study things to do when you only have 15 minutes
as someone who has two jobs and studies full time, it’s important to grab every second i can to study! but sometimes when you don’t have enough time to get stuck into research or proper deep learning, it can be hard to know what to do. here’s some stuff i normally do when i know i don’t have long to study.
when i had a politics exam coming up that i was really nervous about, i just carried my flashcards with me in my wallet and i would do them in my spare time on the bus, waiting at the doctor, etc!
revise notes from class/readings
i feel like this is an obvious one, but just quickly skimming back over your notes every so often helps cement knowledge in your long-term memory and will improve your learning overall for the semester. this is a super good thing to do if the time you have to kill is ‘waiting to go into class’ time!
write a part of an assignment that you already know how to do
i used to never do essay or report writing when i knew i didn’t have too long, because i thought i wouldn’t be able to get anything worthwhile done. more recently, i’ve found that i actually work quite well when i know i only have ten minutes - i just throw a few sentences i’m sure about together, bullet point one paragraph, etc. it actually makes it much easier to know where to start when i sit down for a long session of work!
get on top of admin stuff
one of my favourite things to do in an in-between moment is just go through and format my assignments that i have coming up - put headers in, make sure the document template is set up correctly, or fill in referencing for something i’m partway through. it doesn’t require as much brainpower as other tasks, but it still takes time and needs to be done, so it’s good to get it out of the way!
pretend you’re on a talk show and script in your head what you would say about your subject as an expert in the field
i don’t know, is this a political philosopher thing? this is probably a political philosopher thing. but i find this so fun and whether you can do it confidently or not demonstrates how well you’ve grasped a topic, what you remember, where the gaps in your knowledge are. what kinds of questions would get asked about this topic? how would you answer them? (this is secretly great exam prep if you, like me, get exams with long answer questions).
those are all the ones i have for now, but if ppl from other fields have other things they like to do, feel free to rb and add!