With the holidays just around the corner, you can expect to be surrounded by Christmas carols, family gatherings, and gift giving. But where can you find time to revise during the Christmas period? Time doesn’t stop when Christmas comes around. So how can you find the time to squeeze in some quality revision during Christmas? Whilst enjoying essential time with your family during the holiday season?
- Stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready
- Oppose all unrealistic expectations
- Organise time & adapt
- Create a study studio
- Small but often strategy
- Stay off social media
- Get an accountability partner
- Hire a tutor
Stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready
The Christmas period is known to be erratic and unpredictable. Despite all of the extensive planning, you can never guarantee everything will fall into place the way you expect it to. An unbeaten strategy to help time management during uncertain times is to work ahead. Keeping yourself four to five steps ahead of your plan to revise during Christmas allows you to make up for time you lose unexpectedly.
Make life easier for yourself by planning ahead when the opportunity presents itself. So when the time comes, you don’t waste quality time preparing and losing more time than you can afford to. This can look like prepping the notes and modules you’re getting ready to revise beforehand. Thus, making it more accessible.
Regardless of what you’re studying for, revision notes should always be concise and easily digestible. Maintaining a clean and organized pool of knowledge goes a long way. It also saves you wasting time thumbing through textbooks and endless online resources. Search up a couple of revision guides related to your topics and use them as a guide for how to make convenient summaries.
Oppose all unrealistic expectations
If nobody else will, let Learn&Co be the first to tell you that there is no magical way to force your brain to retain information in under 12 hours. Don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself by creating unrealistic expectations of what you can do within a fixed amount of time. In a situation like this where your free time may be torn apart by family obligations, clear and realistic objectives should be the only guidelines used to keep you on track. Avoid perfectionism or setting goals rooted in another person’s expectations of you. Ask yourself whether your expectations are in line with your own personal goals, values and how you function/learn.
Just look outside of revising or your immediate responsibilities for a moment. Forcing yourself to live up to an unattainable standard is the quickest way to develop low self-esteem. This can lead to an unhealthy relationship with yourself.
Organise time and adapt
Planning is a layered system. Including how the task should be done, when it is done, and who should do it. Clearly, it doesn’t matter how or who does something if there is no time to complete the task.
This is why time management is essential for the completion of any plan. Depending on your objective, the plan decides the course of action. More importantly, what can be done alternatively in case you cannot complete the task the way you initially planned. Adapting or having a backup plan that accounts for recourse or distractions can single handedly see you reach your goals.
When Christmas commitments seem to be encroaching on your allocated study time, save yourself the stress by having a backup plan that can keep you on schedule. It can be really easy to fall off the wagon. Especially when you want to revise during Christmas. Therefore, maintaining a consistent schedule is the best way to build momentum. This is likely to increase motivation and self-belief simultaneously.
Create a study studio
Get the snacks, prepare the playlist, dim the lights. Do whatever you need to do to make your workspace as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. When you are lacking motivation, simply making where you study somewhere you actually want to be can help you kickstart a productive study session.
Make sure it’s somewhere private where you can completely lock in and focus on the task at hand. Even if it’s your bedroom. Making the effort to ensure you have a peaceful place to study is incredibly valuable. Investing in a folding desk (granted you have the space) can help transform your resting place into a productive space. And all without sacrificing privacy. Get your supplies ready, set the noise level, personalise it to support your revision style. Then, take the time to ensure your space is exactly how you want it to be to get stuff done.
Study small but often
Who made it seem as if the longer you revise the more productive it is? Well, we can confidently say that they are wrong. Forcing yourself into 5 hours of consistent studying won’t do anything but make you exhausted and kill your motivation. The average human attention span in 2021 is only about eight seconds. And this is without accounting for the distractions of social media and various technologies.
Keeping your sessions brief but consistent is a more healthy way to work with yourself. As opposed to engaging in a losing battle with your brain by cramming months worth of information within a few hours. Give yourself frequent breaks throughout the day. Also, try not to get too distraught if the length of your revision time varies daily.
The last thing you want to do is overwork yourself as you revise, especially during Christmas festivities. Contrary to common thought, giving your brain some time to recharge by studying in small chunks will actually help you remember more information in the long run. So it is best to get the studies done early so you have the rest of the day to spend with your family.
Stay off social media
Don’t make life harder for yourself, stay off social media. Social media addiction is real. It is designed to keep you looking at your phone for as long as you allow it. To combat this you either need to turn your phone off or put it in a separate room so you can completely focus on your work.
If parting with your phone is too much to bear, you have access to a multitude of free app blockers that lock you out of specific apps for a fixed amount of time. Most modern phones also have a ‘do not disturb’ feature that blocks notifications from interrupting your revision time. Keep in mind that one hour of deep focused revision can be more effective than revising for a whole day filled with distractions. Do what you must to keep concentration at its peak when it matters.
Get an accountability partner
Don’t be afraid to ask for support from your inner circle. Having an accountability partner minimises the stress of having to monitor your behaviour and revision schedule alone. Whilst you are revising during the Christmas period, informing one or more of your immediate family members about your schedule and what your ambitions are is a gamechanger.
Accountability partners essentially use peer pressure (in a good way) to help you keep commitments and encourage you to reach your personal goals. Once you share your ideas or what you want to achieve with another person it is a lot harder to fall off the wagon.
It also works both ways. It doesn’t matter if your individual goals differ, the most important thing is keeping each other accountable and working together to get the job done. This could look like asking your cousin to keep an eye out for any moments you seem to be slacking off, and you speaking up when he has one too many glasses of eggnog: teamwork!
Hire a tutor
Finally, nothing beats having someone to work with you while you revise. Although all the content and information is out there, everyone learns differently. If you don’t feel like you are soaking in the information then definitely consider hiring a tutor. Learn&Co offers language tutoring that caters to the individual to help you achieve your educational goals within a reasonable time-frame. Online tutoring has become one the world’s most convenient methods of teaching as it allows you to work with the best teachers globally from the comfort of your own home.
Tutoring is also ideal for those who need to improve their revision skills during the active Christmas period. Not only does it improve your working space, tutors encourage their students to develop more effective self-directed learning skills and help you dictate how you pace yourself throughout the learning process.
Take a look at Learn&Co’s one to one tutoring programmes and see how we can move towards building a focused revision plan that best fits you this holiday season!
In conclusion, if you want to make the most of your free time this Christmas, plan to revise around your activities. Build a system that enables you to focus and work without having to remove yourself from family and friends. It is possible to get a good amount of revision done during Christmas. Don’t be afraid to modify or create your own to balance work with play this holiday season. Also check out our blog where you can explore fresh ideas on revision and creative learning methods that work for you.
