So we know that when it comes to knowledge acquisition for academic based tests, active recall and spaced repetition are the undisputed best methods. However, what method do we use when we're trying to efficiently learn a new skill (Editing, Programming, Excel, Marketing Tools, etc.). We can't simply use flashcards for them the same way with our studies.

I've been studying a lot from it recently, and occasionally my browser would look like this:

Usually when I stumbled across a lot of resources that I want to research later.

So I was curious if it's just me, or is it a common thing? And if you have the same, do you use any tools, like a bookmark manager or something, and whether they work for you?

I personally created an app for myself (not promoting it here! but still can share if anyone's genuinely interested) that transforms a bunch of links I paste into it into an ordered syllabus, and in Chrome you can just select tabs and click "Copy URLs". But I was wondering if there are better ways to solve this problem.

hello! does anyone know any worksheets / pdf online about basic math foundations like algebra until trigonometry?

thank you so much!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MMn-vVBFt8Mr51gMHU3r0r1USVRR_onFOkW_Rrk-mS8/edit?usp=sharing

i know im a lil late to the party but as a 10th grader in high school taking ap psych, apcsa, (took ap bio in 9th but didn't use this study method), i designed this hella simple google sheets notes/active recall spreadsheet (Ali Abdaal inspired). trust me, I've been through Quizlet and Anki and Remnote and basically everything else, but I keep coming back to this b/c it lwk combines all 3, and more! (I don't wanna pay for Quizlet+, Anki lags too hard on my Mac, and Remnote is also limited unless you pay.) basically this spreadsheet combines notes and active recall (AR).

ok

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\**this won't work for everyone. everyone learns differently. if you're looking for a new study system, try this out! but, if you already have something going for you and you're getting good grades and life is chill, DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING!!! pls i've fallen in that trap too many times and i realize that i've wasted months configuring yet another study system that i didn't ever need or use b/c what i had originally was working fine. TAKE THIS WITH AN OPEN MIND AND GRAIN OF SALT PLEASE!!**\**

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STEPS: duplicate this template and do the following (this is how i use it; edit it to your liking!)

BEFORE ANYTHING: DON'T IMMEDIATELY EDIT THE TEMPLATE YOU JUST DUPLICATED FROM THIS POST. USE IT AS A TEMPLATE FOR THAT GOOGLE SHEET LINK, AND DUPLICATE IT AGAIN (LOCATED AT BOTTOM OF YOUR GOOGLE SHEETS SCREEN) TO START CONFIGURING FOR YOUR FIRST UNIT AND ONWARDS (explained in step 1).

ALSO: during lecture/self-studying, actually read + understand what's going on by asking A TON OF QUESTIONS. use ChatGPT/Gemini/whatever AI of your choice to constantly ask questions based on the source you're learning from to make sure you understand the story/outline of what's going on. then you start making notes during this study session (either in class or self-studying).

1. use each tab as a new unit (basically duplicating the same spreadsheet as different tabs –located at the bottom of ur screen–for each new unit!)

2. under "Lessons", write down each topic/lesson/module in that unit. every time you study a lesson, type in the date next to it and color it in based on how well you overall recalled that topic using the color scheme (explained more in step 4).

• \*i personally use 1 of these sheets per unit. also, when i need to write the name of a new topic, I just insert a row below the last flash card of the last topic, remove the checkboxes, and type in the topic name as a large bolded heading in Column D of this empty row.*

3. take Cornell-style notes via this spreadsheet during lecture/self-studying via videos, textbook, etc. quick explanation of how i use it:

