Time Management in Medical School - The Ultimate Guide

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Jordan Bagnall
Jordan Bagnall

Medical school and time sometimes seem like mortal enemies. Any time that you spend away from your studies can seem like it kills your success in school. And to do well in school, it may feel like you need to dedicate all of your time to medicine.

This feeling is not trivial. I suspect this is one of the facts that has led to an increased suicide rate among medical students. But there is a silver lining here. Because success in medical school (IE getting into a desired residency program) comes down to increasing your productive output in areas like test scores, research, and extracurriculars, learning how to master time management in medical school can give you an advantage.

Will it always feel like I’m drowning?

While this article purports to give you strategies to better manage your time, I think it is wise to temper your expectations a bit. The amount of information you need to master to become a great doctor is massive and increasing every day. I think it’s fair to say that no one ever knows “enough” by the time they graduate medical school. There is always something else you could learn that could end up being important for patient care in the future. It will always take time, and if it doesn’t you are probably doing it wrong.

Given this, you will probably always feel at least a little overwhelmed during your training years. These strategies will help, but it is also important to understand that accepting this feeling might end up being an important part of your well-being.

My Story

I have a bit of a unique perspective when it comes to time management. I am a nontraditional medical student and got married 4 years before I started my M1 year. My wife and I knew we wanted kids, and our daughter was born 3 weeks before medical school started. I knew it would be challenging to be a new parent and adjust to my studies, but honestly, I didn’t really appreciate how hard it would be. It really felt like I was being squeezed at both ends.

The upside of this, however, is that I was essentially forced to find ways to better manage my time. I recently had a faculty member ask me during a residency interview how I, and all students with kids, did it. The only answer I could think of was that I had to. I knew that I didn’t want to make my wife do all of the childcare and I wanted to end up at a residency that would work well for myself and my entire family. The following strategies are those that have worked for me, and that I have found through research.

How to use this guide

In this guide, I will include some fundamental principles of time management as well as additional strategies that I have found helpful. Everyone should be following the fundamental principles of time management, and if you are totally lost as to what you should do, I would start there. The additional principles follow a bit more of a choose-your-own-adventure style of writing. Find ones that you think are helpful, and incorporate them into your life. Any that you don’t like, feel free to ignore. For organizational purposes, I will group these into things you are doing to yourself that may be harmful, and things you might be missing out on.

It is worth noting as well that some of these strategies involve relying on financial or other types of privilege. Unfortunately, not everyone will have the ability to implement all of these suggestions. This is unjust, of course, and hopefully, we can collectively move towards a future where that will not be the case.

Fundamental Principles

Limiting Distractions

I could probably write an entire post about just this topic. Maybe I will one day. Suffice it to say, distractions abound in our hyper-connected age. This isn’t necessarily an issue, at least initially in medical school, as the things we learn are often very interesting. When it really becomes hard is after hours in the library, weeks into a system you don’t care for, or months focused on a single test.

Almost certainly the biggest sources of these distractions are social media and the internet writ large. Consequently, these strategies will mostly focus on those. While there are many reasons Haidt, Kelles, Lembke to limit our exposure to these sources of entertainment, one of their most pernicious side effects is opportunity cost.

A principle from economics, opportunity cost asks us to look at not just the financials of a decision as a cost, but also what we have to give up when we make a decision. A good example of this might be gardening. If you choose to garden on a Saturday morning, your opportunity cost might be forgoing brunch with your friends. Similarly, while watching YouTube for 4 hours on a Saturday morning might have very little financial cost, it could have extreme opportunity cost if you decide to not use that time to get some additional studying in before an exam. Here are some strategies to keep the opportunity cost of social media and the internet low.

  • Delete your accounts. This might be seen as extreme by some people (and maybe it is) but this could be a very effective strategy for some students. Is deleting too much? Have your friend change your password for a few months and only allow yourself to log back in at the end of the semester. It might be too much, or it could be just what you need.

