S.A.(U).L.T : My 5 step approach to efficient learning and studying

This post is for application once you're at the point where you actually WANT to learn. If you're still struggling with motivation please refer to this post on motivation.

Efficient studying will look different for everyone. And there are many different techniques that can help. The path to efficient study for me has been ongoing, and it's been something that I've been working on for several years. At this point in time I can distill my learnings to date into 5 steps that I feel encapsulate the main things that I've learnt about how to learn as fast and as well as possible.

I use an acronym to remember my approach. S.A.(U).L.T. The letters stand for

1. Survey
2. Acquire
3. Understand
4. Link
5. Train

The U is in brackets for 2 reasons. Firstly, because depending on the content, understanding may come at this point, or it may only come after all other four steps. This may sound a bit counterintuitive, but it's something that we have to learn to be comfortable with. Secondly, because putting U in brackets makes the acronym look more like S.A.L.T, which is easier to remember!!!

Survey is about working out what you need to learn. This can be thought of in the ‘ask around' survey kind of a sense or the ‘survey the scene' kind of a sense. If you're preparing for a test, Survey is about finding out what is most likely to come up in the test, if you're trying to learn a language, Survey is about finding the high frequency words, and learning them first. In this step we are sketching the outline of our learning and trying to recognise patterns in the information that we can take advantage of. Read the article on survey here.

Acquire: after you've pinpointed the key lessons that you need to learn to reach your learning goal, acquire is about finding the best information that you can in order to understand it. This step includes knowing when to bail on your lecturer and how to take notes effectively. See the article on Acquire here.

Understand: Some things you'll understand straight away and the ‘understand' step will easily fit in right between acquire and link. But sometimes this is a huge challenge. This is the step where we often are challenged in moving from concrete to abstract ideas, or the other way around. We can think of understanding as the lynchpin or keystone of learning. It needs to be there otherwise learning hasn't really taken place. But, as mentioned, sometimes we have to be patient and follow through with the next two steps before we truly understand. Here's the article on understanding.

Link: Ever understood a concept in class but the next day it was just as much of a mystery as before your revelation? This is because you didn't Link your new knowledge to something you already know. Once we've gained an understanding of a concept (or whilst we're trying to gain an understanding of a concept) we need to explicitly link it to something we already know so that our newly acquired knowledge doesn't just float away. Here's how to Link.

Train: Train/Practice/Review, all of these words mean the same thing. This last step of efficient learning can take as little or as much time as you like, it depends on what you want out of it. If you only want to remember the info for a multiple choice test tomorrow, your requirement for training will be minimal. If you want to remember it for life, this will be an ongoing process. This article first deals with why you should bother training then moves on to how to do it. Article on Training.