3. Alternate it: Interleave Study Topics and Tasks
You often have to practice or study different things. An intuitive way to tackle this situation is to do one thing at a time. However, interleaving the tasks can help you perform better in the long term. This works whether you are practicing different golf swings, or learning how to identify the style of different musical composers. Switching between tasks requires you to process information multiple times and in many ways. Yes, it’s harder to practice this way. But you learn better. It’s a desirable difficulty.
Generate it: Test Yourself
Typical study strategies are passive. You may reread a book chapter to gauge how well you have mastered the material. Passive learning strategies give you a sense of familiarity. You may confuse familiarity with learning something. You can use active learning strategies to improve learning. A good active learning strategy is to test yourself while you are learning. Testing yourself will require you to generate material you think you learned. You will have a better sense of what you have learned. Generating an explanation or description creates multiple paths for relating and remembering information. Thus enhancing your ability to understand and recall that information in the future.
You may not initially feel like you are learning if you incorporate desirable difficulties into your learning process. The extra effort will be worth it. You will learn more than you thought.