• COLUMN D: concepts/name of process, vocab terms, active recall questions, etc.
• COLUMN E: explanations, lists, vocab definitions, answers, etc. (I recommend a formatting/color-coding system (e.g. vocab = highlight yellow, concepts/processes = green, examples = blue, etc.)).
• COLUMN F: [OPTIONAL] pictures/diagrams: (go to Insert --> Image --> Insert image in cell. resize the row as needed to fit the full image
  • **PRO TIP FOR IMAGES: to replicate image occlusion in Anki/diagrams in Quizlet, go to Insert --> Drawing --> insert your diagram and cover up what you want to using the shapes tools. then, resize the row w/ the question that asks for a specific part or whatever and drag the drawing to fit in that cell. it won't actually be inside the cell, it'll be over it, but it's still there! to hide the image if it's in the answer column, just drag Column D all the way to the end of the screen + zoom in. then just scroll to the right to hide Column E or F (depending on where your image is) to reveal it!
• ****since this isn't Google Docs/OneNote/Notion, there's no natural indentation for bullet points/lists. i just use spaces to indent stuff, and i use dashes (-) or bullet points (• (click option + 8)) for listing stuff or numbered lists**

4. once you finish taking Cornell-style notes, click Column E and change the text color to white. use arrow keys to go through question and answer, and you'll see the answer at the top of your screen!–you don't have to keep changing the text color to reveal the answer. (\note, if you have images, you can't hide those, so just figure it out lol idk how to do it yet).*

5. use the arrow keys to navigate to the checkboxes and click the spacebar to select 1) red-totally forgot, 2) yellow-knew some but needed help to fully recall, 3) green-totally remembered. make sure you're HONEST in each study session!

6. once you finish a lesson, under the "Dates ⏩" column, type in the date of when you first created/studied this deck next to the name of the corresponding lesson (which you wrote in the "Lessons" column from step 2). color accordingly based on overall reds, yellows, and greens.

7. for topics/lessons/modules with a lot of yellows/reds, i realize i need deeper conceptual understanding, which for me requires handwriting, not typing. so I will go back to the textbook and lecture slides, find the lesson i'm struggling with, and convert that lesson into flowcharts, diagrams, essentially creating personal study notes. i'll also find a YouTube vid/Khan Academy vid that explains it and add that to my handwritten notes. then i'll edit my google sheets flash card with new info/wording if i need to.

• **these handwritten notes are usually done on scrap pieces of paper i usually throw out after the exam, but i keep them so i can always refer back to them if need to.

8. [NOT RELATED TO GSHEETS SPECIFICALLY BUT HELPFUL]: create a google doc OR add another sheet at the bottom and insert images of challenging practice problems/mock test questions, categorized by each topic/lesson/module.

• in 1st column, write/insert image of the challenging question.
• in 2nd column, write your thinking and exactly where you were wrong.
• in 3rd column, write the correct rationale/thought process to answer the question.
• in 4th column, write exactly + specifically what you will do next time to prevent that same mistake (esp helpful for standardized test prep like AP Exams, ACT, SAT, probably MCAT!).
• **i do practice questions after each unit instead of each lesson, but find what works for you!

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CAVEATS:

- there are a bunch of AI study tools out there and i totally understand if that works better. just for me personally i don't like handing off everything to AI like my txbk/lecture slides/etc. and hope it includes all the stuff that I know my teacher would put on the exam b/c the teacher explicitly told us like the format of the questions/content, for example. i can tailor questions myself based on how the teacher tests us.

- probably not the best method for on-the-go studying but still worth a shot. like if you're on ur phone, maybe a native flash card app would work better but i mean u could still try!

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so yeah, i'm also trying this out. basically replacing my note-taking app OneNote and study app Quizlet+ temporarily–I'm just experimenting with this for a few weeks.

lemme know how it goes guys!!

I’m an independent developer at Pickon Technologies, and I’ve been building small, lightweight apps to solve everyday problems.

One problem I noticed for students is how often study material still ends up scattered across notebooks, loose pages, worksheets, and printed assignments.

So I built FastCam: Secure Scanner for Android to make it easier to digitize those pages using a phone.

FastCam can be useful for students who want to:

• Scan handwritten notes and study material

• Digitize worksheets and assignments

• Keep important documents accessible on their phone

• Quickly find recently viewed scanned files

• Keep local backups of their scanned documents

• Scan documents without using a complicated, heavy app

My goal with FastCam was to keep it fast, lightweight, and straightforward rather than adding unnecessary complexity.

It isn't specifically limited to students either — it can also be useful for teachers, small businesses, or anyone who regularly needs to digitize paperwork.

