retention.

The Illusionary Progress

The other methods like rereading or reviewing notes which students mostly use for trying to make things stick in their heads, do sound appealing because they don't make you "struggle" and they do bring this sense of mastery if you use them many times. What we don't know they do exploit the power of our brain to connect dots immediately after being given a few clues; this is by immediately making up what's missing by connecting clues. Imagine given just the words "you are coming..." immediately you will know the last word might be "home" This is similar to when you are rereading or reviewing notes; the whole information is there in your notebook you get to connect to the other concepts available right there and say to yourself "yes I have mastered this concept" and it feels great (No wonder why multiple choice questions may be one of the easiest types of questions in exams, as you have all the answers). However, when you are in the natural environment when doing exams or tests, you will not have your notes or books; that is where you will see your progress and realize that you were in an illusion.

With retrieval methods, not only will you be able to retain information for a long time using a short amount of time, but you will also be practicing more how to apply it, which leads to more understanding.

If you don't get it, remember this.

The best and right method to retain and understand more of what you have read or been taught has always been by any means to try to recall or put down on your own what you have learned without relying on notes or textbooks. So, the only way is to embrace the pain and push through it, with time you will find it more powerful as you can retain a lot of information than before and save more time. The way I used this back in my days in college was through teaching (man! I did a lot of teaching; it was rarely to find me on the day, not in a group teaching others); the way I did it, I was teaching the things from my head most of the time and not relying on the textbooks (maybe that was my secret, hahaha).

There is more.

Again, there will be a series of posts sharing tips on the right methods to help you carve out more time so you can do other projects while still performing well in your studies. I used the same techniques to self-learn web development back in college, to do my other Industrial Chemistry projects, which I have continued to leverage even after graduation. I hope you, too, will get the same from them, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I can leave you with my short e-book, which I wrote back in 2020 (😁I have been obsessed with study hacks for more than a decade now). If you have subscribed to our newsletter, you can access it here.

#moreExposure #buildUpSkills

Thanks to Joyce, Joyce-P, Stivin, Elly, Bernadetta, Ladislaus, Hadija, Saguda, Neema, and Paschal for reading drafts of this.