  • Use an internet-deactivated old smartphone or laptop. Many people have spare laptops or smartphones lying around that are not being used after upgrading. These devices can be powerful tools for distraction-free productivity if they are modified to include only the essential work applications and nothing additional: a word processor, a flashcard app like Anki, other study applications like 3D anatomy applications, etc. I usually remove the web browsers, messaging applications, email, and anything else from these devices myself. I wrote nearly all of my residency application materials on an old iPhone that I had modified this way (with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard) and found that much easier than working on my normal laptop. This tip works really well paired with the next one.

  • Buy a timed lock. This is something I have been doing recently. I bought this lock on Amazon for less than $20. When I need to focus, I put my phone, my computer, an interesting book I might be reading, or anything that might distract me into a bag and set the timer. Usually, the first few minutes are a nice detox from our hyper-connected life, and then I feel more focused and ready to get some work done. I often work much longer past the timer because I get in a state of flow and enjoy being able to focus.

  • Apps like Freedom.io and Cold Turkey. While not as powerful as actually locking your distracting devices away, in my experience, these apps can help to focus your work. I often use freedom.io when I am forced to work on my laptop and am usually surprised by the number of times I aimlessly find myself wandering to YouTube or other sites. Research has found that this blocking software causes significant increases in focus and productivity, particularly in people who are distracted by social media. Mark

Working Efficiently

Efficient studying is sort of the holy grail when it comes to medical school. In theory, someone with a photographic memory may be able to read through a textbook once, retain all the relevant information, and never have to study again, making most of the rest of this article pretty irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t the case for the vast majority of us, so we will have to figure out the most efficient ways to learn. This is a challenging task and one that will likely require some time to truly master. There are a few general principles and common pitfalls here that can help, however.

  • Active studying. As previously discussed, studying can be divided into active and passive strategies. Some active studying strategies include answering practice questions, diagramming difficult concepts, flashcards, and others, while passive strategies include only the consumption of information including reading the textbook, highlighting notes, etc. While some passive studying is often needed, a higher percentage of time spent on active studying is much more efficient and should be emphasized.

Active Studying

  • Common pitfall: 100% Anki. While I am a fan of Anki, as many medical students are, it is very easy to use it too much. If Anki is your only active study method, for example, you are likely shortchanging your level of mastery. While Anki is valuable, it should only be a part of your studying, and not the whole.

  • Common pitfall: Only using premade Anki decks. Many medical schools place a good deal of emphasis on specific aspects of content that they want you to learn. This means that using only board resources probably won’t cover enough material for you to do well on in-house exams. Be sure to cover the information your medical school wants you to know thoroughly.

  • Common pitfall: Not collaborating. Each medical school is a unique study environment that is distinct from all the others. It can be hard to figure out the best way to excel in this environment. Luckily, you are not alone and your classmates can be a valuable resource in helping you navigate it.

Consistency

Acquiring enough knowledge to become a doctor is like climbing a mountain. Contemplating the enormity of the journey right when you start out can be overwhelming, but just like climbing a mountain, it is accomplished one step at a time. We probably all understand that, but what is often missed is the fact that finishing this journey is much easier if you take steps toward your destination every day. If you work consistently, the given amount of work you have to do every day is much less than going in fits and starts. I have several friends who would put off any serious studying in medical school until a week or so before an exam, and end up trying to cram everything in a frantic way. It would have been much easier to have put in a little work each day and arrive at the final week well-prepared.

If you find your studies and time management struggling in medical school, it is worth asking the question: are you taking steps toward your destination each day?

Mountain

Med school feels like climbing a 4-year long mountain.

Things you are doing to yourself

Breadth instead of Depth

There is a temptation in medical school to go for more numbers. More clubs you are involved in. Multiple research projects. Volunteering at multiple locations. While you should have a certain minimum number of activities you are involved in (the ERAS application has 10 slots for experiences) I find that you can make a lot more progress by going deeper on a few activities.