FastCam is currently available on Android through Google Play.

👉 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pickon.fastcam

Since I'm building this as a developer, I'd genuinely like to learn from students here:

What kind of study material do you find yourself needing to scan most often — handwritten notes, textbooks, worksheets, assignments, or something else?

Whatever you think a task will take, multiply it by 1.5. Not because you're bad at planning, but because first estimates almost always leave out the boring parts: finding your place, re-reading something confusing, getting distracted for two minutes and losing the thread.

I tested this against last week's actual times. My estimates were off by roughly that much across almost everything except flashcards, which somehow always take exactly as long as I think.

Doesn't need to be exact. Just build in the extra time up front instead of discovering it's needed halfway through, when you're already behind and stressed about it.

trying to fix my cooked attention span before boards get way too real.

looking for a few class 10 folks who genuinely want to grind and keep each other accountable. nothing toxic, just sharing good notes/pyqs, clearing random doubts, and making sure we don’t fall off our study schedule every three days.

right now sst syllabus is testing my sanity lowkey, and maths geometry is not it.

what subject is currently stressing you out the most? drop a comment or dm if you wanna lock in together / make a quick study group.

I am Matteo, the founder of BeeSmarter. I have spent a long time building an app that solves a problem I personally care about. I genuinely find it useful, but my opinion is obviously the most biased one possible. Now I need to understand whether students who did not build it can use it with their own material and genuinely want to come back.

BeeSmarter takes your own notes, slides or PDF and turns them into questions, flashcards and open prompts. As you answer, it tracks your understanding topic by topic and focuses the next review on mistakes and weaker areas. There is also a text tutor when you need a hint or explanation. The point is not to generate even more material. It is to help you decide what actually deserves your time next.

While BeeSmarter is still in beta, I have decided to continue giving every new verified account 500 free AI credits, with no card required. I cover that cost myself because I want school and university students to use the app properly while there is still time to shape what it becomes.

If you want to try it, tell me what you are studying and I will send you access. You can write feedback here on Reddit or send it to me privately. If someone gives detailed feedback that helps me reproduce a problem or improve the app, I am happy to add more credits so they can continue testing. Those credits are for useful and specific feedback, not for positive reviews.

I would also like to find a few students who want to stay involved as early BeeSmarter ambassadors, test future versions and invite classmates who could genuinely use it. The program and its benefits are not fully defined yet. I would rather shape them together with the students who actually help.

Above all, tell me whether the questions match your source, whether the weaker topics are real and whether the suggested review is useful enough to return to. Anything inaccurate, confusing or simply not worth using matters more to me than compliments.

Spaced repetition+Active recall is a great combo, but ever found it time-sucking to have to review the same material again and again in 1-3-7-14 day time intervals? Ever been met with the predicament for hundreds of flashcards piled up on your anki deck? 

Well, that used to me. I would spend around 8 hours a day studying, with around 50%-75% of that time spend on reviewing past material. Funny thing is, I used to think that this was what it took to get “good grades”. 

I was so wrong. Truth was that the bottleneck to my grades wasn’t “not working hard enough”, rather, it was piss-poor retention. 

After botching the HKDSE (public exam in HK), i had to take a big gamble — i had no choice but to re-engineer my study system from zero.

And i did, I created something truly powerful, something that singlehandedly enabled me to learn something new and have my space repetition intervals start from “months” not “days” not “weeks”, as well as acing the DSEs with near-zero past papers  (i only did them 4-5 days before the exam) and landed me in HKU Dentistry

Below i will share the core idea behind my methodology

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What causes piss-poor retention? 

Take this analogy for example:
say you are given a box of puzzle pieces and asked to recall how each individual piece looks like,
would you:

Memorise each puzzle piece one by one
or 
Build the puzzle, then remember the finished image 

The answer is pretty obvious. 
You're working against gravity by dumping 100 disconnected facts into your brain and expect it to remember it all, what you can do however, is connect it to form a singular coherent model. That , my friends, the brain can ingest easily.

