One suggestion for procrastinators and worriers. Action trumps both procrastination and worrying. Quit wasting time worrying or fretting about the work that needs to be done. In the long and short run, you’ll feel better having started than worrying.

Do you need to read from a text book and distill the information? Do you take copious notes that now need to be edited? Do you need to outline the class using notes and the text book? Determining the materials that you must organize will help you through the next step, which is how much time do you have?

Every semester, we formed study groups with fellow students in class. We compared notes, discussed cases, speculated on possible test questions, and reviewed old exams on file at the library.

Then about a month to a month and a half before finals, we began creating outlines of our text and notes. And if everything went as planned, we would have our outlines finished a week before finals so we could review everything we put together.

There are three major learning styles: auditory, visual and tactile.

Auditory learners primarily use sound or hearing to learn. If you’re an auditory learner, lectures help. Reading notes and books out loud may also help. A study tip I used to use in high school was to read my notes into a recorder and playing them back as I was drifting off to sleep. It was the last thing my conscious mind heard, and continued into my non-conscious sleep mode.

If you’re a visual learner, you like to see things. See how a particular machine works rather than having a book describe how it works. You like pictures and movies, and visual cues have more impact on keeping your interest.

If you’re a tactile learner, you like to touch things, getting your hands on things to learn how to use them. You take a more hands on approach to learning and like to feel how things work together, putting things together or taking things apart.

You may not consciously know what your learning style is, but intuitively (in your gut) you know how you learn the best. Listen to your intuition.

How does this help?

Well once you know how you learn, you can work to your strengths. Understand how you learn, and create a strategy that uses that style to its fullest advantage.

If you’re visual, a study tip would be to take your lectures and transform them into as many graphs, charts or pictures as you can. Put the spoken word into a visual form. If you’re auditory, and lectures work well for you, then consider taping lectures, or reading lectures into a recorder so you can listen to them instead of reading then later on. If you’re tactile, find a way to make your lectures or notes physical. Act out your notes, or get up and move while you review.

It’s also what happens when you study. You’re learning something new, and there’s a natural hesitation or desire to put it off. It’s brought about by a fear of failure. You’re afraid you may not understand the material so you avoid the feeling of failing by avoiding the task itself. You must overcome this in order to implement new study tips and techniques. After all, learning comes as much from failure as it does from success.

Isn’t it hard to study when you’re watching your favorite basketball team playing in the NBA finals? There is probably no study tip or study help technique that can over come this distraction. So why do we turn on the TV? Because it’s more pleasurable to watch the game than it is to do homework. That’s why removing distractions is a key to implementation.