One of the reasons for this is switching costs. Each time you change activities, it takes a certain amount of time for you to “get in the flow” with your new activity and reach your maximum level of productivity. Put another way, if you are working on two research papers for an hour each, you might write one page per hour for each for a total of two pages. If you instead focus on just one paper for two hours, you might get 3 pages written in 2 hours. This increase in productivity can either allow you to get more done for a residency application or allow you to spend less overall time per week on research.

Another way of looking at this issue which is often given as advice, is getting good at saying “no” to tasks that don’t contribute directly to your goals in medical school. Now might not be the time to volunteer for additional smaller tasks, like let’s say volunteering to organize an event for the medical school or getting roped into helping a friend paint their house. There is a balance to be struck here of course, but your time and attention are very limited and precious at this time of your life.

This concept is similar to, but not exactly the same as deep work, which will be discussed later.

Taking shortcuts with your health

Your health forms the foundation of all performance in medical school. If you are not performing at your highest level, learning in medical school will feel like trying to chop down a tree with a blunt axe.

While you will learn a lot about the importance of fitness for your patients, it can be easy to short-change your own health during medical training. Doing this is a mistake, however, as it shortchanges your performance. Exercise has been shown to increase overall energy levels. It also helps with information retention and learning. Ratey While it isn’t necessary to be at the peak of physical fitness for your life, consistent exercise, even as short as a daily 20-minute jog, is crucial to maintain a baseline of performance.

Another often overlooked aspect of health during medical training is sleep. Sleep is a crucial period of memory consolidation. If you don’t get adequate sleep, your energy levels will be depleted. Sleep deprivation is linked to numerous other health issues that could impact your studying. While it is challenging to find the time, getting an adequate amount of quality sleep will pay huge dividends.

The final pillar of health is nutrition. While probably the least important of the three for medical school, a poor diet can stunt energy levels. This is particularly true with foods high in processed carbs like candy or ice cream. Best to skip those for healthier options that will give you long sustained energy throughout the day.

Taking shortcuts with medical issues

I have been surprised at how many friends have had challenging medical issues impact their studies in medical school. I suspect the long-term pressure of medical school tends to bring things to the surface that otherwise might have remained hidden. Regardless, many friends have seen big improvements in their studies and time management once these issues have been properly treated. While this applies to all medical issues, there are a few that appear to be particularly relevant to medical school.

ADHD- The sheer volume of information in medical school can unmask ADHD that smart students might otherwise have been able to power through in undergraduate classes. If you feel unable to concentrate and appear to be struggling more than you had expected, it might be worth looking into. Doing so could make a huge difference for the next several years of your studies.

Anxiety and depression- Unfortunately, these disorders have a tendency to become more prevalent in medical school as well. Rotenstein Medical school can be isolating. It can be easy to think that you are the only one struggling, whether it is with academics or otherwise. The truth of the matter is that everyone struggles with something in medical school, and you are not alone. If you feel hopeless, or that you have thoughts of wanting to harm yourself or someone else, I urge you to call 988 immediately. Adequately treating anxiety and depression can radically transform your relationship with your work, and give you the ability to manage your time much more efficiently.

Substance use disorder- Students can find themselves relying more and more heavily on substances as a coping strategy with the stresses of medicine. Unfortunately, there is some evidence suggesting that medical students have higher rates of alcohol use than the general public. Ayala I have friends who have experienced significant hardship due to issues with this, leading to a costly waste of time and financial resources. If you feel that you are relying on substances in an unhealthy way, I urge you to get help.

Ignoring school academic resources

Many medical schools have faculty members that specialize in helping students who are struggling academically. Of course, you may not even necessarily have to be struggling to meet with these counselors, you may just be trying to optimize the way you currently study. Regardless, these counselors have a lot of experience and can help you find an academic strategy that works best for your situation. They have insights born from experience that I, of course, don’t have.

Engaging in Low-yield recovery activities

We are not machines, and everyone needs to take breaks from their studies. The quality of these breaks can vary substantially, however. Recovery time, similar to study time, can be divided into passive and active varieties. The easiest thing to do is to pull out your phone and scroll through social media. This, and similar activities like watching Netflix, fall into the passive category. Active recovery, by contrast, includes pursuits such as exercise, socializing with roommates and family, engaging in the arts, and activities like meditation. While some passive recovery is fine, you will often get more bang for your buck with a smaller amount of active recovery. I know I often feel better after a 10-minute walk outside than I do after watching a 30-minute YouTube video.