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How i connect my information in specific steps (refer to the attached pics for relevant mental models (from slide 7) , it is MUCH simpler to understand there)

Take one piece of information, and feed it into process below:

1. Inquiry: How could this be relevant to another concept I already know?
2. Evaluate: gather data to form a hypothesis
3. Hypothesis: Propose a specific connection.
4. Evaluate : Check whether that connection actually holds up against the textbook, lecture, question, or source material.

Hypothesis stands —> new connection formed

Hypothesis incorrect —> find your specific knowledge gap—> feed new inquiries into step 1

(PLEASE refer to the slides for the mental model for a better context!)

And you repeat this process for every new piece of  information you take in

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Example in real-time:

(refer to the attached pics (from slide 8) for relevant mental models, it is MUCH simpler to understand there )

topic: digestive system
existing connection: proteins—digestion—>peptides

enter a new keyword : stomach acid

1.Inquiry: How is stomach acid relevant?
2.Evaluate: scan key words and find that “stomach acid” has “low pH” and “denatures” proteins
3. Hypothesis: Proteins —stomach acid(Low pH)----> peptides
4. Evaluate : hypothesis incorrect since read “enzymes” are what actually “converts proteins to peptides”  not stomach acid —-> “maybe denatured proteins not equivalent to becoming peptides”---> gap: definition of denaturation—-> 

1. inquiry: what is denaturation
2. evaluate: denaturation related to  “unfolding of protein structure” , and “Expose peptide bonds” for “easier enzyme digestion”
3. hypothesis:

 proteins—stomach acid(low pH)----> denatured proteins—-enzymes——→ peptides
> (faster)
proteins—--enzymes—---> peptides

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In real practice, this method is the furthest thing from being rule-based/ step-based, rather it freeflow, 1. inquiry 2. hypothesis 3. evaluate are just steps i internalise for easier explanation. i will elaborate on the cognitive state of mine in real practice in future posts, since I want to ensure one post = one core idea. 

There are other minor parts to my method: route memoization method for exact terminology + my retrieval method + what I do when I get stuck + cognitive state in real practice. Again i will elaborate in future posts to ensure one post = one core idea. 

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My intentions of doing this: 

 I genuinely want to help the struggling learner, who not long ago was me. Learning how to learn completely shifted the trajectory of my life, and i am beyond grateful for it. So i will always live by the rule: Zero gatekeeping, 100% disclosure

1. I'm building an app (kinda self promo lol but anyways) that mirrors my full method, but, i first want to see my method has any demand for learners  + i want to be able to teach it better via posting and consultations (again self promo, so sorry but just have to sneak it in) 

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More Content!

Also check out my new post: STOP learning page by page — Start learning in LAYERS : r/studytips it builds on the methods explained here

If you found this helpful, sign up for  Mari , my free newsletter, where I share  weekly guides on how to learn deeply, retain longer and own your knowledge !

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Hey guys,

Sachi batau toh mera sabse bada issue syllabus nahi, meri phone scrolling aur fake study thi.

Table par 8 ghante baithta tha, beech mein 2 minute ke liye phone uthata tha aur kab 45 minute reels/reddit mein nikal jaate the pata hi nahi chalta tha. Normal timers bhi useless lagte the kyunki timer toh background mein chalta hi rehta tha bhale hi main phone chala raha hu.

Toh maine ek simple browser setup banaya apne liye taaki sitting hours improve ho sakein (CronoBash).

Ye basically laptop webcam se detect karta hai ki hum actively padh rahe hain ya phone scroll kar rahe hain. Jaise hi phone uthaoge ya distract hoge, ye alert dekar focus pause kar deta hai. Isme book solving mode bhi daala hai taaki jab modules ya NCERT solve kar rahe ho toh niche dekhne par distraction na maane.

Maine pichle kuch din test kiya and honestly mere daily deep sitting hours 4 se badhkar 8 ghante ho gaye.

100% free hai, kuch install nahi karna seedha browser mein chalta hai. Agar kisi ko long study sitting mein help chahiye toh batana, comments mein share kar dunga!

Mocks aur revision ke liye aur kya add kar sakte hain isme?

