Making the best use of time during your JEE preparation

By Aman Goel

Time is the most precious resource when it comes to training yourself for excelling at anything. One could be very talented, but for performing up to one’s full potential, it is important to make the best possible utilisation of the time available.

Here, we will discuss about how to make the best possible use of time during your JEE preparation.

Start Early

Starting JEE preparation early has many significant advantages. One of them is having more time as compared to others for sharpening your understanding of concepts. Ideally, two years (Class 11 and 12) are sufficient to crack JEE, but if you begin serious preparation before Class 11, you might have an edge over others. This may lead you to obtain a better JEE rank.

Nowadays, many students begin their JEE preparations as early as Class 8th and 9th. Class 8th is too early though. Coaching institutes that take in admissions for students in Class 8, mostly focus on exams like NTSE, IJSO, and other related competitive exams at the school level. They try to enhance the problem-solving aptitude of students from a very young age. Teaching the actual JEE syllabus takes place later in these coaching institutes too.

For students not joining any coaching in Class 8th and 9th, it is advisable to practice solving mental ability questions at home. This will help students in sharpening their problem-solving skills, which will, in turn help them in grasping JEE concepts faster.

Make a Proper Schedule

Not planning what goals to achieve in a day will make you waste the day and fill you with guilt. Also, if you have a proper checklist of all the tasks that you have to finish in a day, you will be able to do them. Also, marking tasks as “done” in your checklist will give you immense satisfaction and confidence boost, which will prevent you from slacking off in the day.

Plan your next day before going to sleep each day. This will give you a sense of purpose and you will feel energetic and enthusiastic to hit the goal when you wake up the next day.

You should decide the waking and sleeping times too. Ideally, it is good to sleep early during the night and wake up early in the morning as this is what you will be doing on the exam day - you would sleep early the previous night and wake up early on the day of the exam. Hence, it is better to tune your biological clock accordingly.

Take Breaks

Your body needs breaks from work timely. Hence, taking breaks at appropriate time would ensure maximum productivity. The focused attention span of healthy teenagers and adults ranges from 10 to 20 minutes. However, you can choose to repeatedly re-focus on the same thing.

There is a very effective productivity technique, known as the Pomodoro technique. In this technique, you need to break down your work time into short spans of 25 minutes each. These work time spans, known as Pomodoros, are separated by short breaks. Consider a set of 4 Pomodoros. After 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Pomodoro each, you can take a break of 3 to 5 minutes. At the end of the 4th Pomodoro, you can take a break of 15 to 30 minutes. Then you can begin the cycle again.

The Pomodoro technique is very popular. You can find several apps that can help you use this technique effectively.

Take Out Time For Recreation

To ensure maximum productivity, you should hit a balance between work and play. Your body needs both physical and mental exercise. The JEE curriculum is the best for mental exercise, but don’t forget to do physical exercise too.

You can go out to play in the evening for an hour, or do some physical exercise at your home itself. However, be mindful of not spending more than an hour for this as one hour is sufficient, and extending the “play” period beyond one hour would be just a waste of time.

Meditation

For the 90’s kids, lack of focus was generally not a big issue because that generation was not exposed to the smartphones and social media, which are very addictive and distracting. The students who are preparing for JEE presently are the ones who are born after 2,000. This generation of students is habituated to smartphones and social media. Also, studies have shown that since the year 2,000, the attention span of humans has shortened.

So as to overcome distractions and increase the attention span, it is advised to meditate on a daily basis. Meditation has several benefits which include stress reduction, anxiety control, lengthening attention span, enhancing memory, control blood pressure, improve quality of sleep, and many more. Meditating for 20 minutes daily would go a long way in improving your physical and mental health.

In this article, you learnt about ways of making use of your time during JEE preparation for ensuring maximum productivity. Hope you found this article useful. Stay tuned for more such articles!

About the Author:

Aman Goel is co-founder at a Tech Start-up. He holds a BTech in Computer Science Engineering from IIT Bombay with a JEE Advanced AIR 33 (Year 2013).

During his free time, he enjoys writing articles/blogs. He is an Entrepreneur, Coder, Speed-cuber, gamer, and fan of Air crash investigation!

 

 

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