Things you are missing out on

Prioritized to-do lists

I’m not sure when or where I read about this, but this has been one of my go-to productivity hacks for years. It is essentially as easy as the title suggests. When coming up with a task list for the day, write down everything you need to do. When done, number the tasks from most to least important and start with the most important. Resist the urge to move on to the next task until the first one is done. This helps you focus on getting the most important things done, which is obviously helpful. But possibly even more important, it takes away all of the time spent deliberating on what is the next task you should work on. It’s easy to crank out tasks when they are all laid out in sequential order like this. Importantly, if I get through all my tasks for the day I usually try to reward myself by taking the rest of the day completely off.

To-do list

An example of one of my prioritized to-do lists

Use a calendar

Admittedly, I am not the best at this one, but I would probably be more efficient in my work if I were. Calendars can be helpful to see what tasks you are obligated to do and when. Importantly, you should aim to use them not to fill them up with as many meetings and engagements as possible but to protect large blocks of time that allow for deep, productive work. Something else that can be useful with calendars is to keep track of individual tasks that can then be turned into a prioritized to-do list as I just spoke about. For this reason, I often print out month-long calendars instead of using an electronic calendar on my phone or computer, although either can work.

Emphasize deep work

This is a concept from author Cal Newport, who has contributed several ideas to this post. Deep work involves creating space in your day to spend long periods of uninterrupted time performing quality work, as opposed to cramming short bursts of productivity into an otherwise hectic schedule. Deep work is useful for us here not necessarily because you need the uninterrupted concentration to write a groundbreaking symphony or anything else particularly innovative, but simply because it is the most efficient way to learn.

Many of the concepts in this article can be useful to create an environment for deep work, but a couple of crucial ones include having a long period of time without other obligations and no distractions. So turn off your phone, grab some snacks, and head to the library for the afternoon to see how much more productive you can be. Importantly, once you have gotten a lot done, go home and do something you enjoy.

Schedule around your energy cycle

I never really understood how different people’s energy cycles could be until I got married. My wife hates waking up early, and I am awake and at my peak energy every day by 5:30 AM. However your body works, it would be wise to focus on using those hours for peak productivity.

While I am biased towards getting more things done earlier in the day, I know some people who are most productive from 8:00 - 10:00 PM. If this is the case, it might be wise to use that time every day to get a big chunk of things done say watching lectures or cranking through practice questions.

Spaced repetition

Spaced repetition, that is the spacing out of reviews of material so that you can retain the information for longer, is a critical time management technique in medical school because it reduces the overall amount of time you need to spend studying. Spaced repetition can take many forms. Perhaps you will decide to review all of the lectures from the week prior each Saturday, and all of the lectures from the prior month on the 1st of each month. By far the most popular form of this, however, is the use of the flashcard app Anki.

Anki is an entire topic unto itself. There are ways to do Anki that will save you lots of time, and ways to do it that will cost you lots of time. We created NovaCards in order to give you the tools you need to study with Anki as efficiently as possible. When done right, spaced repetition can be the cornerstone of a successful study routine.

Working with others

While it may seem counterintuitive, working in a group can lead to great efficiencies in learning. One major reason for this, which we have previously talked about, is that working in a group presents opportunities for engaging in active learning strategies such as explaining a difficult concept to a friend.

Study group partners can also be used to specialize in certain lectures or concepts, and be responsible for teaching them to the group. They can help you keep track of looming deadlines and keep you accountable for putting in the appropriate amount of work. For some, studying in a team sport and your partners can be essential in keeping you performing at your best.