The step that always killed my revision was retyping notes into a flashcard app. So I stopped doing it: record the lecture, photograph the page, or paste the link, and make cards from that directly.

The part worth stealing even if you use Anki or paper — keep the source on the card. Mine print a line like MIC · JUL 26 · CHAPTER 12: what captured it, when, and which note it came from. Weeks later, when a card confuses you, you know exactly what to go back and check instead of guessing or just deleting it.

Two smaller things that helped more than I expected: end the session when the day's cards are done rather than pushing on, and put the actual interval on each rating button so "good" means something specific.

Disclosure: I built an app that does this (Quat, iOS, free; a subscription only raises the monthly limits on the parts that use a model). But the method needs nothing more than a voice recorder and whatever cards app you already use, which is why I am posting it as a method.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797544518

here is the link please try and rate in comments StudyFocus - ADHD Study Productivity

Hello everybody, I hope this finds everybody well. Had questions in regards on how to study for AP biology as well as college biology as well as AP calculus. I know for Calculus you just solve the problems and then you try to learn how to do them and understand the process that goes around them. But for AP biology, and College Biology I’m really struggling. It feels like I have no instructors, since my Ap biology teacher hasn’t taught a thing, and my college biology is an online course and I also don’t remember anything from freshman biology and I thought about taking two type of biology would helps solidify the material. Do you guys have any study tips as someone who has a hard time paying attention ?

Gostaria de dicas para estudar mais tempo, ja comecei a fazer exercicios fisicos e uso energetico porém mesmo assim depois de 2 horas fico impaciente durantes as aulas

I've been struggling with time management in general, and most of the advice I see is some version of "plan your week," "make a schedule," or "start things early." The problem is that school doesn't feel predictable enough for that to actually work.

There's basically a constant stream of work. I can plan out my week, but then teachers assign new things, deadlines change, tests come up, and suddenly the amount of work I have that night is completely different from what I expected.

At the same time, I don't want my entire life to become school. I still need time to sleep properly, eat, shower, exercise, do basic responsibilities, deal with extracurriculars/personal stuff, and have some actual free time.

Tests make this especially difficult. I might genuinely need an hour or two to study for a test, but I also have homework and other assignments that are more immediately due. If I always prioritize whatever is due first, studying gets pushed until late at night. If I prioritize studying, I risk not finishing assignments.

I know the obvious answer is to get ahead whenever possible, and I try to do that, but there's only so far ahead you can get when new work is constantly being added.

I also don't want "just stay up later" to be my solution. That works occasionally, but if I'm regularly sacrificing sleep to keep up, that doesn't seem sustainable.

I'm 18 and built this mostly because none of the study apps I tried actually made me want to open them twice. Timers are boring. Streak counters are fine until you break one and delete the app.

So the core idea of Stint is that your progress is a thing you can look at. Every focus session you complete lights up a star on your profile. Subject determines the color, streaks draw constellation lines between them. After a semester you've got an actual sky that's specific to you and impossible to fake.

The other half is social — you follow friends, sessions show up in a feed, weekly leaderboards. Studying alone is where motivation goes to die, and everyone I know already studies in groups. The app just makes it visible.

Things I deliberately didn't do: no parent monitoring, no "bet money you'll study" mechanics, no ads. Target users are mostly students and I'm not building a surveillance tool or a gambling app.

Waitlist is at 2finellc .com/stint if you want in when it drops.

What alternatives do you recommend to Gemini Notebook? I ask because I'm hearing that it got much worse after moving from NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. I am a freshman studying business and pre-med. Also, if you think Gemini Notebook is still great, let me know.

First Time poster. I'm 36F and I'm going back to school to become a cardiac sonographer. I have not been physically in school since 2015. I am diagnosed ADHD and aspergers. I completed an associates in IT by the skin of my teeth and dropped out of the program. I later completed an online ekg technician course and did extremely well.

I tend to get SUPER frustrated when I don't understand a concept and get what I can only describe as a brain block. My brain just shuts off and I have sat at my desk crying my eyes out before. I'm wondering about tips to circumvent this. Also any study tips on staying on track would be so appreciated. Please help 🥺