Study Group

Study groups can be an efficient way to learn

Standing up for yourself

Does it ever feel like your time is much less valuable than those around you in medical school? Have you ever been in a situation where it feels like your time is egregiously being wasted? This concept is particularly useful in the clinical years of medical training, where your learning is often dependent on the busy schedules of attendings and residents. If you have already started this type of training, I’m certain you are familiar with this scenario: sitting in the workroom, watching the resident typing out a few more notes, without much interesting clinical learning happening and an ever more frightening amount of studying left to finish when you get home. To be clear, I don’t think the physicians we work with want to keep us at the hospital much longer than is necessary on purpose (most of the time at least,) I just think they have much more urgent clinical matters to attend to that may distract them from optimizing your schedule.

The answer to this situation is clear: you are an adult and have to speak up for yourself. A polite “Is there anything else I can help you with?” can save you hours of otherwise wasted time sitting in a workroom when properly applied. Sometimes there may be a legitimate scenario that would make sense for you to stay longer, other times they may say no for no particular reason. It behooves you, however, to believe that they have your best interests in mind and speak up if your time could be better used.

This concept applies to other situations in which other people might attempt to rope you into inefficient uses of your very limited time. It is entirely appropriate for you to say no in these scenarios. Your time is valuable too and should be guarded as such.

Eating the frog

This concept, and the book that shares its name, have played a central role in my time management strategy. In this metaphor, the frog is the biggest, hairiest, most difficult, and important task of the day. Similar to what (I imagine) eating a real frog would be like, getting this task done is usually not very pleasant, despite the fact that it is crucial to your success. The key to eating the frog is that it has to be the very first thing you do each day. Whatever your frog is, getting it done early makes the day a win before it has even really started. Alternatively, if something goes wrong and eating your frog is taking longer than usual, you have the rest of the day to work on getting it done.

During my clinical rotations, my frog was always my practice questions. I knew that if I didn’t get started on them early I would be much more likely to procrastinate during the day and end up in a bad situation. So, I woke up even earlier than I needed to for my rotations, got out my computer, and ate the frog every day until I was done with all of my rotations.

The one-minute rule

This concept mainly saves you time by helping you knock out little tasks efficiently and removing any opportunity for them to waste your time later. It is pretty simple: if you ever think of a task that you should do that takes less than one minute, drop what you are doing and get it done immediately. Forgot to email a professor about a question? Get it done now. Need to schedule an appointment? Do it right away. While I don’t follow this rule 100% strictly (I am unlikely to interrupt the flow of a deep work session to do something like this, for example) it does provide a helpful framework to get those pesky tasks done quickly to keep things rolling along.

Have a morning routine

This is another topic that has entire books written about it. I think morning routines are mostly useful because the lack of other distractions in the morning means that they can relatively easily be developed into rock-solid habits. If you repeat this habit enough times, those actions, even if small, can start to make a meaningful impact on the trajectory of your studies.

In order for this to have an impact in medical school, it might be helpful to focus on your weaknesses that might be leading to wasted time later in the day. Feeling stressed and therefore unfocused? Maybe meditate for 5 minutes each morning. Also, having a hard time getting through your flashcards? Maybe study 100 flashcards after your 5 minutes of meditation. If you repeat these two actions for enough days in a row, your overall stress and flashcard burden are likely to decrease significantly, and you will have more time to either work on other matters or spend enjoying yourself later in the day.

Stand up meetings

Do you ever feel like the meetings you are involved with are going too long? This tip could help cut these down. The idea here is that meeting tend to go long because most people are sitting comfortably in a chair. Want to make them speed up? If everyone is standing, and therefore just slightly less comfortable, people are much more likely to focus on only the essentials. Unfortunately, the application of this idea can be limited to those organizations in which you have some influence. But even if you are rank and file, suggesting this could save you hours.

A similar idea to that applies to virtual meetings is just to add a time limit to your calls. If everyone sees that there are only 5 minutes left in the call, you would be surprised how much can get done quickly.

Task activation energy

As a reminder from general chemistry, activation energy is the energy needed to make a chemical reaction begin, even if the reaction is net energetically favorable. Put in layman’s terms, activation energy is what is needed to get things started, even if the task is important and needs to get done. For me, this concept is particularly applicable to specific, dull tasks that I am prone to procrastinate on. I’m thinking of folding laundry, doing dishes, and performing rote data entry for a research project. These tasks are so boring that I often have a hard time getting started or finishing them, despite the fact that they need to get done.

So, just like a chemical reaction, we need something to give us a little boost to get us over the hump. I like to pair these tasks with exactly the sort of thing that I would normally say you should avoid: YouTube videos, Netflix, listening to an audiobook, etc. I find data entry much more fun if I can binge an interesting Netflix series while doing it. If I know that, I can usually avoid procrastination and knock it off my to-do list much faster.

Activation Energy

Activation Energy

Task batching

I think of task batching as deep work for household chores. Similar to academic work, it is much easier to get things done around the house if you minimize switching costs and touchpoints. One example of this is meal prepping. Normally, I have to think about what I am going to have for lunch each morning as I am getting ready for work. When I decide on something, I have to make sure I have everything I need, make it, and package it up. With meal prepping, you can simply make a huge batch of one meal for the entire week, package it up, and essentially not think about it anymore for the rest of the week, saving yourself time and cognitive load.

This same concept can be applied to laundry, deep cleaning, servicing your car, fixing things in the house, etc. Whatever you can get done efficiently and concurrently, get it done and reap the rewards later.

Let small, bad things happen

I got this idea from the book “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris. It is pretty simple at its core: the important tasks you have to get done each day, like studying flashcards and getting through practice questions, are so much more important than other items on our to-do list that it might be worth it to completely let other items fall through. You certainly need to find a balance here, but if you have a choice between finishing your flashcards for the day, missing 20 minutes of sleep, or filling out a survey for your medical school, it might be worth it to let the survey fall through. As long as you keep track of the truly important tasks, letting small things slip through the cracks could be beneficial on the margins.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

This strategy was developed in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, but it is still just as useful today. It works by dividing your work and breaks into distinct chunks. A typical session might look like this: work for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, work for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, work for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, work for 25 minutes, take a 25-minute break. These regular breaks that incorporate some longer periods for recovery can make getting through longer tasks more manageable. I found this particularly useful for getting through my Anki reviews, which often took hours. There are several smartphone applications that make it easy to implement this technique to help keep you on track and focused.

Make your breaks productive

Of course, no one can work straight through an entire day without taking breaks, and some study strategies like the Pomodoro technique have breaks officially built into them. The key here is to avoid just jumping directly onto your smartphone or other non-productive distraction each time you take one. One of my favorite ways to do this was to get a run in as a longer break during the afternoon when I always felt a bit of a slump. When it was time to stop, I would avoid my phone and jump directly into getting ready to run. After a quick jog, I would usually feel more energized and jump directly back into another Pomodoro session. During my next small break, I would try to squeeze a shower in, saving me about a half hour a day. You could also use this time to empty the dishwasher, get some cleaning done, make a call, or do any other small tasks that tend to add up at the end of the day.

Limit choices

One surprisingly difficult aspect of medical school for me was decision fatigue, here defined as a “state of mental overload that can impede a person’s ability to continue making decisions.” What I didn’t realize beforehand, was the fact that every flashcard and practice question is at the end of the day a decision. After making hundreds of these decisions each day for months on end, even small decisions can become difficult and procrastination can creep in. Taking steps to limit the amount of non-academic decisions can be helpful here, even if just to avoid the time wasted by procrastinating those decisions. A few ideas include setting out clothing the night before, always eating a routine breakfast, following a to-do list, and even things like automatic bill pay.

Track where you are spending your time now

No one is perfect, of course, and it can be very enlightening to track how you actually spend your time compared to how you think you spend it. This is especially easy in the digital world. iPhones now have the built-in “Screen Time” feature which allows you to quantify the amount of time spent on applications and websites. Another good option is RescueTime, which allows you to track and block distracting websites. Regardless of how you track how you spend your time, it could give you insight into ways you might be able to use it more efficiently.

Get ahead on the weekends

This is another Cal Newport idea, this time from “How to Become a Straight-A Student.” While you should of course use weekends to recover, it can be a good idea to get a jump on some of your weekday studies by devoting the majority of one weekend day to preparing for the upcoming week. I think it’s important not to use the weekends to catch up, but to relieve some of the work burden you will have for the following week. If you prep well enough, your normal work days will feel less stressed and you might have less of a need to spend the entire weekend trying to recover. This can be an especially useful strategy if you get started early enough in the day to get some useful work done and then have plenty of time for fun after. However you decide to do it, taking advantage of days off can make the total work burden feel less overwhelming.

Rely on your support network

Medical school is hard, and the people around you know that. This is not a bad time in life to rely on them for some extra support. Are your parents willing to do your laundry on the weekends? Is your partner OK with doing the grocery shopping for the week? Is your brother willing to help you move in? Whatever it is, and as long as you are maintaining a healthy balance in your relationships, now is a great time to rely on support.

Watch lectures at home

Many medical schools now film their lectures and allow students to watch them at home. This has a few potential advantages: you can often speed up the playback and save hours a day by watching the lectures faster, and, if you have no other reason to go in, you might be able to save time you would have otherwise spent commuting. There are some disadvantages here, though. Some students really enjoy asking questions and actively participating in lectures, which is obviously impossible with this strategy. Others feel like they retain less information when watching a sped-up lecture. Regardless, you can save hours a day by doing this if it is a good fit for you.

Trade time for money

While most are of limited financial means during medical school, there are still some opportunities to strategically spend a little money to save time. The first that come to mind are the time-saving machine learning tools included with NovaCards Premium. The unlimited ability to find or instantly generate Anki cards relevant to your class notes could save you hours a day. There are many options related to non-academic life that are probably worth your time. I spent $200 to buy a countertop dishwasher for the old house I am renting during medical school, which has saved countless hours. I often bought the $2 grilled cheese sandwich at the hospital for lunch instead of having to pack a lunch. It might be worth your money to pay for groceries to be delivered to your house instead of making a weekly trip. Regardless of what you choose, a lot of time can be saved even on a tight budget if money is spent strategically.

Countertop Dishwasher

A countertop dishwasher similar to this has saved me hours, and was relatively inexpensive

Parkinson’s Law

This observation, first noted by naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955 states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” That is to say, if you give yourself 2 hours to finish a presentation on a research article, it will probably take at least those two hours. Want to get it done faster? Give yourself a much more limited amount of time, 30 minutes for example. You’d be surprised how much you can get done in a short amount of time if you attempt this. In my experience, this strategy is best for work that does not need to be completed with a high level of quality but nonetheless needs to get done. So maybe don’t write your personal statement for residency in 30 minutes, but consider using this for something like an essay that is due for a low-stakes pass/fail clinical medicine elective.

Ask the right questions

In order to get creative, sometimes we need to ask impossible questions. One example of this might be “How can I arrange my life so that I never spend any time commuting?” Another might be “What would I need to do to reduce my time spent cleaning the house by 75%?” Whatever the area of your life is that you are looking to optimize, keep in mind that asking questions that are seemingly impossible is often more inspiring than trying to just make incremental improvements.

When in doubt, start earlier

As already mentioned, I spent medical school as a new father with a young child. This dynamic was particularly challenging on the weekends when we didn’t have access to daycare and often had events planned to do together. Getting in a small amount of studying in the morning tended to make the rest of the day difficult as I tried to squeeze work into other gaps in the schedule. The only solution that really worked? I started getting up and arriving at school (to avoid distraction) at 5 AM on weekends. I was able to get through most of my work relatively quickly and enjoy the rest of my weekend. I’m not necessarily saying that everyone should be at the library before the sun rises on the weekend, but creating time for yourself this way can get you a leg up in otherwise difficult scheduling circumstances.

Shorten your commute

Commuting to school is one of those tasks that needs to get done, but has essentially zero net benefit to your goals. As such, it is a great target for time savings. There are several ways to shorten it: moving closer to campus, paying a little extra for better parking, and my favorite, bike commuting. Getting to school by bike is often faster (if you live close enough) because you avoid traffic and can usually park your bike directly next to your destination on campus. Buying a used bike is cheap, and will almost certainly pay for itself quickly in gas and car maintenance costs. Plus riding a bike is more fun, and it’s nice to get a little extra exercise on the way to school. Don’t like bikes? E-scooters and e-bikes are quickly becoming cheaper, and offer essentially the same benefits as bike commuting.

Electric Scooter

An electric scooter like this will be faster than a car for a lot of shorter commutes.

Use your commute

Sometimes there is no way around it, and you will have to have a bit of a commute to work. There are a couple of ways to make this time productive. The best way is to use public transportation, where available, and get some studying done on the way. I got through about half an hour of flashcards a day doing this in my preclinical years, which meant half an hour more time that I could help out with my daughter. If that doesn’t work, there are several medical review podcasts that could help you retain the information you are studying more completely while on the go. A favorite of mine is the Divine Intervention podcast, but there are several available to choose from.

Video Speed Controller Browser Extension

I got this as a tip from another medical student and it has been very helpful. While many videos, especially on a service like YouTube, have controls that allow you to speed up the playback, some do not. This browser extension, available in Chrome, and others like it, allows you to speed up the playback of virtually any video to whatever you desire. This is especially helpful for longer, required videos and training that can easily deplete your valuable time. A side advantage is that these extensions often use shortcut keys to speed up the video, which is much easier than using the native video controls, meaning you are more likely to watch a video at faster playback than before.

Anki Speed Focus Add-On

This one is a little controversial but can be useful. The speed focus add-on is designed to help you concentrate on your Anki cards more fully. It does this by automatically flipping over the card, and then marking it as correct or incorrect in a set time interval that you can specify. You essentially are forced to concentrate on your cards because not doing so means you will get them all incorrect (I usually set it up to do this.) It also incentivizes you to think quickly while going through your reviews. Of course, spending less time on your flashcards might cause your retention to go down. This strategy can also be exhausting, so it should be used judiciously. You can get through your reviews quite a bit faster, though, and it is often useful for reviewing older decks you are quite familiar with.

Exercise and Study

This is another exhausting one, but it can get you out of some binds. Flipping through flashcards or watching lectures during a treadmill or stationary bike workout certainly makes both of those tasks less enjoyable and effective, but it can save you a good amount of time. Probably the best version of this is to use a larger screen like an iPad, and a remote controller like AnkiMote to flip through your cards and limit the workout to walking on a treadmill. This not only could help you save some time by getting in a light workout but also helps to remove the monotony of sitting at a desk all day long.

Conclusion

What if it is still too hard?

Even with all of the tricks in the world, medical school will still feel hard. At a certain point, you need to focus on setting some expectations and relying on stress management techniques to get through it. It’s OK to be stressed and it’s OK not to get everything done that you would like to during this time of your life.

If you have made it into medical school, you have what it takes. The only way you can really fail is by giving up. Keep persisting, working with mentors, and trying new things if you are struggling. You can do this!

We are here to help

At NovaCards, all of our machine-learning tools are designed to make learning in medical school more efficient, and many of them are free to use! We understand these problems deeply because we have experienced them ourselves. Check out all the ways NovaCards can help you at novacards.ai.

Citations

Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Random House.

Keles, B., McCrae, N., & Grealish, A. (2019). A systematic review: the influence of social media on depression, anxiety and psychological distress in adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 25, 79 - 93. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2019.1590851.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Penguin.

Mark, G., Iqbal, S., & Czerwinski, M. (2017). How blocking distractions affects workplace focus and productivity. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers. https://doi.org/10.1145/3123024.3124558.

Ratey, J. J. (2014). Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Little Brown.

Rotenstein, L. S., Ramos, M. A., Torre, M., Segal, J. B., Peluso, M. J., Guille, C., Sen, S., & Mata, D. A. (2016). Prevalence of depression, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation among medical students. JAMA, 316(21), 2214. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2016.17324

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